housekeeping, all material
necessity for an immediate choice was taken away; for he was exactly in
that situation dearest to every scholarly and thoughtful man, in which
all that pertained to the outward life appeared to rise under his hand
at the moment he wished for it without his knowing how or why.

He was not at the head of a prosperous church and society, rich and
well-to-do in the world,--but, as the pioneer leader of a new theology,
in a country where theology was the all-absorbing interest, he had to
breast the reaction that ever attends the advent of new ideas. His
pulpit talents, too, were unattractive. His early training had been
all logical, not in the least aesthetic; for, like the ministry of his
country generally, he had been trained always to think more of what he
should say than of how he should say it. Consequently, his style,
though not without a certain massive greatness, which always comes from
largeness of nature, had none of those attractions by which the common
masses are beguiled into thinking. He gave only the results of thought,
not its incipient processes; and the consequence was, that few could
follow him. In like manner, his religious teachings were characterized
by an ideality so high as quite to discourage ordinary virtue.

There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human
affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love,
through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes,
till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image
of the divine. At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of
paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where the
soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience of
devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and
Beauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type,
the distant shadow. This highest step, this saintly elevation, which but
few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to which
the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence and
strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one long
discipline, for which the soul's human education is constantly varied,
for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which all
its multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration,--this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our
sage as t