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    speaks to the heart of man ; more wonderful ^ more inexplicable , than any instinct whatsoever ; a deep mystery of the soul , which the sense can never explore , yet which is an object of the most undoubting faith—* Thou must '—Whoever has heard that

    mandate in his heart , speaking amidst temptations and pleasures and necessities ; whoever has felt that it ought to be obeyed , has not seen , but yet has believed . The clearest revelation of an invisible world s surpassing in authority and power all that is visible , has been his .

    He has believed in moral obligation , in duty and in right , and such a faith makes man an immortal being . He has believed in God ; for the idea of God is that of rectitude , intelligence , goodness , love , power , invested with the attributes of the infinite . He has found , too , in nature , and inhis own soul , no equivocal traces of

    the being to whom all these attributes belong ; traces unseen by the outward eye , but ever visible to the spirit . In God and in his conscience , in the order and the disorder of the world , he finds the need and the promise of an immortal life ; without this and without God it would be idle to talk of duty .

    Here then are mind and its powers , here are the infinite , the beautiful , the lovely , the holy , the just , the divine , the immortal , all subjects of undoubting faith , yet all invisible . These are our life , they are what we cherish , what we prize . These are what rouse up our souls within us when we read of those chosen men in whose hearts things unseen have triumphed over the objects of sense . Nothing can make clear the page of human history but

    the admission of things invisible . The idea of illimitable power which comes in , in the midst of a world of limitations , of duty amid the strife of interests and pleasures , of what is unchangeable in the midst of fluctuation , of eternity in the midst of time , of God in the diversity of nature , these alone can explain a large

    portion of the history of human nature . And things invisible have been the most powerful agents on the stage of events , inasmuch , as the spirit is the loftiest part of human nature . Man is not , like the brute , an organized being , ministered to by intelligence , —man is a mind ministered to by organized matter . Whoever regards him in a lower light does not understand him .

    The invisible , then , is everything—the visible , how little m comparison 1 The invisible comprehends the soul , the power of thought , and all goodness , virtue . Is there anything in the universe so grand , so high , so beautiful , or so true ? It is this which ennobles and purifies the soul , and this which brightens the world

    with reflections from above . Here are the order , harmony , benevolence , and beauty which enchant us when we survey nature . It brings exhaustless delights . The invisible , without , speaks to the invisible within , in language which cannot be misunderstood . God speaks to the soul . Therefore it is that the earth is beau- *

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    The Visible and the Invisible . 4 &

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Jan. 2, 1832, page 45, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1804/page/45/