ere
touch upon the probable reason why God must, as it were, be offset by
World, Spirit by Matter, Soul by Body? The Maker must needs, if it be
lawful so to speak, heap up in the balance against His own pure, eternal
freedom these numberless globes of cold, inert matter. Matter is,
indeed, movable by no fine persuasions: brutely faithful to its own law,
it cares no more for AEschylus than for the tortoise that breaks his
crown; the purpose of a cross for the sweetest saint it serves no less
willingly than any other purpose,--stiffly holding out its arms there,
about its own wooden business, neither more nor less, centred utterly
upon itself. But is it not this stolid self-centration which makes it
needful to Divinity? An infinite energy required a resisting or doggedly
indifferent material, itself _quasi_ infinite, to take the impression of
its life, and render potentiality into power. So by the encountering of
body with soul is the product, man, evolved. Philosophers and saints
have perceived that the spiritual element of man is hampered and
hindered by his physical part: have they also perceived that it is the
very collision between these which strikes out the spark of thought
and kindles the sense of law? As the tables of stone to the finger of
Jehovah on Sinai, so is the firm marble of man's material nature to the
recording soul. But even Plato, when he arrives at these provinces of
thought, begins to limp a little, and to go upon Egyptian crutches. In
the incomparable apologues of the "Phaedrus" he represents our inward
charioteer as driving toward the empyrean two steeds, of which the one
is virtuously attracted toward heaven, while the other is viciously
drawn to the earth; but he countenances the inference that the earthward
proclivity of the latter is to be accounted pure misfortune. But to the
universe there is neither fortune nor misfortune; there is only the
reaper, Destiny, and his perpetual harvest. All that occurs on a
universal scale lies in the line of a pure success. Nor can the universe
attain any success by pushing past man and leaving him aside. That
were like the prosperity of a father who should enrich himself by
disinheriting his only son.

Principles necessary to all action must of course appear in moral
action. The moral imagination, which pioneers and produces inward
advancement, works under the same conditions with the imagination of
the artist, and must needs have somewhat to work _upon_. Ma