We will have no other master but our caprice--that is to say, our evil
self will have no God, and the foundation of our nature is seditious,
impious, insolent, refractory, opposed to, and contemptuous of all that
tries to rule it, and therefore contrary to order, ungovernable and
negative. It is this foundation which Christianity calls the natural
man. But the savage which is within us, and constitutes the primitive
stuff of us, must be disciplined and civilized in order to produce a
man. And the man must be patiently cultivated to produce a wise man, and
the wise man must be tested and tried if he is to become righteous. And
the righteous man must have substituted the will of God for his
individual will, if he is to become a saint. And this new man, this
regenerate being, is the spiritual man, the heavenly man, of which the
Vedas speak as well as the gospel, and the Magi as well as the
Neo-Platonists.
March 17, 1870.--This morning the music of a brass band which had
stopped under my windows moved me almost to tears. It exercised an
indefinable, nostalgic power over me; it set me dreaming of another
world, of infinite passion and supreme happiness. Such impressions are
the echoes of paradise in the soul; memories of ideal spheres, whose sad
sweetness ravishes and intoxicates the heart.
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