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Only slowly has the ideal of the good been clarified. Only slowly have the gods been ethicised. 'An honest God is the noblest work of man. The moralising and spiritualising of the idea of Jahve lies right upon the face of the Old Testament. The ascent of man on his ethical and spiritual side is as certain as is that on his physical side.
He heard and saw nothing which did not in some way suggest to him the ways and love of God. He was much in the habit of spiritualising all allusions of an earthly nature, and what in some men would have sounded like cant was refined by his inner spirituality to sanctified quaintness. For instance, Mr. Ireland with great difficulty persuaded Fletcher to sit for his portrait.
These motives, by which the true action of the drama expresses itself, are a symbol of the inner life, of its preponderance over outward event, and, in their guidance of the music, their indication of the real current of interest, have a spiritualising effect upon both music and action, instead of, as was once thought, materialising both.
So it is no spiritualising of this story, or reading into it a deeper and more religious meaning than belongs to it, to say that what passed in that man's heart and mind before he caught up his little bed and walked away with it, was essentially the same action of mind and heart by which a sinful man, who knows that Christ is his Redeemer, grasps His Cross and trusts his soul to Him.
In earlier days, when its beliefs had been in a fluid state, he too might have been drawn into the controversy; he might have been for spiritualising the papal sovereignty, like Savonarola; or for adjusting the dreams of Plato and Homer with the words of Christ, like Pico of Mirandola. But things had moved onward, and such adjustments were no longer possible.
The last of the five instances of our Lord's extending and deepening and spiritualising the old law is also the climax of them. We may either call it the highest or the deepest, according to our point of view.
His artistic good taste, his classical polish, his sound shrewd sense, his hatred of cant, his insight into humbug above all, his shallow, pitiable habit of being always intelligible these are the sins which condemn him in the eyes of a mesmerising, table-turning, spirit-rapping, spiritualising, Romanising generation, who read Shelley in secret, and delight in his bad taste, mysticism, extravagance, and vague and pompous sentimentalism.
It's a cruel hint that one lives above it in the heaven of one's own hopes, by some mere blind accident. To have set one's feeble hand to the spiritualising of the world and to feel the possibility of that " "I see," said Hilda, and perhaps she did. But his words oppressed her. She got up with a movement which almost shook them off, and went to a promiscuous looking-glass to remove her hat.
It would seem, indeed, as if the chief outcome of the spiritualising philosophy which maintains the immaterial and independent quality of mind had been to make mind, the contents of our consciousness, ideas, images, and feelings, into something quite separate from this real material universe, and hence unworthy of practical consideration.
There is not a single degradation of the body which I must not try and make into a spiritualising of the soul. I want to get to the point when I shall be able to say quite simply, and without affectation that the two great turning-points in my life were when my father sent me to Oxford, and when society sent me to prison.
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