consist but in the announcement that {87} God
recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely
overlooked? Take repentance: the man who can do nothing rightly can at
least repent of his failures. But for paganism this faculty of
repentance was a pure supernumerary, a straggler too late for the fair.
Christianity took it, and made it the one power within us which
appealed straight to the heart of God. And after the night of the
middle ages had so long branded with obloquy even the generous impulses
of the flesh, and defined the reality to be such that only slavish
natures could commune with it, in what did the _sursum corda_ of the
platonizing renaissance lie but in the proclamation that the archetype
of verity in things laid claim on the widest activity of our whole
aesthetic being? What were Luther's mission and Wesley's but appeals
to powers which even the meanest of men might carry with them,--faith
and self-despair,--but which were personal, requiring no priestly
intermediation, and which brought their owner face to face with God?
What caused the wildfire influence of Rousseau but the assurance he
gave that man's nature was in harmony with the nature of things, if
only the paralyzing corruptions of custom would stand from between?
How did Kant and Fichte, Goethe and Schiller, inspire their time with
cheer, except by saying, "Use all your powers; that is the only
obedience the universe exacts"? And Carlyle with his gospel of work,
of fact, of veracity, how does he move us except by saying that the
universe imposes no tasks upon us but such as the most humble can
perform? Emerson's creed that everything that ever was or will be is
here in the enveloping now; that man has but to obey himself,--"He who
will rest in what he _is_, {88} is a part of destiny,"--is in like
manner nothing but an exorcism of all scepticism as to the pertinency
of one's natural faculties.

In a word, "Son of Man, _stand upon thy feet_ and I will speak unto
thee!" is the only revelation of truth to which the solving epochs have
helped the disciple. But that has been enough to satisfy the greater
part of his rational need. _In se_ and _per se_ the universal essence
has hardly been more defined by any of these formulas than by the
agnostic _x_; but the mere assurance that my powers, such as they are,
are not irrelevant to it, but pertinent; that it speaks to them and
will in some way recognize their reply; that I can