ondition on the
earth. There is that within us which is always endeavouring to transcend
those limitations, and which believes in their final dispersal. This
aspiration rises to something higher than any possible actual on earth.
It is never worn out; it is the divine in us; and when it seems to
decay, God renews it by spiritual influences from without and within,
coming to us from nature as seen by us, from humanity as felt by us, and
from himself who dwells in us.

But then, unless we find out and submit to those limitations, and work
within them, life is useless, so far as any life is useless. But while
we work within them, we see beyond them an illimitable land, and thirst
for it. This battle between the dire necessity of working in chains and
longing for freedom, between the infinite destiny of the soul and the
baffling of its effort to realise its infinitude on earth, makes the
storm and misery of life. We may try to escape that tempest and sorrow
by determining to think, feel, and act only within our limitations, to
be content with them as Goethe said; but if we do, we are worse off than
before. We have thrown away our divine destiny. If we take this world
and are satisfied with it, cease to aspire, beyond our limits, to full
perfection in God; if our soul should ever say, "I want no more; what I
have here--the pleasure, fame, knowledge, beauty or love of this
world--is all I need or care for," then we are indeed lost. That is the
last damnation. The worst failure, the deepest misery, is better than
contentment with the success of earth; and seen in this light, the
failures and misery of earth are actually good things, the cause of a
chastened joy. They open to us the larger light. They suggest, and in
Browning's belief they proved, that this life is but the threshold of an
infinite life, that our true life is beyond, that there is an infinite
of happiness, of knowledge, of love, of beauty which we shall attain.
Our failures are prophecies of eternal successes. To choose the finite
life is to miss the infinite Life! O fool, to claim the little cup of
water earth's knowledge offers to thy thirst, or the beauty or love of
earth, when the immeasurable waters of the Knowledge, Beauty and Love of
the Eternal Paradise are thine beyond the earth.

Two things are then clear: (1) The attainment of our desires for
perfection, the satisfaction of our passion for the infinite, is
forbidden to us on earth by the limitations