the _power_.] to the same agencies lying underneath creation,
as a root below a plant. Not less awful in power was the transition
from the limitations of space and time to ubiquity and eternity,
from the familiar to the mysterious, from the incarnate to the
spiritual. These enormous transitions were fitted to work changes
of answering magnitude in the human spirit. The reader can hardly
make any mistake as to this. He _must_ concede the changes.
What he will be likely to misconceive, unless he has reflected,
is--the immensity of these changes. And another mistake, which he
is even more likely to make, is this: he will imagine that a new
idea, even though the idea of an object so vast as God, cannot
become the ground of any revolution more than intellectual--cannot
revolutionize the moral and active principles in man, consequently
cannot lay the ground of any political movement. We shall see. But
next, that is,--

II. Secondly, as to the idea of man's relation to God, this, were
it capable of disjunction, would be even more of a revolutionary
idea than the idea of God. But the one idea is enlinked with the
other. In Paganism, as I have said, the higher you ascend towards
the original fountains of the religion, the more you leave behind
the frauds, forgeries, and treacheries of philosophy; so much the
more clearly you descry the odious truth--that man stood in the
relation of a superior to his gods, as respected all moral qualities
of any value, but in the relation of an inferior as respected
physical power. This was a position of the two parties fatal, by
itself, to all grandeur of moral aspirations. Whatever was good
or corrigibly bad, man saw associated with weakness; and power was
sealed and guaranteed to absolute wickedness. The evil disposition
in man to worship success, was strengthened by this mode of superiority