Who knows if love and its beatitude, clear manifestation as it
is of the universal harmony of things, is not the best demonstration of
a fatherly and understanding God, just as it is the shortest road by
which to reach him? Love is a faith, and one faith leads to another. And
this faith is happiness, light and force. Only by it does a man enter
into the series of the living, the awakened, the happy, the redeemed--of
those true men who know the value of existence and who labor for the
glory of God and of the truth. Till then we are but babblers and
chatterers, spendthrifts of our time, our faculties and our gifts,
without aim, without real joy--weak, infirm, and useless beings, of no
account in the scheme of things. Perhaps it is through love that I shall
find my way back to faith, to religion, to energy, to concentration. It
seems to me, at least, that if I could but find my work-fellow and my
destined companion, all the rest would be added unto me, as though to
confound my unbelief and make me blush for my despair. Believe, then, in
a fatherly Providence, and dare to love!
November 25, 1863.--Prayer is the essential weapon of all religions. He
who can no longer pray because he doubts whether there is a being to
whom prayer ascends and from whom blessing descends, he indeed is
cruelly solitary and prodigiously impoverished.
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