them. By the body we know the soul. But we are always ready to love the
body instead of the soul. Therefore, God makes the body die continually,
that we may learn to love the soul indeed. The world is full of beautiful
things, but God has saved many men from loving the mere bodies of them, by
making them poor; and more still by reminding them that if they be as rich
as Croesus all their lives, they will be as poor as Diogenes--poorer,
without even a tub--when this world, with all its pictures, scenery, books,
and--alas for some Christians!--bibles even, shall have vanished away."

"Why do you say _alas_, papa--if they are Christians especially?"

"I say _alas_ only from their point of view, not from mine. I mean such as
are always talking and arguing from the Bible, and never giving themselves
any trouble to do what it tells them. They insist on the anise and cummin,
and forget the judgment, mercy, and faith. These worship the body of the
truth, and forget the soul of it. If the flowers were not perishable, we
should cease to contemplate their beauty, either blinded by the passion for
hoarding the bodies of them, or dulled by the hebetude of commonplaceness
that the constant presence of them would occasion. To compare great things
with small, the flowers wither, the bubbles break, the clouds and sunsets
pass, for the very same holy reason, in the degree of its application to
them, for which the Lord withdrew from his disciples and ascended again to
his Father--that the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Soul of things,
might come to them and abide with them, and so the Son return, and the
Father be revealed. The flower is not its loveliness, and its loveliness
we must love, else we shall only treat them as flower-greedy children,
who gather and gather, and fill hands and baskets, from a mere desire
of acquisition, excusable enough in them, but the same in kind, however
harmless in mode, and degree, and object, as the avarice of the miser.
Therefore God, that we may always have them, and ever learn to love their