resent, are like to be
'namings'--which shall be nameless! In silence, in the Eternal Temple,
let him worship, if there be no fit word: Such knowledge, the crown of
his whole spiritual being, the life of his life, let him keep and
sacredly walk by. He has a religion. Hourly and daily, for himself and
for the whole world, a faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual prayer
rises, "Thy will be done." His whole work on Earth is an emblematic
spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on Earth,--not the
Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants' wills! He has a
religion, this man; an everlasting Load-star that beams the brighter
in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth grows the night around him.
Thou, if thou know not this, what are all rituals, liturgies,
mythologies, mass-chantings, turnings of the rotatory calabash? They
are as nothing; in a good many respects they are as _less_. Divorced
from this, getting half-divorced from this, they are a thing to fill
one with a kind of horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear.
The most tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the
Prophet, "Behold, I will show thee worse things than these: women
weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's vision,--then
as now.

Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder: I know more or less the
history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of these. Can
thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated daily for centuries
of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me? Brother, No. Perhaps I
am grown to be a man now; and do not need the thunder and the terror
any longer! Perhaps I am above being frightened; perhaps it is not
Fear, but Reverence alone, that shall now lead me!--Revelations,
Inspirations? Yes: and thy own god-created Soul; dost thou not call
that a 'revelation'? Who made Thee? Where didst Thou come from? The
Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied
mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! _Thou_ art the latest Birth of
Nature; it is 'the Inspiration of the Almighty' that giveth _thee_
understanding! My brother, my brother!--

Under baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettantisms, with
their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever scandalous
rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of man,--religion
now is; its Laws, written if not on stone tables, yet on the Azure of
Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's Creation, certain as Life,
certa