The winds which fan his cheek waft him the sum of that profit and
happiness which their lagging inventions supply.
The chief fault of this book is, that it aims to secure the greatest degree
of gross comfort and pleasure merely. It paints a Mahometan’s heaven,
and stops short with singular abruptness when we think it is drawing near to
the precincts of the Christian’s, — and we trust we have not made
here a distinction without a difference. Undoubtedly if we were to reform this
outward life truly and thoroughly, we should find no duty of the inner
omitted. It would be employment for our whole nature; and what we should do
thereafter would be as vain a question as to ask the bird what it will do
when its nest is built and its brood reared. But a moral reform must take
place first, and then the necessity of the other will be superseded, and we
shall sail and plow by its force alone. There is a speedier way than the
“Mechanical System” can show to fill up
marshes, to drown the roar of the waves, to tame hyenas, secure agreeable
environs, diversify the land, and refresh it with “rivulets of sweet
water,” and that is by the power of rectitude and true behavior. It is
only for a little while, only occasionally, methinks, that we want a garden.
Surely a good man need not be at the labor to level a hill for the sake of a
prospect, or raise fruits and flowers, and construct floating islands, for
the sake of a paradise. He enjoys better prospects than lie behind any hill.
Where an angel travels it will be paradise all the way, but where Satan
travels it will be burning marl and cinders. What says Veeshnoo Sarma?
“He whose mind is at ease is possessed of all riches. Is it not the
same to one whose foot is enclosed in a shoe, as if the whole surface of the
earth were covered with leather?”
He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these inferior
deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. But we would not disparage the
importance of such calculations as we have described. They are truths in
physics, because they are true in ethics. The moral powers no one would
presume to calculate. Suppose we could compare the moral with the physical,
and say how many horse-power the force of love, for instance, blowing on
every square foot of a man’s soul, would equal. No doubt we are well
aware of this force; figures would not increase our respect for it; the
sunshine is equal to but one ray of its heat. The light of the sun is but the
shadow of love. “The souls of men loving and fearing God,” says
Raleigh, “receive influence from that divine light itself, whereof the
sun’s clarity, and that of the stars, is by Plato called but a shadow.
Lumen est umbra Dei, Deus est Lumen Luminis. Light is the
shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of light,” and, we
may add, the heat of heat. Love is the wind, the tide, the waves, the
sunshine. Its power is incalculable; it is many horse-power. It never ceases,
it never slacks; it can move the globe without a resting-place; it can warm
without fire; it can feed without meat; it can clothe without garments; it
can shelter without roof; it can make a paradise within which will dispense
with a paradise without.
