Society the Redeemed Form of Man

God's spiritual perfection ! To think hereupon what a stupid dreary thing the human soul is reduced to after it has undergone scientific manipulation, and been run into a mere pruritus of the senses ! Ham let the play with Hamlet the person left out is noth ing in comparison. The melancholy thing in this case is — not that one's bread of life becomes mere unleavened dough, for one can exist well enough, if bare existence contents him, on unleavened bread ; but that any considerable number of men should be so lacking in the sentiment of infinitude within their proper nature, as willingly to make sense, in which all animals are superior to them, the sovereign arbiter of truth in intellectual things ! I beg however that you will not think that it seems to me vitally important in what sense the existing battle between religious faith and science is settled. Neither party is contending for the interests of the living God, so spiritually active at present within the precincts of human nature, but only and at best for those of some traditional deity now deceased; the deity, for example, of orthodox ecclesiastical culture. The worship of this time-and-space deity at this day, and especially in this land, where human nature is vindicating with startling emphasis and iteration its immaculate Divine dignity against all manner of finite private or personal pretension in men, seems to me a