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But the young artist was not of this order. Idealist and genius, he was already highly spiritualised and vitalised even upon earth, and when death rent the bond between him and his body, he passed at once from the atmosphere of carnal things into a loftier sphere.
The girl hung her head, and spoke not. "How comes it, then," continued the King, with a voice to which he in vain endeavoured to impart an accent of severity, "how comes it, O little one, that thou, whose thoughts should be lifted already above this carnal world, and eager for the service of Mary the chaste and blessed, standest thus hoodless and alone on the waysides, a mark for the eyes of men? go to, it is naught."
"You can carry a staff," Oswald said, laughing; "and being so big a man, you will assuredly require a long and heavy one; and, even if it is heavily shod with iron, no one need object." "That is not so bad, Master Oswald. A seven-foot staff, of the thickness of my wrist; with an iron shoe, weighing a pound or two, is a carnal weapon not to be despised.
Men are grieved that they thrive no more in the world; grieved that they have no more carnal, sensual, and worldly honour; grieved that they are suffered no more to range in the lusts and vanities of this life; but all this is because the soul is unaquainted with God, sees no beauty in holiness, but is sensual, and wrapt up in clouds and thick darkness. Of anger.
How little some can do! They take a part in work, as it is called, but there is little of exercising spiritual power and carrying real blessing. Should we not each ask, "Have I outgrown my spiritual infancy?" Some must reply, "No, instead of having gone forward, I have gone backward, and the joy of conversion and the first love is gone." Alas! They are babes in Christ; they are yet carnal.
Durtal laughed. "There is perhaps a middle course: never consummate the carnal act with her you love, and, to keep yourself quiet, frequent those you do not love. Thus, in a certain measure, you would conjure away possible disgust."
There is no dream of his without an interpretation, without a prediction; and if the event answer not his exposition, he expounds it according to the event. Every dark grove and pictured wall strikes him with an awful but carnal devotion. Old wives and stars are his counsellors, his night-spell is his guard, and charms his physicians.
And you see a mark of the carnal state not only in unlovingness, self-consciousness and bitterness, but in so many other sins. How much worldliness, how much ambition among men, how much seeking for the honor that comes from man all the fruit of the carnal life to be found in the midst of Christian activity!
But those who, instead of having cultivated their inner man, came on the surface into the materialistic life, and lived according to their animal passions and carnal lusts and according to the custom of their party and sect, and supported blindly the performances contained in the traditions and systems which have been delivered to them by their predecessors, were preparing in their way for revolutions and wars, instead of having learned our disclosures that the time had arrived for the abolition of the Old Heavens and the Old Earth, that is, of the old ecclesiastical and political institutions, and how they are to be abolished in the most peaceable manner.
Stony forms, monstrous, enigmatic, reared like symbolic tokens of defeated gods, or of the worn-out evil passions that troubled old creation before the coming of man, and the fresh order of spiritual and carnal bewilderment. Why should I go on and seek further amazement, while from the lowest to the highest I can read not one of the mystic figures of the solitude around me?
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