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Updated: June 6, 2025
A modern writer, Mr A.E. Waite, in his Lives of the Alchemystical Philosophers, says: "The physical theory of transmutation is based on the composite character of the metals, on their generation in the bowels of the earth, and on the existence in nature of a pure and penetrating matter which applied to any substance exalts and perfects it after its own kind."
The wise director of a government strengthens this natural instinct by the force of public opinion, and perfects it by education and manners. And thus the citizens are preserved from vice and corruption rather by honor and shame than by fear of punishment. But this argument will be better illustrated when we treat of the love of glory and praise, which we shall discuss on another occasion.
Grace, say the theologians, is, in the order of salvation, every help or means which can conduct us to eternal life. That is to say, man perfects himself, civilizes himself, humanizes himself only by the incessant aid of experience, by industry, science, and art, by pleasure and pain, in a word, by all bodily and mental exercises.
Thus art first makes rude and ill-shapen figures and afterwards perfects everything with its proper form; and it was for this that the statuary Polycletus said, Then our work is most difficult, when the clay comes to be fashioned by the fingers.
At all events Elsie Hörstel clasped her blind babe to her heart that night, and fell asleep with a feeling of rest and peace to which she had long been a stranger. Ah! God had a purpose for the little child and her brown Bible in that little hut of which she as yet had no conception. Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings He still perfects praise.
Eternal Nature is thus the great storehouse and workshop in which all the created essences, elements, principles, and potentialities of all possible worlds are laid up. Here is the great treasury and laboratory into which the Filial Word enters, when by Him GOD creates, sustains, and perfects the worlds, universe after universe.
The result really follows from a number of premises, but the mind passes over these so rapidly that it seems the guess was made instantaneously. The prophet must have these two faculties in a high degree. Witness Moses braving the wrath of a great king. Some prophets also have their rational powers more highly developed than those of an ordinary person who perfects his reason by theoretical study.
"The education of life," says De Stael, "perfects the thinking mind, but depraves the frivolous." I do not inquire, Monkton, to which of these classes I belong; but I feel too well, that though my mind has not been depraved, it has found no perfection but in misfortune; and that whatever be the acquirements of later years, they have nothing which can compensate for the losses of our youth.
It is therefore always and in itself a good, but its value rises and falls with that of the activity with which it is conjoined, and which it intensifies and perfects. Hence it follows that the highest and best pleasures are those which accompany the highest and best activity. Pleasure is, therefore, a necessary element in the best life, but it is not the whole of it nor the principal ingredient.
He is nearer us when He leaves us, and works with us and in us more mightily from the throne than He did upon the earth. Who is He of whom this is true? And what kind of work is it of which it is true that death continues and perfects it? So let me note, before I pass on, that there is a great truth here for us.
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