y
piety or by passion, into their region. And no man touches these
divine natures, without becoming, in some degree, himself divine.
Like a new soul, they renew the body. We become physically
nimble and lightsome; we tread on air; life is no longer irksome, and
we think it will never be so. No man fears age or misfortune or death,
in their serene company, for he is transported out of the district of
change. Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and Truth,
we learn the difference between the absolute and the conditional or
relative. We apprehend the absolute. As it were, for the first time,
_we exist_. We become immortal, for we learn that time and space
are relations of matter; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous
will, they have no affinity.

5. Finally, religion and ethics, which may be fitly called,--the
practice of ideas, or the introduction of ideas into life,--have an
analogous effect with all lower culture, in degrading nature and
suggesting its dependence on spirit. Ethics and religion differ herein;
that the one is the system of human duties commencing from man;
the other, from God. Religion includes the personality of God;
Ethics does not. They are one to our present design. They both put
nature under foot. The first and last lesson of religion is, "The things
that are seen, are temporal; the things that are unseen, are eternal." It
puts an affront upon nature. It does that for the unschooled, which
philosophy does for Berkeley and Viasa. The uniform language that
may be heard in the churches of the most ignorant sects, is,
--"Contemn the unsubstantial shows of the world; they are vanities,
dreams, shadows, unrealities; seek the realities of religion." The
devotee flouts nature. Some theosophists have arrived at a certain
hostility and indignation towards matter, as the Manichean and
Plotinus. They distrusted in themselves any looking back to these
flesh-pots of Egypt. Plotinus was ashamed of his body. In short, they
might all say of matter, what Michael Angelo said of external beauty,
"it is the frail and weary weed, in which God dresses the soul, which
he has called into time."

It appears that motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and
religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality of the
external world. But I own there is something ungrateful in
expanding too curiously the particulars of the general proposition,
that all culture tends to imbue us with ideali