comes. If we live truly, we shall see truly. It is as
easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.
When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its
hoarded treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his voice
shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid;
probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering
of the intuition. That thought by what I can now nearest approach to say
it, is this. When good is near you, when you have life in yourself,
it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the
footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall
not hear any name;--the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly
strange and new. It shall exclude example and experience. You take
the way from man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its
forgotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There is
somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is nothing that
can be called gratitude, nor properly joy. The soul raised over passion
beholds identity and eternal causation, perceives the self-existence of
Truth and Right, and calms itself with knowing that all things go well.
Vast spaces of nature, the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea; long intervals
of time, years, centuries, are of no account. This which I think and
feel underlay every former state of life and circumstances, as it does
underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called death.

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the instant
of repose; it resides in the moment of transition from a past to a new
state, in the shooting of the gulf, in the darting to an aim. This one
fact the world hates; that the soul becomes; for that for ever degrades
the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame,
confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally
aside. Why then do we prate of self-reliance? Inasmuch as the soul is
present there will be power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance
is a poor external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies
because it works and is. Who has more obedience than I masters me,
though he should not raise his finger. Round him I must revolve by the
gravitation of spirits. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent
virtue. We do not yet see