ow,--as
dimly shadowing forth some wild search in darkness and some final
resurrection into light,--through these, many from Egypt and India and
Scythia, from Scandinavia and from the aboriginal forests of America,
have for unnumbered ages passed from a world of bewildering error to the
heaven of their hopes. To the eye of sense and to shallow infidelity,
this may seem absurd; but the foolishness of man is the wisdom of God to
the salvation of His erring children. Happy, indeed, are the initiated!
Blessed are the poor in spirit, the Pariah, and the slave,--all they
whose eyes are veiled with overshadowing sorrow! for only thus is
revealed the glory of human life!

There are many things, kind reader, which, in our senseless staring, we
may call the signs of human weakness, but which, by a higher
interpretation, become revelations of human power. The gross and
pitiable features of the world are dissolved and clarified, when by an
impassioned sympathy we can penetrate to the heart of things. We are
about to pity the ragged vesture, the feeble knees, and the beseeching
hand of poverty, and the cries of the oppressed and the weary; but, at a
thought, Pity is slain by Reverence. We are ready to cry out against the
sluggish movement of the world and its lazy flux of life; but before the
satire is spoken, we are fascinated by an undercurrent of this same
world, earnest and full toward its sure goal,--of which, indeed, we only
dream; but "the dream is from God,"[3] and surer than sight. There is a
profounder calm than appears to the eye, in the quiet cottages scattered
up and down among the peaceful valleys; the rest of death is more
untroubled than the marble face which it leaves as its visible symbol;
and sleep, "the minor mystery of death," ([Greek: hypnos ta mikra tou
thanutou mysteria][4]) has a deeper significance than is revealed in any
external token. So what is sneeringly called the credulity of human
nature is its holy faith, and, in spite of all the hard facts which you
may charge upon it, is the glory of man. It introduces us into that
region where "nothing is unexpected, nothing impossible."[5] It was the
glory of our childhood, and by it childhood is made immortal. Myth
herself is ever a child,--a genuine child of the earth, indeed,--but
received among men as the child of Heaven.

Upon the slightest material basis have been constructed myths and
miracles and fairy-tales without number; and so it must ever be. Thus