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1827] THOUGHT IN RELIGION 223 vigorous and approved thoughts, barter the sun for the waning moon? 'Tis all idle talking. In the extreme it is plain enough. But the difficulty I contemplated consists in finding the proper mean; in discerning how much (for certainly something) is laudable, and how much extravagant in their theory of duty; in learning how much we lack of the love of God, and in adjusting life betwixt reason and feeling; e. g., it may be plausibly denied that 't is worth while to get rich, or to make acquisitions in science. But shall a wise man refrain?

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December 17, 1827.

But now and then the lawless imagination flies out and asserts her habit. I revisit the verge of my intellectual domain. How the restless soul runs round the outmost orbit and builds her bold conclusion as a tower of observation from whence her eyes wander incessantly in the unfathomable abyss. I dimly scrutinize the vast constitution of being into which this present shall be absorbed, in which we shall look back, peradventure, to Christianity as to a rosary on which, in the morn of existence, we learned to count our prayers, and think it idle to pause in the train of mighty meditation, to remember in our an

cient pupilage the rudiments of those stupendous moral energies we shall wield at that hour. But no; no thought, no perception of truth, how limited soever, can become insignificant. God communicates with the thoughts of men; and to whatever magnificence of nature and acquisition we may attain, the whole past will always be the instrument of future works.

Connexion between God and the Soul,What is religion but this connexion? Is not this the thought that always invests human nature, though in rags and filth, with sublimity, that wheresoever a man goeth, there goes an animal containing in his soul an image of the Being by whom the Universe subsists? The Mind is his image and mirror. Is it not that, with whatever depravations blotted and disguised, God makes the main idea therein to which all others arrange themselves as threads of steel to a magnet, or as all the magnets of the world to the polar axis? Is not the mind in health just in proportion as that idea is clear? If that is obscured, is there not death in the mind? (I use mind in its largest sense, for I see that the intellect may be vigorous, as in Laplace, and refuse to honor its Maker.) But I am confounded by the anomaly. These

1827]

GOD WITHIN US

225

views seem to me to hold. I cannot understand the feelings of the Atheist. I cannot believe Atheism and genius to consist. And yet what motive for the pretence? Does n't the heart say Hallelujah amid its prayers for Bacon, Newton and Locke, for Socrates and Cicero? If there were no lobsidedness, no disease in the Soul, the idea of Deity would be its exact and constant measure of its progression. When that was great, the mind was great. Its own glory would keep even pace with the glory it gave. Is not this unutterably beautiful and grand, this life within life, this literal Emanuel, God within us? When this shall have been taught worthily to men, the wailing spirits of the prophets may bend from their spheres, for the Principle of Evil shall come to his end, and God shall be all in all.

AUTHORS OR BOOKS MENTIONED OR REFERRED TO IN JOURNALS OF 1827

Bible;

Pindar; Socrates;

Cicero; Seneca; Epictetus; Plutarch, Lives;

Athanasius;

Philippe de Comines; Mémoires;

Calvin.

Bacon; Shakspeare;

Jeremy Taylor, Holy Living and Dying;

James Harrington, apud Hume;

Pascal; Locke; Newton; La Bruyère;
Cowper; Young; Berkeley; Butler;

Madame de Staël; Scott, Quentin Durward, Bride of Lammermoor, Rokeby;

Buckminster, Channing, Sermons ;
Sampson Reed, Growth of the Mind.

JOURNAL XIX

(From "Sermons and Journals," 1828-29, and Cabot's Q and R)

[SOME letters, written by Emerson to his brothers and aunt during the winter and spring of this year, which are quoted by Mr. Cabot in his Memoirs, show the good sense with which at this critical period he yielded to necessity instead of fighting Fate, like his brother Edward. Thus the elder brother saved and the valiant younger brother lost his life. In one of these letters, Waldo says: "I am living cautiously, yea, treading on eggs, to strengthen my constitution. It is long battle this of mine between life and death.

So I never write when I can walk, and especially when I can laugh." This accounts for the scanty journal-writing in this year, and he refused many flattering invitations to preach. Thus his proper health gradually reasserted itself.]

(From Cabot's R)

January, 1828.

Montaigne says he is sorry Brutus's treatise

on Virtue is lost, because he would hear one,

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