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This lady has a large family and very large fortune, which at her death goes to her eldest son, who is a young man of enthusiastically religious views and feelings; he has no profession or occupation, but devotes himself to building chapels and schools, which he himself superintends with unwearied assiduity; and though he has never taken orders, he preaches at some place in the city, to which crowds of people flock to hear him; none of which is at all agreeable to his mother, whose chief anxiety, however, is lest some one of the fair Methodists who attend his exhortations should admire his earthly expectations as much as his heavenly prospects, and induce this young apostle to marry her for her soul's sake; all which his mother told mine, with many lamentations over the godly zeal of her "serious" son, certainly not often made with regard to young men who are likely to inherit fine fortunes and estates.
But to me few things are more pathetic than to see people, on the strength of the inward peace and satisfaction which their rudimentary efforts towards perfection have brought them, employ, concerning their incomplete perfection and the religious organizations within which they have found it, language which properly applies only to complete perfection, and is a far-off echo of the human soul's prophecy of it.
To the soul's wild cry for its own there are many answers. He began to think of them. Was not there one of them all from which he might suck one drop of comfort? "You shall see her again," says the Christian, the true Bible Christian. "Yes, you shall see her again. 'And I saw the dead, great and small, stand before God.
I say not this, that I would any way lessen the belief of the soul's immateriality, &c.... It is a point which seems to me to be put out of the reach of our knowledge; and he who will give himself leave to consider freely, and look into the dark and intricate part of each hypothesis, will scarce find his reason able to determine him fixedly for or against the soul's materiality.
When the material of the temptation is lawful and honourable the temptation is less suspected, and the tempted is more easily thrown off his guard. The field and the oxen must be bought and used; the affections of the family must be cherished; but woe to us if we permit these seemly plants to grow so rank that the soul's life shall be overlaid beneath their weight!
But when his father was informed thereof, he caused an Austin Friar to be called to his son, to give him good instructions for his soul's health, and to advise him to receive the Sacrament sub una specie, or under one kind, and that he should tell his son he was the same Friar who was privately acquainted with Martin Luther, and was very conversant with him; and, the better to make the Prince believe him, the Friar said that Luther himself lately had advised certain persons to receive the communion under one kind.
He broke into a low, wavering cry, like a child's in despair, like an animal's in terror, like a soul's in the anguish of remorse. The evening after the funeral, while the Marches sat together talking it over, and making approaches, through its shadow, to the question of their own future, which it involved, they were startled by the twitter of the electric bell at their apartment door.
The soul begins to feel a drawing, to let God not only be all things in the soul, but there to reign separate from the soul's enjoyment of his gifts. The soul now experiences what is called, by the author of the Imitation of Christ, the exile of the heart. It hears a voice in the depth of the soul, or, rather, has an impression, that God reigns there alone.
Thus one came and reported the death of the Emperor John, and the succession of Constantine; another told of justice finally done thy heroic father, and of thy prosperity; more lately a wandering monk, seeking solitude for his soul's sake, joined our community, and from him I hear that the old controversy with the Latins has broken out anew, and more hotly than ever; that the new Emperor is an azymite, and disposed to adhere to the compact of union of the churches east and west made with the Pope of Rome by his predecessor, leaving heart-blisters burning as those which divided the Jews.
So that an incest-dream would not prove an incest-desire in the living psyche. Rather the contrary, a living fear of the automatic conclusion: the soul's just dread of automatism. And though this may sound like casuistry, I believe it does explain a good deal of the dream-trick. That which is lovely to the automatic process is hateful to the spontaneous soul.
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