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This process, for aught we know, may belong to the great system of human progress, which, with every ascending footstep, as it diminishes the necessity for animal force, may be destined gradually to spiritualize us, by refining away our grosser attributes of body. If so, Judge Pyncheon could endure a century or two more of such refinement as well as most other men.
But in our ascending spiral, we escape all this. These railroads could but the whistle be made musical, and the rumble and the jar got rid of are positively the greatest blessing that the ages have wrought out for us. They give us wings; they annihilate the toil and dust of pilgrimage; they spiritualize travel! Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot?
Thus I never fail of a sort of self-congratulation in finding myself, for instance, passing along Ludgate Hill; but, in spite of this, it is really an ungladdened life to wander through these huge, thronged ways, over a pavement foul with mud, ground into it by a million of footsteps; jostling against people who do not seem to be individuals, but all one mass, so homogeneous is the street-walking aspect of them; the roar of vehicles pervading me, wearisome cabs and omnibuses; everywhere the dingy brick edifices heaving themselves up, and shutting out all but a strip of sullen cloud, that serves London for a sky, in short, a general impression of grime and sordidness; and at this season always a fog scattered along the vista of streets, sometimes so densely as almost to spiritualize the materialism and make the scene resemble the other world of worldly people, gross even in ghostliness.
This is the picture you see spread far below you, with distance to soften it, the sun to glorify it, strong contrasts to heighten the effects, and over it and about it a drowsing air of repose to spiritualize it and make it seem rather a beautiful estray from the mysterious worlds we visit in dreams than a substantial tenant of our coarse, dull globe.
The purification of England which the Methodist movement began and which manifested itself, among other things, in sweeping away the slave-trade, necessitated a less crude formula for the still invincible instinct of expansion, and in Kipling a prophet arose, of a genius akin to that of the Old Testament, to spiritualize the doctrine of the Chosen People.
As opposed to the average German intellect, which for the past fifty years has been struggling day and night to materialize the spiritual, the Russian intellect seems to be always trying to spiritualize the material.
A more tranquil and soul-satisfying scene could not be imagined: the dear old mother earth was looking her very best; while the shifting golden sunlight, the mysterious haze in the distance, and the glint of a wide stream not very far off, seemed to spiritualize her "happy autumn fields," and bring them into a closer kinship with the blue over-arching sky.
"I wish," I said, "that I were a special correspondent. I'd " "Well," said Bland. "What would you say?" "I should take that New Zealander who stood on the broken arch of Westminster Bridge and " "Macaulay's," said Bland. "I don't think that the public would stand him again. He's played out." "Not in the way I mean to use him. I should, so to speak, spiritualize him, and "
"'It's too gross, said the facetious Friar, in his loud, strong voice 'it's too gross, Docthor Finnerty, so let us spiritualize it, that it may be Christian atin, fit for pious men to digest, and then he came out with his thundering laugh oigh, oigh, oigh, oigh! but he had consequently the most of the pudding to himself, an' indeed brought the better half of it home in his saddle-bags."
We need to spiritualize all our acts, our whole lives, our business, our work, our pleasures, by giving them moral intent and value, so as to unify the sacred and the secular, the utilitarian, and the ideal by making each serve the other.
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