Certainly.
"How, then, can there be any doubt but that intelligence itself, mind
itself, is one and identic in all men, since all think alike of the
cosmos, and one and identic also in that everlasting Cause of the
cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?"
Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled
so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is
the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on
the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is
the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in
very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul
of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not
so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, _but we are he_, we
are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the
light in man, the good in man is God.
Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or
consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels
that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not
here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul
whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple
not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined
and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of
Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a
ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the
man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot
be found within himself.
He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to
commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in
the skies--it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful
profanities upon the canvases of our artists--nor will he need that his
soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds"
with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with
himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now _that there
is no God anywhere who is not within him_. He will need no Chrishna,
Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no
god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring
in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering
humanity
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