expression of a clear idea: it is merely the expression of an effort to attain one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effort—the cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt. The fact is, that upon the enunciation of any one of that class of terms to which 'infinite' belongs—the class representing thoughts of thought—he who has a right to say he thinks at all, feels himself called upon, not to entertain a conception, but simply to direct his mental vision toward some given point, in the intellectual firmament, where lies a nebula never to be resolved. And yet to this very point, which the intellect cannot define, are our spirits forever tending. No artistic creation ever fully pleases unless there is given in it some suggestion of this mystic attribute, underlying and permeating all other attributes of Deity. It is the dim unconscious feeling after this attribute which causes the forever recurring dissatisfaction with the finite, which so ruthlessly pursues us through life. It is the source of that vague but tender longing, that restless but dreamy yearning, that haunting melancholy, which characterize human souls created for the enjoyment of the infinite; divining and insatiably thirsting for the absolute.
Let us now attempt to trace some of the various ways in which this feeling after the infinite manifests itself. Plato and his school tried to explain the existence of absolute ideas in the soul by the hypothesis of its preëxistence to that of the body in the bosom of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; and, consequently, that such ideas are but reminiscences of a more perfect life. We find the following passage in an ode of Wordsworth's:
'Our birth is but a sleep, and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home.
'Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.'
It seems useless here to enter upon the vexed subject of 'innate ideas,' or to attempt to convince the reader, metaphysically, that the very negation contained in the word finite, necessarily suggests its affirmation in the word infinite. Enough that the idea of the infinite is certainly found in the mind of man, that he seeks it in the material world, in himself, in God. High gifts may have been wrought into the dim soul, which are destined to be gradually awakened through the growing perceptions of the mind. Every spiritual being created by eternal love may have had imparted to him a ray from the sun of eternal love, which, in its due time and place, is to manifest itself in his consciousness. Such participation in God as the primary source of all that is to abide eternally with the redeemed, has, in the present state of our vague consciousness, been described by men who felt its stirrings in their soul as the memory of eternal love. It might more properly be called an intuition of eternal love; such an instinct as leads the chrysalis to prepare for the change which it certainly does not understand. Life, such as the beat of the heart, the action of the lungs, is not manifested to the consciousness—neither is the source of this intuition, which, however, gives evidence of itself by an intuitive feeling of incessant longing. It reveals its presence constantly; sometimes in an undefinable feeling of profound desire, satisfied with no earthly object, yet but vaguely directed to the eternal or divine; sometimes in a profound and absorbing religiosity. This longing exists in an inchoate state; it is a love yet to be developed. From this mystic root springs much that is intellectually great, even the love of scientific certainty. Philosophy may, indeed, almost be termed the science of longing.
Developing in its normal growth, it gives us our true saints; those who live but to love God, and to serve man. But like all human gifts, it may be perverted. It is some such perverted apprehension or illusory longing for the infinite, which causes a man to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some ruling habit, some favorite and engrossing pursuit. Alas! it often leads the most gifted of our race to devote all their energies, thoughts, feelings, to one faulty, fading, changing object, vainly pouring that worship upon the creature, which should be rendered only to the Creator.
'He that sits above
In His calm glory, will forgive the love
His creatures bear each other, even if blent
With a vain worship, for its close is dim
Ever with grief, which leads the wrung soul back to Him.'
The despair which this feeling sometimes occasions in the perverted soul of one intent upon feeding it with the gross aliments of the debased senses, is, without doubt, a very frequent cause of suicide. It may lead, in the soul of the infidel or sensualist, to the idolatry of art. It is a feeling, and requires direction. When enlightened by revelation and purified by faith, it manifests itself in the sublime abnegation and ardent love of the faithful follower of Jesus Christ.
This instinctive longing for the infinite, existing in the soul itself, cannot be satisfied by any earthly longing, sensual gratification, or external possession. Made 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever,' man is ruined and eternally miserable if he refuse to fulfil the destiny for which he was created. His misery springs from the root of his greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot succeed in burying under the finite. This is a pregnant subject; under this strange caption might be written the psychological history of most human despair.
'The Fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of nature
Can't trance him again,
Whose soul sees the Perfect
His eyes seek in vain.'
Thus is faith a necessity of the soul, 'the evidence of things not seen.'
The idea of eternity is necessarily evolved from the negation contained in the limited meaning of the word time. Eternity is the all embracing, completely complete time; eternity, which is infinite not only a parte externa, that is everpassing yet everlasting, without beginning and without end; but also infinite a parte interna—so that in the endlessly living, thoroughly luminous present, the whole past, also the whole future, are equally actual, equally clear, and equally present to us, as the very present itself. Can we indeed form any other conception of a state of perfect bliss? Is the idea of a state of entire happiness at all compatible with the regret that must be felt for a blissful past; the consciousness of a flying present; and the fear of an uncertain future? Yet the idea of time does not seem necessarily excluded from a conception of the essence and operations of God. Does there in very reality exist such an absolute opposition between time and eternity, that it is quite impossible for them to subsist in any mutual contact or relation? Is there no transition from the one to the other conceivable? Is eternity anything more than time vitally full, blissfully complete? If eternity is nothing more than the living, full, essential time, and if our earthly, fettered, and fragmentary time is, as the great poet says, 'out of joint,' fallen with man's disobedience to his God into a state of strange disorder—it is easily conceivable that the two do not stand apart so as to have no mutual contact. Those who have seen a holy death leave a calm and beautiful smile upon the face of a dying Christian, can scarcely help believing that the beginning of a blissful eternity has impressed itself upon the rapt features, actually breaking through the shackles of time before the prisoner was emancipated from its fetters. And those brief intervals of rapture which are sometimes
