This highest step, this saintly elevation, which but
few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to which
the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence and
strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one long
discipline, for which the soul's human education is constantly varied,
for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which all
its multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant
aspiration,--this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our
sage as the _all_ of religion. He knocked out every round of the ladder
but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to
the world, "Go up thither and be saved!"
Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrender to
the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,--because, if _that_ were
commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion. Every prayer, not
based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the Divine
Majesty;--the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life,
the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, the
deeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign,
were all vitiated and made void. Nothing was to be preached to the
sinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to this
height.
It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to many
unendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher with the
cry, "This is an hard saying; who can hear it?" The young and gay were
wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which to them were as
unintelligible as a statement of the last results of the mathematician
to the child commencing the multiplication-table.
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