Substance and Shadow

The profoundest of our sensuous judgments, and the basis of the religious instinct in us, is, that our natural force is final : that far from be- ing strictly incidental to a grander subsequent evolution of the Divine power in us, it is, on the contrary, its own end: thus that the pleasure and the pain, the health and the disease, the strength and the weakness, the growth and the decay, upon whose equilibrium our natural conscious- ness is contingent, are in themselves absolute goods and evils: to be received, the former with thankfulness, as a mark of the Divine favor; the latter with sorrow, as a mark of the Divine dis- pleasure.