everence and faith; there yearn the immortal desires
of continued existence and eternal joy; there is the chamber of prophetic
visions and poetic fires; there conscience holds its court, and in God's
stead utters its solemn decision. There too the acutest of our
sensibilities to suffering reside. . . . AND this inner, spiritual nature
of man is his distinguishing glory, the priceless, inalienable treasure
which he carries with him amid all the changes of time, and all the
disasters of the universe. It is his all. It is his proper self. Other
things are circumstances of his being. This is his being, subsisting
independently of every other thing and being except the DEITY. It invests
all external objects with its own character and coloring; paints its own
image on the sky, the floods, the fields, and faces of men, and turns the
world into a thousand-faced mirror, and every face flings back upon the
soul its own likeness, and all its flitting, changeful phases of mood and
feeling. Is it guilty? 'The fiends of its own bosom people air with
kindred fiends that hunt it to despair.' Is it sad? The sighing of the
softest breeze is heard as a requiem, and the natural beatings of its own
heart sound like 'funeral marches and muffled drums.' Is it glad,
innocent, and happy? All nature smiles and puts on the garments of beauty;
the stars sing together, the trees of the forest rejoice, and the floods
clap their hands. Thus the visible universe becomes a mere reproduction of
the spirit of man that beholds it. Create a mind, and it creates for its
residence an external world of its own hue and character. Make that mind
happy, and its external world, from pole to pole and from the zenith to
its centre, is resplendent with light and beauty; balm-like airs, soft and
fragrant as those of uncursed Eden, breathe upon it, and all its life is
love. Dreaming, it sees a ladder reaching to heaven, and the angels of GOD
ascending and descending on errands of mercy, and waking, exclaims with
reverential joy, 'Surely GOD is in this place.' Make a mind miserable, and
you darken its universe. The stars fall from its heaven, the golden
fruitage of its paradise decays, and winter winds wail around it, and
night and storm mingle their pitiless elements on its unsheltered head.
Intertwined and involved in the inner life, are occurring at all times the
great things of human history. In the sanctuary of unrevealed bosoms, in
the 'silent, secret sessions' of t