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At this Hazael was much moved, and they talked of Jesus, Joseph saying that he had suffered cruelly for teaching that the Kingdom of God is in our own hearts; for to teach that religion is no more than a personal aspiration is to attack the law, which, though given to us by Moses, existed beforetimes in heaven, always observed by the angels, and to be observed by them for time everlasting.
No wonder, then, that Art in our time has nothing but technical excellence; that it despises conscience, despises aspiration, despises soul, despises even ideas that it is worthless, all worthless. 'Except as practised in a certain temple of art in a certain part of London that shall be nameless, whence Calliope, Euterpe, and all the rhythmic sisters are banished, interposed Cyril.
Their previous leaders had observed, as a warning only, the modern aspiration for vast wealth obtained by economic injustice; but that aspiration made an instant appeal to Smith's ambition; and it is the peculiar iniquity of conditions in Utah today that his ambition has betrayed his people to the very evils which they were originally organized to escape.
Out of this tedious winter came, suddenly as it seems to us, a rich and beautiful spring. The epoch of the great prophets, with a new life of thought and aspiration, breaks in abruptly on this commingling of all sorts of religion within the precincts of Jehovahism. Even in February the sap is softening and warming in the veins which show no greening on the tips of the patient trees.
It has been finely said, that "the opening of a rose-bud and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ are facts of the same order, for they are equally manifestations of the one force which is the motive power of all phenomena." We see that power in the glories of the opening spring; we are conscious of it in ourselves, in every good resolve, every upward aspiration.
It is not a vague sentiment for the abolition of conflict between states; nor is it a pious aspiration for peace. It is the clear perception that the state cannot fulfil its functions in modern life if it continues to act as isolated or segregated. That for which the state itself stands cannot be attained even within the frontiers of one state by any state acting alone.
And it may be said that this force is the divine in us, that it is God Himself who works in us because He suffers in us. And sympathy teaches us to discover this force, this aspiration towards consciousness, in all things.
It is an aspiration toward something better that subordinates all our acts to this one dominant desire. Every realization tends to the development of the ideal, which is increased in beauty by each partial attainment. We have just said that the ideal of some men is the acquisition of a fortune.
"One day at Enghien I listened silently to a conversation between M. Savarin and the Englishman, who sought to explain the conception of duty in which the German poet has given such noble utterance to the thoughts of the German philosopher viz., that moral aspiration has the same goal as the artistic, the attainment to the calm delight wherein the pain of effort disappears in the content of achievement.
The one is fully compatible with fervour and hopefulness and devotion to great causes. The other stamps a man with artifice, and hinders the free eagerness of his vision, and wraps him about with mediocrity, not always of understanding, but that still worse thing, mediocrity of aspiration and purpose.
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