in bodies that took
shape and will lose it, melting into air." Thus bodies, and not spirits,
are the true apparitions, the souls being the realities which they both
reveal and hide. In fact, body is literally a garment of flesh--a
garment which the soul has for a time put on, but which it will lay
aside again. One of the greatest of all the idolatries of appearance is
our constant habit of judging one another by the attractiveness of the
bodily vesture. Many of the judgments which we pass upon our fellows
would be reversed if we trained ourselves to look through the vestures
of flesh to the men themselves--the souls that are hidden within.

The natural expansion of this is in the general doctrine of matter and
spirit. Purely material science--science which has lost the faculty of
wonder and of spiritual perception--is no true science at all. It is but
a pair of spectacles without an eye. For all material things are but
emblems of spiritual things--shadows or images of things in the
heavens--and apart from these they have no reality at all.

3. _Society and Social Problems._--It follows naturally that a change
must come upon our ways of regarding the relations of man to man. If
every man is indeed a temple of the divine, and therefore to be revered,
then much of our accepted estimates and standards of social judgment
will have to be abandoned. Society, as it exists, is founded on class
distinctions which largely consist in the exaltation of idleness and
wealth. Against this we have much eloquent protest. "Venerable to me is
the hard hand; crooked, coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning
virtue, indefeasibly royal, as of the Sceptre of this Planet. Venerable
too is the rugged face, all weather-tanned, besoiled, with its rude
intelligence; for it is the face of a Man living man like." How far away
we are from all this with our mammon-worship and our fantastic social
unrealities, every student of our times must know, or at least must have
often heard. He would not have heard it so often, however, had not
Thomas Carlyle cried it out with that harsh voice of his, in this and
many others of his books. It was his gunpowder, more than any other
explosive of the nineteenth century, that broke up the immense
complacency into which half England always tends to relapse.

He is not hopeless of the future of society. Society is the true
Phoenix, ever repeating the miracle of its resurrection from the ashes
of the former fire