Our whole life is startlingly moral.There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.Goodness is the only investment that never fails.In the music of the harp which trembles round the world it is the insisting on this which thrills us.The harp is the travelling patterer for the Universe's Insurance Company,recommending its laws,and our little goodness is all the assessment that we pay.Though the youth at last grows indifferent,the laws of the universe are not indifferent,but are forever on the side of the most sensitive.Listen to every zephyr for some reproof,for it is surely there,and he is unfortunate who does not hear it.We cannot touch a string or move a stop but the charming moral transfixes us.Many an irksome noise,go a long way off,is heard as music,a proud,sweet satire on the meanness of our lives.
We are conscious of an animal in us,which awakens in proportion as our higher nature slumbers.It is reptile and sensual,and perhaps cannot be wholly expelled;like the worms which,even in life and health,occupy our bodies.Possibly we may withdraw from it,but never change its nature.I fear that it may enjoy a certain health of its own;that we may be well,yet not pure.The other day I picked up the lower jaw of a hog,with white and sound teeth and tusks,which suggested that there was an animal health and vigor distinct from the spiritual.This creature succeeded by other means than temperance and purity.“That in which men differ from brute beasts,”says Mencius,“is a thing very inconsiderable;the common herd lose it very soon;superior men preserve it carefully.”Who knows what sort of life would result if we had attained to purity?If I knew so wise a man as could teach me purity I would go to seek him forthwith.“A command over our passions,and over the external senses of the body,and good acts,are declared by the Ved to be indispensable in the mind's approximation to God.”Yet the spirit can for the time pervade and control every member and function of the body,and transmute what in form is the grossest sensuality into purity and devotion.The generative energy,which,when we are loose,dissipates and makes us unclean,when we are continent invigorates and inspires us.Chastity is the flowering of man;and what are called Genius,Heroism,Holiness,and the like,are but various fruits which succeed it.Man flows at once to God when the channel of purity is open.By turns our purity inspires and our impurity casts us down.He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day,and the divine being established.Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied.I fear that we are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs,the divine allied to beasts,the creatures of appetite,and that,to some extent,our very life is our disgrace.-
“How happy's he who hath due place assigned
To his beasts and disafforested his mind!
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Can use his horse,goat,wolf,and ev'ry beast,
And is not ass himself to all the rest!
Else man not only is the herd of swine,
But he's those devils too which did incline
Them to a headlong rage,and made them worse.”