cant and unworthy thing; a thing that has no business
even to be, except in that utter privacy which is rather a sleep and a
rest than living. Well, but in the above instances, even those most
remote from sordid individuality, we have fallen far short of that ideal
in which the very conception of the partial, the atomic, is lost in the
abstraction of universal being, transfigured in the glory of a Divine
personality. You are familiar with Swedenborg's distinction between
discrete and continuous degrees. Hitherto we have seen how man--the
individual--may rise continuously by throwing himself heart and soul
into the living interests of the world, and lose his own limitations by
adoption of a larger mundane spirit. But still he has but ascended
nearer to his own mundane source, that soul of the world, or Prakriti,
to which, if I must not too literally insist on it, I may still resort
as a convenient figure. To transcend it, he must advance by the
discrete degree. No simple "bettering" of the ordinary self, which
leaves it alive, as the focus--the French word "foyer" is the more
expressive--of his thoughts and actions; not even that identification
with higher interests in the world's plane just spoken of, is, or can
progressively become, in the least adequate to the realization of his
Divine ideal. This "bettering" of our present nature, it alone being
recognized as essential, albeit capable of "improvement," is a
commonplace, and to use a now familiar term a "Philistine," conception.
It is the substitution of the continuous for the discrete degree. It is
a compromise with our dear old familiar selves. "And Saul and the
people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of
the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not
utterly destroy them; but everything that was vile and refuse, that
they destroyed utterly." We know how little acceptable that compromise
was to the God of Israel; and no illustration can be more apt than this
narrative, which we may well, as we would fain, believe to be rather
typical than historical. Typical of that indiscriminate and radical
sacrifice, or "vastation," of our lower nature, which is insisted upon
as the one thing needful by all, or nearly all,* the great religions of
the world. No language could seem more purposely chosen to indicate
that it is the individual nature itself, and not merely its accidental
evils, that has to be abandoned and annih