Which is the real possessor of a book--the man who has its original and
every following edition, and shows, to many an admiring and envying
visitor, now this, now that, in binding characteristic, with
possessor-pride; yea, from secret shrine is able to draw forth and
display the author's manuscript, with the very shapes in which his
thoughts came forth to the light of day,--or the man who cherishes one
little, hollow-backed, coverless, untitled, bethumbed copy, which he
takes with him in his solitary walks and broods over in his silent
chamber, always finding in it some beauty or excellence or aid he had
not found before--which is to him in truth as a live companion?

For what makes the thing a book? Is it not that it has a soul--the mind
in it of him who wrote the book? Therefore only can the book be
possessed, for life alone can be the possession of life. The dead
possess their dead only to bury them.

Does not he then, who loves and understands his book, possess it with
such possession as is impossible to the other? Just so may the world
itself be possessed--either as a volume unread, or as the wine of a
soul, 'the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and
treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.' It may be possessed as a
book filled with words from the mouth of God, or but as the
golden-clasped covers of that book; as an embodiment or incarnation of
God himself; or but as a house built to sell. The Lord loved the world
and the things of the world, not as the men of the world love them, but
finding his father in everything that came from his father's heart.

The same spirit, then, is required for possessing the kingdom of heaven,
and for inheriting the earth. How should it not be so, when the one