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superficiality, and even the vice, so characteristic of the "great sinful cities" where alone such elaborate productions can be given.

Personal influence is perhaps the most important element in the advancement of the moral and intellectual and religious life. The history of the world is the history of its great personalities. It was not so much what Socrates taught as the example he gave; and, says Professor Kühnemann of Schiller, "He was not a great historical scholar, but in spite of this he had caught the tone which makes the great university teacher; for he is only such who sees his own work under the highest point of view, and leads his pupils to the noblest efforts. He gave his young friends to carry away with them through life what is more powerful than any learned instruction and what experience shows is alone held in grateful remembrance, the memory of a great and pure character, the memory of a complete man.'

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Hence one of the most frequent "openings into the Infinite" is the character of spiritually

minded men. Not men like Mephistopheles, who possess a spirit-" der stets verneint " or like Chamfort-whose conversation in the morning, says Madame Helvètius, "spoils my whole day"; but those whose minds have been fixed on high and holy things. To approach such men elevates us, and in talking with them we feel the touch of the eternal; nay

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even though they sleep they seem to purify the air and their houses seem to adorn the landscape and strengthen the laws."

Of such spiritual personalities, prophet and preacher have always been the leading examples; and it may be that the futility of much of the preaching of to-day, when so often it seems,—

che le pecorelle, che non sanno,

Tornan del pasco pasciute di vento,1

is largely due to the fact that the mind of the preacher himself is not set on eternal things.

1 The unsuspecting sheep

Return from the pasture fed with wind.

Par. XXIX, 106.

What the true preacher can do in opening up to men the Infinite can be seen in the following passage from Schleiermacher's "Reden über die Religion,"—" He comes forward to present to the sympathetic contemplation of others his own heart as stirred by God. And, by leading them into the region of religion, where he is at home, he would infect them with his own feeling. He utters divine things and in solemn silence the congregation follow his inspired speech. If he unveils a hidden wonder, or links with prophetic assurance the future to the present, or by new example confirms old truths, or if his fiery imagination enchants him in visions into another part of the world and into another order of things, the trained sense of the congregation accompanies him throughout. On returning from his wanderings through the Kingdom of God into himself, his heart and the hearts of all, are but the common seat of the same feeling."

CHAPTER III.

THE TRANSCENDENTAL VIEW OF

NATURE.

WE have discussed briefly some of the socalled openings into the Infinite, but we have not as yet touched upon the three most important of them all-nature, Romantic love, and religion.

It is customary to regard mysticism as a peculiarly religious phenomenon; and it is true that it has ever been closely associated with the religious instinct, and that in ancient times it was almost exclusively confined to religion or philosophy; which terms, however, were practically identical in the fountain-head of all modern transcendentalism, Neo-Platonism. Gradually, the transcendental sense has broadened and deepened as the centuries have gone on. We shall see later how re

ligious transcendentalism, or mysticism has been completely changed. In the immediately following pages we shall discuss the influence of this sense in two fields which were practically uncultivated by the ancient world, nature and Romantic love.

There are four ways in which we may regard nature; one in which her great forces are looked upon as the manifestation of unseen powers, good or evil. This is the earliest form in all nations, and thus we find the thunderbolt looked upon as the weapon of Jove, the mighty earth-shaking ocean transformed into Neptune, the sun into Apollo and the moon into Diana. So too the eternal contest between day and night, summer and winter, was transformed into a contest between Thor and Wodan, between Balder and Loki; while with cosmic imagination the final destruction of the visible universe was conceived under the form of the Götterdämmerung.

Then, again, there is the scientific interest which leads men to study plants and animals and hills and rivers and the courses and mo

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