very striking passage,
that the material world may convey itself through other senses than the
five which we possess, that there may be innumerable other senses, and
that some of these may perhaps be already developed in other creatures
than man. Such a suggestion stirs our curiosity and desire; but how few
of us have learned to rightly use the five senses we have! And of the
moral perceptions we have but a most rudimentary development. We are
unconscious of most of the world we live in, unconscious even of what
many of our fellow-men discern. Did you ever happen to be in the
presence of a sunset, flooding the heavens with glory, with a companion
who showed no sign of perceiving the splendor? Ah! perhaps he was
blinded to it by some secret grief or care, some trouble which you might
have discovered in him and comforted, had your sympathy been as acute as
your sense of beauty. But did his blindness, whatever its cause, suggest
to you that you perhaps were at that moment in the presence of sublime
realities, to which your consciousness was closed as his was to the
sunset?

To recognize consciously the spiritual elements in the universe belongs
partly to a right cultivation of character, and partly it is due to
natural endowment, to an intellectual faculty. It is not, after all, of
so much account that we _see_ the divine in life as that we have it in
ourselves. In this one sentence, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they shall see God," Jesus puts spiritual vision as the result of a moral
quality. But it is the moral quality itself on which, in one form and
another, his blessing is constantly pronounced. So, if you say, "I
cannot see,--God is in no sense visible to me," yet there remain still
most precious gifts, if you will take them. Blessed are the gentle, the
peacemakers, the merciful, they that do hunger and thirst after
righteousness; blessed are the sympathetic, the stout-hearted, the
open-eyed, the open-handed; plain and simple and sure are these
benedictions.

The presence of Divinity which it is most essential that we recognize is
the choice perpetually presented to us between a higher and a lower
course of action. Whether one has the joyful, uplifting vision is of
small consequence in comparison with whether he steadily chooses and
follows the right.

No one can be reasoned or persuaded into any living faith in God or
immortality, any more than reason and persuasion can draw from the cold