THE BREATH OFGOD WITH MAN 
 
 HARRIS 
 
 la
 
 
 AN ESSAY 
 ON THE GROUNDS AND EVIDENCES 
 
 OF 
 
 UNIVERSAL RELIGION. 
 
 THOMAS LAKE HARRIS. 
 
 " He breathed on them, and saith, 
 ' Receive ye the Holy Ghost.' " 
 
 i^t&j gorft antJ SLcnbon: 
 
 BROTHERHOOD OF THE NEW LIFE. 
 
 1867.
 
 
 THE BREATH OF GOD 
 WITH MAN. 
 
 er: 
 eft 
 
 UlNfAN life is embosomed in mystery. Man Is 
 bom in the midst of a veiled labyrinth, intricate 
 and many chambered, whose long corridors 
 are haunted by formidable shapes, larvae and lamia, be- 
 setting him with ghostly arts, alluring him Avith deceptive 
 voices, and tempting him with fallacious appearances. 
 The innocent are inexperienced, the cultured almost 
 universally sophisticated, the devout enslaved by one or 
 another of the multitudinous priesthoods of Christendom 
 or Heathendom, the irreligious bewildei'ed by the hypo- 
 theses which form themselves in lurid points upon the 
 bosom of the darkness of their infidelity. The weak and 
 the passive are drawn in the train of hereditary, national, 
 or ecclesiastical forces, as nebulous particles that float in 
 the extremities of a comet ; while the powerfiil and apos- 
 tate, according to their proclivities, conserve existing 
 disorders, or precipitate destructive revolutions. The 
 world in general possesses neither Church, University, or 
 Society. The institutions which tenant their places serve 
 but to occupy the ground until the real order appears. 
 
 Without a true priesthood there is no organized reli- 
 gion ; without a true philosophership, no corresponding 
 culture ; without a true heroship or kingship, no harmo- 
 
 A 2
 
 4 TJic Breath of God ivith Man. 
 
 nioiis, humane Society. Till these appear, universal 
 warfare is the condition of the world ; sect striving 
 against sect, theory against theory, and interest against 
 interest, in the social land. The advance of thought 
 generates new antagonisms, while its suppression induces 
 ecclesiastical corruption, intellectual ignorance, social 
 depravity, brutality, and ruin. The multitudes, whether 
 cultured or unlearned, are so far the slaves of cupidities, 
 that, humanly speaking, there is no help, no cure for this 
 chronic condition of affairs. To venture beyond the 
 pale of the recognised parties is to incur the penalty of 
 religious and social ostracism. 
 
 So, in the eighteenth century, Swedenborg stood alone. 
 It is melancholy to reflect that in the ratio in which, 
 divesting himself of the mere fallacies and fantasies of 
 the time, he began to glow as a pure morning star, dis- 
 pensing the lustres of eternity, he sank from the recog- 
 nition of his contemporaries. From the hour when he 
 beheld the living God, and talked with stately troops of 
 angels, he was looked upon as a hopeless wanderer in the 
 realms of the inane, a dreamy seer of pretended ghosts, 
 the slave and victim of a morbid idiocy of reason. 
 When, after the lapse of nearly a century, the most pro- 
 found thinkers find themselves forced to admit the stu- 
 pendous verity of his leading doctrines, they salve their 
 self-love by the incredible assumption, that his thoughts 
 took form within the chambers of a fertile fancy, and 
 stood transfigured before the eye of reason as a mirage 
 upon the rim of its horizon ; while especially persistent 
 assaults are made upon the verity of the process by which 
 he unveiled the spiritual significances of Biblical revela- 
 tion. The Word to them stands apparelled in no such
 
 The Breath of God zvith Man. 5 
 
 heavenly splendour, oracular with no such Infinite Intel- 
 ligence. 
 
 The destructive process goes rapidly on. The Bible 
 once shone as a single sun ; the historical telescope 
 resolves it into belts and dots of far-scattered nebulre ; it 
 hangs over the past as a fragment of the milky way over 
 the remote ecliptic; and, thus resolved, the explorers 
 are left but to conjecture whether the remote vapour- 
 clouds are unstratified, inorganic masses, or mists in their 
 wide attenuation, or orbs that embosom the creations of 
 love and beauty and intelligence. The historical foun- 
 dations of Revelation are broken up ; the tempests beat; 
 the torrents roll ; the earth is shaken ; the landmarks are 
 overthrown or submerged : the end has come ! 
 
 Swedenborg assumed, d, priori, the unity, integrity, 
 divinity, and interiority of the Christian and Hebrew 
 Scriptures, as was his duty and direction. He made the 
 Bible primary and absolute, and all else subsidiary and 
 secondary. But the venue is now changed ; the world 
 demands to know what is in Nature, and what does Na- 
 ture teach, prove, suggest, and prophesy ? The question 
 is not, what doctrines may be eliminated from Scripture, 
 but, what principles, what theories of universal truth, are 
 inscribed in the structures of the cosmos, in the proces- 
 sions of historical events, and in the constitution of man ? 
 Let us meet this issue. Let us show that here we have 
 firm ground, flowing water, respirable airs, and a clear 
 sky. Let the Word be what it may, body or spirit ; the 
 works of God in their processes are both letter and spirit, 
 not terminated by the limits of visible, material substance, 
 but resting in the bosom of infinite ideas, that expand 
 into peopled and eternal heavens. If, in the beginning,
 
 6 TJic Breath of God with Man. 
 
 Scripture was the publication of Natural Religion, let us 
 ascertain what Natural Religion is, and thus become 
 believers in the Scripture that is not for one age or one 
 people, but for all nations and all time. 
 
 First, is there a God ? We will not argue the question ; 
 neither compliment the theist or scandalise the atheist. 
 We would simply say, " Children, you have a Father! " 
 Men of all races, complexions, faiths, look upon each other, 
 know each other, love each other. Ye are brethren, all 
 children of the loving, bounteous Parent. You ask where 
 is He, and what is He ? and before launching into such 
 boundless immensities, we choose to respond to the un- 
 spoken inquiry, "Who is He ? " Dismiss your prejudices 
 either against or in favour of the hypothesis that the 
 historical Jesus was Deity incarnate. Stand erect, for 
 that is reason's attitude ; lowly, tender, affectionate, for 
 that is the heart's posture. Stand firm to overcome a 
 doctrine that is beneath your human dignity. Stand 
 sympathetic, open, willing to receive a doctrine that 
 manifestly is noble and exalted and pure and beautiful. 
 Place yourselves, if possible, in the beginnings of history. 
 Neither hold it credible nor incredible that such truth 
 should visit you, yet hold it an open question waiting to 
 be demonstrated. 
 
 Who is God ? We answer, the Infinite Divine Man, 
 the All-Father and the All-Mother, embraced in one All- 
 wise, All-loving Personality. Can this be proved 7 and, 
 if so, in what manner? To one who believes in Revela- 
 tion, there is a sufiicient declaration in the fact, and in 
 the contents of Scripture. To one who believes in 
 philosophies of infinity and personality, those philoso- 
 phies convey an argument that is deemed unanswerable.
 
 The BrcatJi of God zuith Man. 7 
 
 To those who have faith in the unseen, the fact and the 
 contents of faith are vahd conclusions. But ahiiost all 
 are thoroughly grounded in neither of these. 
 
 Where then is the appeal ? Simply here ; if God exists 
 at all ; if God exists as our Father, the Divine Man, wise, 
 loving, mighty, He dwells within all phenomena as the 
 Substance Fact, whose discreted works are the spiritual 
 and physical universe. You do not breathe of yourselves ; 
 a vast power beyond your limited individualism gives 
 breath. Do you yearn after that Unknown One ? Does 
 the heart, recoiling from orphanage, seek to throw its arms 
 around its Father's neck, and drink in life in the Paternal 
 bosom ? Then from that solid basis of yearning love, by 
 the effort of the up-gathered being, seek to press into His 
 presence. If you find vacuity, nothingness, emptiness, 
 there is, I know not what, — death, oblivion, extinction, 
 annihilation. If we are bubbles, let us break and be 
 delivered from the hollowness we are. 
 
 If that God Is, whom we declare to you, you will find 
 Him, you will be gathered to His breast. But He, the 
 Infinite, gives all, and we, creature finites, receive all. 
 He will breathe into us while we are gathered there. 
 There is a physical parturition. Brought forth into the 
 bosom of nature, the lungs opened to inhale her airs ; the 
 babe becomes the conscious resident of the wonder- 
 teeming world. But All-Father is more than the world ; 
 there is a second parturition, and nature lifts us up that 
 His breath may enter us. We then breathe again, respi- 
 ring in God, and as He gives Himself in the warm, in- 
 flowing life, which imparts to the lungs new motions, we 
 experience the facts of a Supersensual Existence ; the 
 Living One demonstrates His direct presence by direct 
 inbreathing force.
 
 8 TJie Breath of God ivith Man. 
 
 We will assume that your heart is moved with tender, 
 springing, struggling affections, all seeking this unknown 
 Divine Man ; that you are honest in the determination to 
 embody in life the purest ideals ; that you earnestly desire, 
 as your o^vn good, the welfare of your fellow-men. You 
 are perhaps wearied with the pursuit of truth in many 
 religions ; sick of the artifices, the conventionalisms, the 
 hollownesses of our social life ; pressed upon with awful 
 questionings of the here and the hereafter ; pining with 
 the hunger of the bosom for living food. Like the wo- 
 man of Samaria, you stand by the well of truth, and cry, 
 " The water is deep, and there are none to draw." We 
 dare to affirm that One is beside you at the well, who ex- 
 claims, " Whosoever drinketh of this water shall thirst 
 again, but whosoever drinketh of the water which I shall 
 give him shall never thirst, but it shall be in him a well 
 of water springing up into everlasting life." 
 
 Or again, you are like one craving for satisfying food, 
 — the husks of literature, the petrifactions of science, do 
 not appease the hunger of the soul. There is a great 
 famine in that inner land, the world of the affections in 
 the bosom. Banquets are provided for the taste, the 
 fancy, the reason, the imagination : but the fathers ate of 
 this food and are dead ; yet ye would receive a satisfy- 
 ing substance that shall give life for ever. Here again 
 we declare that One is near, who cries, " I am the bread 
 of life. If any man partake of My substance he shall 
 live for ever." But one says, "This is allegory; the froth 
 of religious sentimentalism ; the exhalation of pietism 
 grown morbid." We answer, It may be so ; but to the 
 test. The affirmation is, that the living God, even the 
 Divine Man, is both willing to demonstrate who and
 
 TJie Breath of God with Man. 9 
 
 what He is, by imparting His own bosom life, descend- 
 ing even into and uplifting the whole respiratory frame, 
 in response to whole-hearted, humble, and reverent seek- 
 ing of Him. 
 
 But a step farther. You have sought and found. You 
 are able to say one thing. I do know that there is a 
 world of plenary life, beyond the realm of the corporeal 
 elements. It descends, baptising the bosom Avith fires of 
 satisfying love. It inaugurates a new era in physical 
 existence, bringing down the moral into the plane of the 
 sensational. You feel consciously buoyed up and sus- 
 tained between tAvo atmospheres, one of ether, bearing 
 in its currents the heat and light, the joy and power of 
 nature ; the other of spirit, impulsing the wisdom and the 
 love, the soft joy and exquisite rapture, the penetrating 
 force, the vivifying essence of Deity. You have proved 
 that the bounds of material existence end not in vacancy 
 and inanity. God, whom science discovers not in the re- 
 solution of its nebulae, whom criticism finds not in the 
 dissection of its literatures, is not afar ofi", but very nigh ; 
 and you are as conscious of His action, as the sentient 
 earth might be of the existence of ocean when its tides 
 come rolling in upon the shore. 
 
 We do not think that there is any other method by 
 which man can absolutely discriminate between the God 
 and the not-god. Let us suppose ourselves in some 
 primeval Eden. The virgin world is around us and the 
 virgin heaven above. Creation glows in the ardour and 
 the luxuriance of an unsullied prime. We awaken to 
 conscious existence without natural parentage. We are 
 the primates of our race. We begin to meditate the pro- 
 blem of our origin. We ask, " Whence came we ? To
 
 lO The Br cat] I of God with Man. 
 
 Whom are we indebted for these exquisite senses, for 
 this opulent frame replete with accordant faculties, and 
 for this bounteous display of visible food for eye and ear, 
 for taste and smell, for will and reason ?" 
 
 We might behold a being, in majestic manhood, ap- 
 proaching, and our heart might go out toward him ; but 
 neither his declaration nor our assent would prove him 
 to be the Father. Why ? Simply because it is possible 
 for individuals of the lordliest genius, yet coiTupt in will, 
 to assume all garments of beauty, to simulate all tones 
 of tenderness, for purposes of deception and ruin. But 
 suppose that miracles were wTOught, what natural mind 
 could discriminate between direct acts of Creative Po- 
 tency, out of the usual course of nature, and magical 
 operations of a race of infernal but colossal intelligences? 
 The argument from miracle, resolved to its last analysis, 
 breaks like a bubble, 
 
 W'hat tlien is the evidence that God is God ? That 
 He should be able to appear objectively to sense and 
 spirit, but also to reveal Himself subjectively from His' 
 infinite imminence within \ descending, so to speak, from 
 the heights of Being which are above our consciousness, 
 and literally giving Himself to us by the procession of 
 His life into our own, through a Divine respiration ; so 
 that we may feel that God, who is our Life, has come ; 
 that He dwells within us, and we in Him. We may dis- 
 trust the conclusions of the natural mind, working on 
 supernatural problems. The evidence, that satisfies the 
 affections in high states of ecstasy, loses its brilliant 
 clearness -when Ave return to the level plane of our 
 habitual life ; but when the Divine respirations absolutely 
 inflow, and open their way into the natural lungs, bring-
 
 The Breath of God tvith Man. 1 1 
 
 ing each breath we draw into subjection to the circu- 
 lations of Divine Love and Wisdom, the breaths of 
 the Divine Man, it is more than as if a Divine Teacher 
 objectively walked the earth ; it is more than as if the 
 apparently dead were resuscitated in our presence ; for 
 the Divine Teacher objectively but represents truth to 
 the understanding, and displays of power to the senses, 
 while subjectively He comes forth, by His sweet pervad- 
 ing airs, from the centre to the circumference of our 
 existence. 
 
 Here, pausing, let us notice together some of the in- 
 teresting facts of natural respiration. The breathing of 
 the child is soft, low, and gentle ; that of the youth im- 
 pulsive, ardent, impetuous ; that of man in full vigour 
 capacious, deep, and more continuous ; till old age and 
 second childhood, when it declines, and, with those 
 whose days have been spent in the practice of virtue, 
 seems hushed away as in cradle melodies ; and at last, 
 coming imperceptibly, it closes as the sound of the music 
 stealing over tranquil oceans, or through untroubled 
 atmospheres, becoming so imperceptibly fine that the 
 soothed listener is hardly aware of the moment when it 
 is heard no more. 
 
 Or, again, we inhale most deeply in the presence of 
 objects of natural delight. We open to take in capacious 
 draughts of the elixir of the morning, tlae ambrosia dis- 
 tilled in the sweet breath of flowers filling the summer 
 garden with perfume. The lover breathes most fully 
 where the sphere of his fair one dispenses a subtle joy. 
 The kind and faithful husband, returning from the harsh 
 contentions of the outer world to meet the welcoming 
 voice of a pure, devoted wife. And how fully both re-
 
 12 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 spire together, caressing the infant pledge of their fond 
 endeannents, or watching the saUies and dehghts of 
 sportive infancy. 
 
 Observe, too, the opposites. The lungs, if they must 
 inhale a tainted atmosphere, yet drink it in the scantiest 
 driblets. We hold the breath unconsciously against of- 
 fensive odours and poisonous inhalations. The lungs 
 contract, the breathing becomes difficult, when we are 
 with our rivals and deadly enemies. The pure woman 
 holds her breath at bay in the presence of libertines, and 
 the chaste man cautiously and sparingly imbibes the 
 atmosphere that harlots breathe. 
 
 Notice further, when we have resolved on deeds that 
 may affect the life or fortunes, the decision is accom- 
 panied with full, long-drawn inhalations and expirations, 
 as if we were bracing ourselves ujd in the collective might 
 of the powers of the air. And again, when great deeds 
 are to be done, we inhale fully, and then strike the blow. 
 Gluttons and drunkards breathe stertorously, but the re- 
 spiration of the temperate man is also temperate and 
 chaste. The scholar breathes in a calm equilibrium, 
 which is favourable to the processes of thought. Men 
 of the artistic type breathe variedly, the respirations 
 noting, as with the index on a dial, the moods of rapture, 
 of doubt, the birth-throes that attend the evolution of 
 their works, the triumphs of a rich and exquisite per- 
 formance. The artisan is graduated in his respirations 
 upon a lower scale, the boor upon a scale still lower. 
 One thinks of the breathings of oxen and horses among 
 farm labourers, and of the breath of swine among those of 
 degraded and stupid characters. The fisherman breathes 
 dreamily, quietly given up to the soothing influences of
 
 Tlie Breath of God ivith Man. 13 
 
 the angle ; the hunter with live elasticity and bounding 
 freedom. 
 
 Observe again : the breaths of a mob, moved by violent 
 passions, are themselves a horde of violent respirations, 
 whirlpools in air, gathering to a tornado, and exploding. 
 Let a dominant mind, mighty with a magnetic oratory, 
 succeed in calming them, and their breaths subside in 
 long, uniform swells, like ocean after a storm. Men 
 control their breaths in controlling their passions. The 
 child vents his rages in little stormy gusts. The danger- 
 ous men, infernal or celestial heroes, breathe as they 
 move with a still force, the winds are gathered up as in 
 the hollow of the hand. In those caves of ^olus, the 
 human breast, the sleeping aerial powers are evoked by 
 whatever mightily appeals to interest, cupidity, gene- 
 rosity, hope, love, or imagination. Men listen Avith ex- 
 panded bosoms when their favourite object of desire 
 flames forth in stately speech, or reaches them in the 
 might and majesty of the singer's voice or the orchestral 
 accompaniment. But wherever thought rises, or love 
 ascends, or hope mounts above mere natural thoughts 
 into a purely spiritual realm, the thinker, the listener 
 pass through corresponding rises of respiration, growing 
 finer, losing volume, till at length, in the very climax, the 
 charmed audience sit with respiration arrested, or the 
 solitary thinker for the moment is suspended in the un- 
 breathing calm. So again the ecstasist in the highest 
 reveries of religious feeling almost loses connection wdth 
 the natural air, and prayer, in its final intensity, is accom- 
 panied with breathlessness. 
 
 It is to be observed that, as the mind leaves the pro- 
 vince of natural things, the respirations grow feeble,
 
 14 The Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 sharpen themselves away, and are lost; utter despair 
 hardly breathes, and utter faith in the supreme hour of 
 its transfiguration is equally at its breathing's end. In 
 the first shock of great sorrow, we fall back, and the 
 lungs lose their hold upon the atmosphere in a temporary 
 paralysis. But in the equal shock of a sudden joy, too 
 great for the heart to hold, the processions of the breath 
 stand still. As a rule, in the degree in which we im- 
 merse ourselves in corporeal nature, the mere natural 
 respiration is ampler and more vigorous, while going out 
 of nature is going out of breath. Abnormal mystics in 
 their trances retain but a flutter of air. Men gasp for 
 breath in painful dyings, and clutch as with the hand of 
 the lungs at the receding columns of the terrestrial auras. 
 But where, with favourable physical circumstances, those 
 depart who are ready or willing to lay aside mortality, 
 depth upon depth is sounded, mysterious vibrations, hints 
 of a gentle loosening of the spirit from the flesh, and 
 at last a going out of respiration from the nostrils, as if 
 the spirit slid out of its ethereal gannent, that it might 
 sink, unclothed, into the bosom of its God. 
 
 The higher, the new, the Divine respiration, is totally 
 different ; or rather, retaining all that is of the lower as its 
 base and fulcrum, it builds upon and employs it for its 
 service. The good man, possessing mere natural respi- 
 ration, seeks God in prayer ; but when he rises to heights 
 of communion where langnage is drawn up to thought, 
 then thought stilled in the quietude of love, there is 
 hardly a breath in the body. He comes down from his 
 altitude, from lack of lungs in which to breathe. The 
 step beyond is respiration's end, and the exit of tlie spirit 
 from the abandoned frame.
 
 The Breath of God with Man, 15 
 
 With the new respiration which God gives, it is diame- 
 trically the reverse. Highest prayer is attended, not 
 with breathlessness, but with breathfulness ; and the 
 nearer we attain the august Object of our worship, in the 
 disinterested fulness of our love, the more copious be- 
 comes the river of that diviner atmosphere, that, pulsing 
 through the spirit, expands and invigorates the breast. 
 
 There is, in every act of true worship, a wedding in the 
 breast, the heavenly sliding down into the bosom of the 
 earthly atmosphere, and impregnating it with its own 
 eternal qualities. This is the gi-eat point of distinction, 
 but the point is the centre of a universal circle. 
 
 Again, a man has no clue in his natural resjiiration, 
 either as to the truth or the falsity of the conclusions of 
 his reason in spiritual things. Channing, in his rejection 
 of the doctrine of vicarious atonement ; Stewart, in his 
 urgent defence of it ; the elder Beecher, in his vast argu- 
 ment against Unitarianism; Orville Dewey, in his learned, 
 laboured defence and justification of the same distinctive 
 faith; Emmons, in his argument for stem hyper-Calvinism; 
 Dempster or Owen, in equally striking and withering de- 
 nunciations of the dogmas of unconditional election and 
 reprobation, all breathe alike, finding nothing in their 
 respirations, either of pleasure in the approach of pure 
 truth, or of pain in the proximity of eiTor. 
 
 On the other hand, the respirations, as a rule, are in 
 the channel of delights, and hence Ballon breathed best 
 in arguing that the fact of physical death cleansed the 
 departing spirit of every taint of impurity, and Edwards 
 respired most deeply when he pictured earth as a material 
 bubble, spun over the fire and sulphur of an everlasting hell. 
 We cannot wrest from natural respiration any element.
 
 1 6 TJic Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 that, cast into the retort where doctrines fuse and boil over 
 the white heat of reason, shall, by their chemical affinities, 
 absorb and crystallise the truth, while they cast out the 
 error. We cannot, through natural respiration, import 
 any element into the brain which shall disenchant us of 
 our worship of a chimera, or disabuse us of prejudices 
 against its opposite refulgent verity. It works blindly as 
 the axe of the executioner ; it falls to-day upon the basest 
 of criminals, and to-morrow upon the whitest of martyrs. 
 If you load it with the fumes of arsenic, it declares the 
 presence of an enemy; but whole battalions of the infer- 
 nal simulations and deceits may deploy their forces in 
 the midst of it, and it makes no protest against their 
 presence, no revelation of their , malignity. If the rose 
 breathes, it thrills to the delight of its sweetness ; but if 
 the fragrance of the divine elysium of holy thoughts that 
 make glad immortals enriches its vacancy, it gives no 
 sign of pleasure at the gift. It makes no revelation of 
 its tender purity, it serves all alike, equally open, equally 
 reticent concerning all. It is declarative invariably of 
 physical, but not of hyper-physical qualities. 
 
 In the new respiration, God gives an atmosphere that 
 is as sensitive to moral quality as the physical is to natu- 
 ral quality ; the God-pervaded air, for carbon, oxygen, 
 hydrogen and ozone, supplies Divine love. Divine wis- 
 dom. Divine potency, myriform elements, radiant with 
 every truth, ardent and odorous with every pure affection, 
 and sensitive to the approach, the ingression of the base 
 falsity, the depraved lust, as the quickened conscience is 
 sensible of the stings of evil. This living atmosphere, as 
 distinguished from nature's dead atmosphere, is by its 
 very presence a perpetual witness, descending to baptize
 
 TJic Breath of God zviih Alan. 17 
 
 the whole frame more fully in the ratio of self-abnegation 
 and self-surrendery ; rising to the intellect to fill it with 
 light as we approach the truth, and rushing with germi- 
 nant forces through all the channels of the circulations, 
 while we open ourselves to become filled with purity. 
 
 Again, natural respiration, true to itself, ignores moral 
 distinctions ; but spiritual respiration recognises all. Na- 
 tural ethers are destructive or conservative of life as the 
 tissues of the organism are healthful or diseased ; they 
 eat and corrode, they nourish and preserve, indepen- 
 dently of the fidelity of the conscience, or the purity of 
 the affections. The sweet bride may die, while the 
 meretricious woman of the world lives on ; and genius 
 perish, winged for its high career, while imbecility and . 
 brutality renew for long days their vigour. 
 
 But the higher breath, whose essence is virtue, builds 
 up the bodies of the virtuous, wars against disease, 
 expels the virus of hereditary maladies, renews health 
 from its foundations, stands in the body as a sentinel 
 against every plague. It is the friend of all friendly 
 natures, a father in protecting care, a mother in fos- 
 tering and sheltering sweetness, and mightier as the 
 protector of the system than a legion of armed men. It 
 restrains the impetuosity of an excessive zeal ; it over- 
 comes the inertia of constitutional indolence. It retards 
 the hasty, premature flowerings and fruitings of the intel- 
 lect, which exhaust the organism, but matures all noble 
 growths, at once preventing excess and removing sterility. 
 It is the great regulative power. 
 
 Again, natural respiration knots and gathers up the 
 race in clans and parties. There is a perpetually recur- 
 ring tendency in families to discrete themselves from the 
 
 B
 
 1 8 TJie Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 interests of humanity. The same thing is true of sects, 
 which are famiUes in Religion, and of parties, which are 
 famiUes in the State. In the finer air these breaths form 
 a vortex, rushing into the lungs, and in their ascent to 
 the brain begetting infatuations, not always amenable to 
 reason, not always to be exorcised by virtue. Where 
 mere natural respiration exists, social harmony is impos- 
 sible, and in the highest sense there is no Church and no 
 State. Men are drawn together upon their lower corporeal 
 levels; they fly apart upon the highergrounds of spirituality. 
 
 Directly opposite, the breaths of the Divine Spirit, as 
 they pervade and encompass the frame, lift the being 
 from the slough and mire of the mere corporeal affinities 
 and relations. As in the mind they separate the fatuities 
 from the verities, as in the heart they desintegrate the 
 lusts from the affections, and as in the body they cast out 
 the diseases from the healths and sanities, so they sift 
 and winnow the world, breaking up the magical relations 
 that, Mezentius-like, condemn the living to the em- 
 braces of the dead. The Family rises reconstructed by 
 the attraction and the consent of generic types of men. 
 The Church appears in glory, holding in its embrace the 
 human myriads whom one divine breath fills, animates, 
 and unitises. While in the State, the true order of society 
 knits itself together in the universal relations of a unitised 
 and inspired humanity. 
 
 In an era of mere natural respiration, men jostle, im- 
 pede, and destroy each other in the pursuits of life. The 
 business of existence is conducted at a wasteful cost. 
 Colonies perish on unfriendly and malarious shores j 
 fertile and salubrious regions become deserts with the 
 horrors of war, or are made the miserable abodes of
 
 TJic Breath of God ivith Mail. 19 
 
 barbarians. In other regions, great cities swallow up 
 the life of myriads who unwholesomely exist and perish 
 like infusoria in ulcers. Others must be the slaves of 
 predatoiy chiefs, of civilized taskmasters, of the op- 
 pressors and maladministrators of industry. Competi- 
 tion is the universal law, instead of friendly co-operation. 
 
 Otherwise with spiritual respiration. When it descends 
 and takes possession of the frame, it consummates the 
 adoption of the just man as the child of the Infinite 
 Parent, and affiliates him to the universal brotherhood. 
 There is henceforth a guiding power, a positive inspira- 
 tion, which selects his calling, which trains him for it, 
 which leads him to favourable localities, and which co- 
 ordinates affairs upon a large scale. It deals with groups 
 as with individuals ; it redistributes mankind ; it re- 
 organises the village, the town, the workshop, the manu- 
 factory, the agricultural district, the pastoral region ; 
 gathering human atoms from their degradation, and 
 crystallizing them in resplendent unities. 
 
 Moreover, natural respiration serves the ends of power, 
 irrespective of virtue. Human colossi, giants of pon- 
 derous intellectual might, sun-like in the light and radi- 
 ation of the intellect, wielding more than Thor's hammer 
 in the downright strength of the inflexible personality, 
 exact tribute of all the circulations of the atmospheres, 
 and are served by the genii of their powers, w^hether they 
 are builders or destroyers, — the uplifters or degraders of 
 mankind. 
 
 Otherwise, when respiration is from the great Head 
 and Fountain of existence, the breaths that do His will 
 concentrate their forces on the natures organized by 
 genius for a composite service, and consecrated to it by 
 
 B 2
 
 20 TJie Breath of God with Man. 
 
 absolute self-abnegation. Given Cromwell, he is a hun- 
 dred-fold the Protector of the Commonwealth ; given 
 Washington, he is a hundred -fold the father of his 
 country. Whatever be the function of the man, he be- 
 comes an embattled host within himself; out of weakness 
 he is made strong, and puts to flight the armies of the 
 aliens. Man, whose breath is in his nostrils, is as the 
 flower of the field, to-day brilliant in the summer sun- 
 shine, to-morrow withered in the autumn blight. He 
 labours, and an unknown race enter into his inheritance. 
 He is the architect of an abortive fortune, gathering 
 possessions from the universal waste and anarchy of 
 man. Others rise to scatter his increase ; the fortunes 
 of individuals, of families, and of nations are houses built 
 upon the sand ; they fall, they are swallowed up in ruin. 
 In the divine respiration all is different. Men, families, 
 peoples, who breathe in God, by Him labour, endure, 
 achieve, obtain prosperity, diffuse the riches of art, 
 letters, religion, and civilization. They execute as He 
 plans, and their work is permanent on the foundations 
 of His decree. 
 
 We have proposed an ordeal that not one reader in a 
 thousand may have the faith, the courage, the steadfast- 
 ness, triumjjhantly to pass. Of these books there are 
 five classes of readers. The first peruse from the love of 
 intellectual novelty, which makes them omnivorous de- 
 vourers of literature. They are like those consumptive 
 persons with enonnous appetites, whose systems are in- 
 capable of assimilating the food which they receive. 
 
 A second class peruse them in the luxury of religious 
 sentimentalism. European princesses read and grieved 
 over the suffering of the slave depicted in " Uncle Tom's
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 21 
 
 Cabin," and shed luxurious tears, while they and theirs 
 were remorselessly grinding down the poor of their own 
 land, without pity and without remorse. So while the 
 debased moral nature may oppress the virtuous principles 
 of the heart, the eyes may be suffused over the pages of 
 a religious treatise, and the soul dissolved in a luxury of 
 unreal penitence. 
 
 A third class will read merely for the purposes of dis- 
 honest appropriation, stealing ideas under the influence of 
 their familiars, in order to reproduce them as their own. 
 
 A fourth class will read honestly, so far as they go, to 
 ground themselves in the higher Christian doctrine, but 
 will feel themselves incapable of realizing the blessings 
 which they are designed instrumentally to bestow. 
 
 A fifth class will take them to the heart, and, with an 
 eye single to the glory of God and the elevation of man, 
 will seek to realize in themselves a present Heaven. 
 
 There are also five classes among those who will be 
 moved to seek open respiration through their influence. 
 First, abnormal pietists and devotees of the St. Theresa 
 type, men and women of a diseased religious imagination, 
 seeking thereby at once a spiritual soothing and exhila- 
 ration. They would make the Lord's breast a dram shop, 
 and resort to it for the purposes of spiritual intoxication. 
 
 A second class are parasites, individuals who live upon 
 the sympathy which they extract from others, evaders of 
 the great responsibilities, shufflers and shirks of duty, 
 seeking to find in their vain-glorious imbecility the foun- 
 tains of life from which to appropriate. They would 
 make the Lord's breath a sponge, and live upon it in an 
 indolent absorption. 
 
 The third class will be drawn from that large body in
 
 22 TJie Breath of God with Man. 
 
 the world, who, without having been faithful in a few 
 things, are always asking to be made lords over many. 
 They will seek it, blinding themselves to their real 
 desires, which are to enlarge their self-importance, to puft 
 and dilate, as the frogs in the parable, who sought to be- 
 come oxen. 
 
 A fourth class will seek it under a mistaken sense of 
 their advanced conditions in the regenerate life. Un- 
 conscious Pharisees of doctrine, far astray from the sim- 
 plicity of little children ; such will desire to possess it as 
 a superb decoration, a visible crown and emblem of 
 righteousness. 
 
 A fifth class will crave it with the poor publican, who 
 dared not so much as to lift up his eyes to Heaven, but 
 smote upon his breast, crying " God be merciful to me a 
 sinner." Possessed of a mortal horror and hatred of all 
 shams, subterfuges, sentimentalisms, exclusive profes- 
 sions, and bigotries; lowly, meek, humble, charitable, self- 
 deprecating ; hard workers, doing whatever is given them 
 with a whole-souled earnestness ; simple livers, believing 
 that the great object of life is the up-building of sobriety 
 and thrift and economy and industry into human institu- 
 tions ; persons with a continuity of purpose, like the long 
 roll of the ocean, or the persistence of the stars ; in- 
 domitable men and women, who know not what it is to 
 be appalled, disheartened, and overcome by difficulties ; 
 such, and their final number is myriads of myriads, will 
 find in God's breath their paradise, and in His ever- 
 lasting arms their home. 
 
 There are five classes of persons who will enter into 
 the first beginnings of the new respiration, but who are 
 liable especially to fail of its fulness and its reward. First,
 
 TJic Breath of God with Man. 23 
 
 those who possess a certain organic capacity for taking in 
 that Divine hfe which has already descended into and 
 flows through open organizations ; those who possess a 
 certain goodishness on the surfaces of character, but who 
 are neither fixed nor deep. They perhaps may pass as 
 far as the epidermis or scarf skin. When it begins, a 
 certain pleasure will be experienced, and so long as there 
 are no sensations but such as are pleasureable it will be 
 desired. These faineant, sluggish souls, made, as it were, 
 of lymph and not of spirit ; these adipose, moral natures, 
 when they find that every step requires struggle, sacri- 
 fice, humiliation, and a brave, religious heroism, as of a 
 soldier storming a fortress in the forlorn hope, or a rider, 
 sword in hand, charging up to the cannon's mouth and 
 conquering by an absolute fearlessness, will gladly hide 
 themselves again in corporeal substance. These represent 
 a large though not a permanent group. 
 
 Such should be dealt with tenderly and gently. Many 
 will seek respiration, from an ignorance of what its real 
 requirements are, and they will receive a most attenuated 
 dilution of a moral influx, for the purpose of bringing to 
 light their inefficiency and incapacity. In some instances 
 it will work for good, bringing them, by a long series 
 of experiences out of their faint-heartedness and self- 
 appreciation. They will shed, as it were, the snake-skin 
 of character, and be found with a better interior person- 
 ality. It is well to remember that, though to the eyes of 
 a man or an angel their cure may seem impossible, our 
 loving Father has means in His medicinal stores that we 
 know not of We should draw the mantle of charity over 
 their failings, bear with their illusions^ and even misrepre- 
 sentations, and labour earnestly for their salvation.
 
 24 TJic Breath of God with Alan. 
 
 A second class are the mediumistic, the defences of 
 whose organisms have been broken down by tampering 
 with the grave matters of a spiritual life. 
 
 ' ' Plow whole of heart, how sound of head, 
 With what Divine affections bold. 
 Should be the man whose thought would hold 
 An hour's communion with the dead." 
 
 So Tennyson most truly sings. Natures spring up, 
 rooted in the filth of a corrupt civilization, inheriting 
 organically the crimes of centuries, holding suspended 
 within the natural frame the diseases and the depravities 
 of generations ; and yet not without a certain nobility and 
 generosity of sentiment, which prompts them to a chival- 
 rous disregard of custom and prejudice, a loving apprecia- 
 tion and reception of what promises to be an outlet into 
 higher ranges of existence. 
 
 They are like Mary Magdalen, who was possessed of 
 devils, and yet who sought the Lord. The seven pro- 
 vinces of the natural soul and frame are invaded by as 
 many gross and infamous spheres of sorceries and de- 
 baucheries ; yet far within is a little centre of personality, 
 as the smallest of all germs, turning its infant features 
 to the Sun and Source of all our bliss ; a spark of truth, 
 burning in the wide chaos of darkness and insanity ; an 
 inmost chord in the soul-harp, vibrating to a divine pres- 
 sure, while storms of discord make a jangling on every 
 other string. God loves these, loves them far more, in a 
 sense, than those who have every other chord regulated 
 to a grand and rythmic unison from without, and yet 
 who are lacking in that inmost sensibility and suscepti- 
 bility. They are as the harlots, who yet enter into the 
 kingdom before the Pharisees.
 
 The Breath of God ivith Man. 25 
 
 It will be long before the Divine respiration can 
 educe order from their chaos, rationality from their 
 hallucination, purity and sweetness from their corruption 
 and decay. They will tax the patience of the most 
 patient, and the faith of the most enduring and unwaver- 
 ing ; and for long successions of epochs, the insanities 
 will seek new vent, the malady put on as many forms as 
 those of Proteus. But O thou who hast to deal with 
 such, remember, that with Him we serve, all things are 
 possible : " A bruised reed shall He not break, and the 
 smoking flax shall He not quench : He shall bring forth 
 judgment unto truth." These represent a group, both 
 numerous and permanent for ages. 
 
 A third class are the morbidly and otherwise incurably 
 diseased in mind. We find those in life who touch us 
 deeply by a certain fidelity and zealousness of affection, but 
 who are so sore in what may be called the natural organ 
 of self-love, so sensitive as regards the evils of the person- 
 ality, so possessed of the spirit of self-justification, so 
 incapable of an impartial criticism of themselves, so 
 petulant, wilful, and acrid in their humours, so exacting 
 of sympathy, so wayward and erratic, so indisposed to 
 the requirements of order, that they are an agony to the 
 tender heart which clasps them to itself. Their hearts 
 conceal jealousies, and their minds breed suspicions. 
 They are eaten by a carking care. They are of the 
 class who lose the bloom of youth in a maze of physical 
 diseases, who wear often a loveliness in the eyes of 
 partial friendship, that is but rarely visible to those who 
 encounter them in the discomforts and disquietudes of 
 home. 
 
 The surfaces of the nerves, both moral and physical,
 
 26 T]ic Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 are abraded. Like that woman who had had an issue 
 of blood, and who had suffered many things of many- 
 physicians, they seek to touch the hem of the Divine 
 Master, that they may be healed. We are to bear in 
 mind, that " the whole need not a physician, but they 
 that are sick." It is the glory of this new kingdom, that 
 it takes the rejected, that it gathers in, out of the high- 
 ways and by-ways, the forlorn outcasts of the heart. 
 
 The march of respiration is exceeding slow with these, 
 for the tender God waits upon them, accommodating 
 His steps to their slow gait, their imperfect and almost 
 imperceptible motions. Let them be borne with as the 
 mother bears with her rickety and epileptic babe. This 
 class represents, especially among women, an extensive 
 group, and is also, during these ages, one that we have 
 always with us. 
 
 A fourth class may be styled the impulsive — generous, 
 quick to take impressions, of whom we expect great 
 things, and suffer cruel disappointments ; those who are 
 subject to great and unexpected revulsions, the gracious 
 plants of whose affections often blossom at the first 
 sunbeams of capricious March, but whose climate is 
 so uncertain, that frosts may come at Midsummer. They 
 call out great sympathies by a large instinctive recep- 
 tivity, but are not to be depended on, having little self- 
 poise, little capacity for equilibrium. They grow by 
 starts, fitfully, and if they rise where the stronger attain 
 but painfully and slowly, they are also liable to fall where 
 the weaker maintain their ground. They are impatient 
 for quick results, forgetting that time is an element in the 
 Divine processes. They are apt zealously to assume bur- 
 dens of which they weary before the Divine hour for their
 
 The Breath of God with Man ly 
 
 removal lias come, and to pine for sympathies which belong 
 rather to perfect states than to incipient conditions. 
 
 Judgment must be acquired, balance won, energy wed 
 to patience, and hope to perseverance. The quick heart, 
 whose circuits are those of the day, must learn to time 
 its motions by the pulse beats of the centuries. This is 
 rather a small group, but will largely increase. 
 
 A subdivision of this class may be styled the oppres- 
 sively and overbearingly impulsive and generous. Plants 
 of a luxurious soil, thick bodied, juicy, rank, casting 
 broad shade, bearing a positive, astringent, natural fruit, 
 requiring to be cut down and grafted ; those of a tough 
 endurance in the world, executive, prompt, impatient 
 of contradiction, arbitrary, capricious, sometimes grasp- 
 ing, disposed to seize power, earnest, measuring great 
 distances with the eye, but apt to forget that, until rege- 
 neration is complete, man cannot swoop to an eyrie like 
 the eagle, but must plod with painful step. Quick and 
 impetuous in feeling, prone to violent expression, to hope 
 unduly, to despond darkly and causelessly, to give libe- 
 rally, to scatter improvidently, to assume position, to dis- 
 play the divine grace with ostentation. This is one of 
 the best of types when re-wrought, but one of the most 
 dangerous in the beginning ; it is numerous and lasting. 
 
 A fifth class are like the image described in the book 
 of Daniel, with a golden head of celestial aptitude and 
 originality ; a silver breast and arms of spiritual discrimi- 
 nation and receptivity ; the brazen loins of a natural 
 vigour and generation ; the iron limbs of a vital straight- 
 forwardness, exactness, and steadfastness ; the iron-clay 
 feet of' an inchoate and half abortive decision, rendering 
 the whole man liable to fall.
 
 28 TJic Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 Or again, they are like a castellated tower. There is 
 the summit, reaching high above all natural eminence, 
 furnished with a sky-dome, revealing the march of the 
 celestial constellations, windows for the sun and moon, 
 for the auroral lights, for the burning pomps of morning, 
 and the delicious beauty and softness of the day's de- 
 cline. There is the high pavilion of mid-heaven plea- 
 sures, where the thoughts that climb from earth stand, 
 awaiting wings of translation. 
 
 Below this, and still uplifted, is the huge temple of 
 spiritual knowledge and ambition. The breast of the 
 house is there, visited by the four winds of eveiy doctrine 
 from the whole earth. The home is there, with the cul- 
 tured natures of every historical inspiration, here in- 
 scribed with the letters of the Alcoran, there grand and 
 solemn with the huge images of the Shaster, and again 
 made holy and mysterious by the tabernacle and the 
 veils and the winged cherubs of the Pentateuch. The 
 stately emporium of the religious ideas from all time is 
 there, and in their midst, as the heroes and the graces 
 among the demi-gods, the processions of art and poesy, 
 of the sciences and the philosophies. 
 
 Still lower, in the fertile equators and tropics of the 
 frame, are the domestic habitudes, the social loves, the 
 delights of nature and of sense ; the spirits of the blood 
 and of the white lymph that ultimate a third world, 
 which bears the fruits of all that is above. Here opens 
 a huge department resonant to all sweet music, fragrant 
 with eternal perfumes, enriched with viands for the last- 
 ing banquet, revealing courts for the dance and song, 
 suggesting cool and shadowed chambers of repose. Still 
 below are massive structures upon another storey ; the
 
 The Breath of God zviih Man. 29 
 
 work of the Titans, resounding from day to night with 
 lusty hammer strokes of Vulcan or of Thor, the work- 
 shops of the life's deeds ; and thus far avcU. All this 
 stands high in air, but as the iron shafts strike down, they 
 terminate, here in bituminous slime that smokes from 
 a consuming internal fire, there in amorphous clay, 
 dinted by ever}^ rain drop, and crumbling alike from the 
 touch of frost and the dart of sun ; a foundation running 
 up from the midst of pumice and ashes. Its whole hu- 
 man pedestal, in fine, a burning mountain, that conceals 
 lava within its nostrils, and is pregnant with earthquakes. 
 
 So stand the best, the highest, the broadest of men. 
 And still, while the sky dome rises higher into the heights, 
 and the breast palace enlarges into the breadths, and the 
 middle galleries take into themselves the fulnesses that 
 are in the lengths of nature, and grow pregnant with 
 their powers, and while the cyclopean chambers below 
 accrete and give out the solid force that is in the depths 
 of the forces of the earth, and the man colossus stands 
 flaming abroad upon the world, the clay foundation bends 
 beneath the superincumbent burden : a touch, and it is 
 overthrown. It stands upon the shaking mountain, it 
 stands over its abysmal cone, — that mountain the un- 
 subdued evil, that cone the reservoir of all-devouring self, 
 which burns to lowest hell. 
 
 Respiration, to minds who possess, in germ or in ex- 
 pansion, such high endowment, is as terrible as cruci- 
 fixion; for it involves the taking down of the great edifice, 
 stone by stone, the utter resolution of it to primitive 
 constituents. What shall we say ? First, the filling up 
 of that crater, the subjugation of those fires, the quench- 
 ing of those burning soils, the conquest of those subter-
 
 30 TJic Breath of God ivitJi Man. 
 
 ranean passages, where the lava and the earthquake hide 
 away; until the whole burning mountain becomes a solid 
 disc and ponderous iron wheel, set upon the mouth of 
 hell, and sealed over it by the Divine decree. 
 
 When respiration comes, such minds are placed in the 
 very whirlpool of temptations. As the ancients fabled 
 that it was death for a mortal to see a god, so it is death, 
 either most cruel and fatal or most sublime and con- 
 summate, for the man of genius, of culture, of affection, 
 of attainment and a recognised position, to embrace the 
 breath of God. 
 
 To change the figure, — though Moses were cultured in 
 all the learning of Egypt and adopted into the royalties 
 about its throne, he must stand forth as a Hebrew to the 
 Hebrews, and go down from the very brow of power to 
 share the lot of those who writhe beneath its heel. Yet 
 when a certain point is reached in the cycle of experience, 
 and the breath flutters, now drawn up into the space 
 above its natural heaven, and then heavily drooping to- 
 ward the dust and night, there is but one of two alterna- 
 tives, and either requires an act of awful daring, while 
 the responsibility can be shared by none. Either the 
 breath of God must be taken with all its consequences, 
 or thrust back with all its consequences. With such we 
 can well sympathise. 
 
 It is easy for one who is a cripple and a leper, and 
 even almost an imbecile, for one who has but a cloud of 
 personality instead of a star, for one who in place of 
 costly purple wears the beggar's tattered gabardine, whose 
 very obscurity opposes an impervious veil to criticism, — 
 easy for such, who have so little to give, so much to re- 
 ceive, to seize a promise that opens health and vigour,
 
 The Breath of God zvitJi Man. 31 
 
 harmony and proportion, solace and enrichment, beauti- 
 ful time and glorified eternity. 
 
 The little twig is easily uprooted ; it is the generous 
 tree, with tens of thousands of interlacing root-fibres, that 
 must shudder, removed from the endeared, familiar soil ; 
 must bleed from all those wounds ; must ache in all those 
 famines, when its crown of blossoms is brought low, and 
 its untimely fruit is shaken by these miglity winds, and 
 the knife of the pruner is applied where the branch was 
 most luxuriant. Is it not terrible ? is there not a Geth- 
 semane, and a bloody sweat, and a prayer, " If it be pos- 
 sible, let this cup pass from me " ? The Lord can do 
 without such natures ; but the question is, can they do 
 without Him ? Yet such will come ; and, if few as the 
 far stars that come in sight once in a century, they will 
 regild their faded beams from the very Spirit of the morn- 
 ing, and shine for ever. 
 
 " Behold," saith the Spirit, " I stand at the door and 
 knock. If any man hear My voice, and open the door, 
 I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with 
 Me." To break bread is the rite and symbol of all human 
 fellowship. It also is the symbol of the Divine human, 
 the fellowship of God with man. We sit at a friend's 
 board, and we receive the bread which, earned by his toil, 
 is really an extension of himself In eating with him, 
 therefore, we eat as it were of him ; so much of his ple- 
 nary fulness supplies so much of our supposed necessity. 
 Dear Lord, Thou dost give Thyself, descending into us 
 by Thy most holy breath. Thy discreted substance is 
 given that we may live thereby ; for Thy flesh is meat 
 indeed, and Thy blood is drink indeed. Lord, evermore 
 give us this bread. All-Father, All-Mother, receive us
 
 32 TJic Breath of God with Man. 
 
 in the Infinite Bosom. We pine to share the embraces 
 that re-create, as we have received the quaUties that 
 create us. Thou Divine Man, to whom shall we come 
 but unto Thee ? Thou alone hast the words of eternal 
 life. 
 
 There are five classes to whom respiration will come 
 with power, advance with vigour, and be consummated 
 with comparative certainty. The first are those in the 
 Churches who mistrust, and at heart reject, the doctrine 
 that there is any malignity in the Divine Nature. Nine- 
 tenths at least of all the devotees in Christendom cherish 
 the conception of a malignant Deity, cruel, partial, into- 
 lerant, and revengeful. The nominal Christian succeeds 
 the Jew in his belief that God selects, by arbitrary elec- 
 tion, a people who are to share exclusively His bounty. 
 With cold-blooded complacency, men contemplate, as a 
 matter of course, the damnation of their neighbours, of 
 the disciples of other creeds, and of the Gentile world. 
 It is not the Calvinist's Jehovah, nor the Pantheist's Im- 
 personal Abstraction, whom we are to approach and seek, 
 but the Divine Man. Those who are prepared, by the 
 rejection of a Divine Tyrant, and by the intense affection 
 for a Divine Friend, who fills, yet infinitely transcends, 
 earth's fairest ideals of purity, truth, and love ; those who 
 hunger for the Father, and can take in the conception of 
 a Divine Humanity, may easily in course of time breathe 
 with Him. 
 
 A second class are those whose hearts, in whatever 
 creed they are, have outgrown its theology ; who believe 
 more than they know ; who love more than they can 
 express ; who, without ability to evolve a divine faith, 
 possess the immense force of a concentrated affection.
 
 The Breath of God tvith Man. 33 
 
 They will be lifted up as into the Divine bosom, almost 
 without a knowledge of their change, and rise in thought 
 above the mists of error when the sun has risen over the 
 hill-tops of the heart. 
 
 A third class are exact and patient thinkers, open to 
 a supersensual range of subjects. In the processes of 
 meditation, step by step, they thread the labyrinth of 
 theology, and emerge from it where the clear, glorious 
 light of Jhe Divine Man shines in upon the understand- 
 ing. They perceive, ideally and theoretically, that what 
 is here written must, in the very constitution of things, 
 be true. The brain, struggling upward into the supernal 
 heights of truth, lifted secretly by a consonant and recti- 
 fied will, raises, as it were, the lungs after it. As with 
 the former class knowledge follows experience, so with 
 these it precedes experience; they journey to the rising, 
 because they know there is a sun. 
 
 A fourth class, different from the others, are born 
 under the opened heaven, and will respire with a modi- 
 fied breath of Divinity from the moment of birth ; and a 
 fifth will not alone be born into the higher respiration, 
 but be conceived in the breath, through the conjugial 
 embraces of counterparts in whom the organism has 
 been rectified of evils, and who are wholly chaste from 
 the first principles of the will to the extreme instincts of 
 the sense. 
 
 It is only incumbent that the recipient shall believe 
 according to his light. Yet truth, absolute truth, as 
 far as the capacities are unfolded, must be welcomed, 
 adopted, and embodied. We return now to the ques- 
 tion, Who and what is God ? When respiration is 
 opened, the Hebrew, the Parsee, the Theist, the Christian 
 
 c
 
 34 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 believer may know for themselves that the Divine Man 
 is identical with our Lord Jesus Christ ; for as they ask 
 that He will reveal His hidden name, each will dis- 
 cover that, if he thinks that Jesus is not the Lord, his 
 frame will chill, and the bosom be oppressed with an 
 intolerable load ; will feel, in a word, that death is rush- 
 ing in to take possession of him. When the thought is 
 reversed, and the words rise to the lips, " Jesus is that 
 God," the tides of the Divine Spirit will roll as never 
 before, uplifting, illuminating, strengthening, and giving 
 peace. This then stands for ever as the corner-stone 
 of New-time Theology, God incarnate, the Word made 
 flesh. Here the two heavens of history and conscious- 
 ness, the two records of Creation and Revelation are 
 seen as no more twain but one. All revealed religion is 
 natural, and all natural religion revealed. 
 
 Yet, bear in mind, it is not one of the three infinites 
 of a veiled Polytheism ; not the second person of an 
 Athanasian creed, made known as interposing the shield 
 of an Infinite pity against an Infinite wrath. It is the 
 Almighty Love in unition with the All-conscious Wis- 
 dom; it is the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and 
 the End, the Almighty. His voice went forth, while yet 
 Incarnate, piercing the bosom of the ages with the pro- 
 phecy, " If I go, I will come again, and receive you unto 
 Myself." He receded into the bosom of mystery, and 
 from that mystery the soft, sweet breathings of His spirit, 
 inflowing into and blending with the respirations of His 
 children, declare the promise verified, the prophecy ful- 
 filled. Many will say, like Thomas, feeling the solid 
 pressure of His substance, " My Lord and my God." 
 Many, through the opened heavens of the spirit, will
 
 The Breath of God zvith Man. 35 
 
 behold Him coming in power and in great glory. " Even 
 so come, Lord Jesus." 
 
 The introduction of so august an era as that which 
 with open respiration is led forth into the world, must 
 inevitably be attended with personal struggle, and fol- 
 lowed by radical changes and upliftings in all relations ; 
 as will be seen. It is not attended with the elevation of 
 one sect above another, nor does it organize a new sect 
 to shatter and decompose the old. The war of polemics 
 may be considered, so far as the disciples of a new order 
 are concerned, at its end. And here must be noticed a 
 distinguishing peculiarity. 
 
 It is impossible for the Lord's breath to incorporate 
 itself wholly and vitally with the human constitution, 
 except through perfect peace. " Blessed are the peace- 
 makers, for they shall be called the children of God." 
 Our Lord, arraigned before the unjust judge, answered 
 not a word. The world little suspects how deep a philo- 
 sophy is involved in this. Every sect of Christendom 
 goes forth as did the disciples of Islam, bearing the 
 sword of controversy unsheathed in its right hand ; but 
 this kingdom shall not be by violence ; no need of argu- 
 ment when it carries demonstration. " He that doeth 
 the will of our heavenly Father, shall know the doctrine, 
 whether it be of God." 
 
 " Blind unbelief is sure to err, 
 And scan the work in vain ; 
 God is His own interpreter, 
 And He will make it plain." 
 
 Have not good men controverted ? Yes ; and law- 
 fully, in ages of closed respiration. So good men sacri- 
 ficed sheep and oxen in burnt sacrifices, typifying a Gift 
 
 C 2
 
 36 Tlic Breath of God with Majt. 
 
 and Sacrifice to come. But if we would bear forth the 
 living breath of the Prince of Peace, we must follow in 
 His steps. He opened Himself that the Divine life 
 might flow through His humanity. His argument was 
 a prayer ; His syllogism a benevolence. This is of itself 
 a demonstration of indwelling God with men, that a 
 people rise who simply increase by the opening of the 
 bosoms of their brethren to inhale the breaths of the 
 infinite beatitudes. But some may ask, " How meet the 
 criticisms of ecclesiasts and literati?" By growth, as 
 flowers grow ; by song, as birds sing ; by exhalations of 
 the life of Deity. Men are building a tower, and critics 
 gather, one faulting the materials, another the plan and 
 mode of construction. Why stop building to discuss the 
 chemical affinities of lime and sand, the toughness of 
 iron, the compactness and durability of granite ? The 
 pyramids are their own fact. 
 
 When the cathedral is finished, let the critic stand 
 amidst its clustered pillars, beneath the enduring roof, 
 where the light of the lofty oriel flames upon him ; let 
 him stand where piety and devotion arch broad wings of 
 sculptures. But thou, O workman of God, build in thy 
 place, that thy work may be finished with thy day. 
 There is not time for polemical debate. When God's 
 breath begins in a man, he becomes a daysman; his 
 work is given him to do, and in that work controversy 
 has no part. It may have been man's method, but it is 
 not our Lord's. The work, when finished, justifies itself. 
 
 Inapplicable knowledge is a cumbrous load. Only 
 the knowledge that subserves the ends of life becomes a 
 working power. In the light of this axiom the doctrine 
 of education requires revision. To become a perfectly
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 37 
 
 educated nvin, in the modern sense, the memory must 
 be loaded with mountains of technicalities, the brain is 
 emptied of its juices in their acquisition, and exhausted 
 in the effort at retention. The Lord is the Infinite 
 Educator, and when respiration is opened the university 
 of a true culture receives us. " Know thyself," was in- 
 scribed over the door of the ancient philosopher. ''Know 
 thyself," is inscribed by the Divine Hand above the 
 portals of the mind. The metliods of the Divine ciiltns 
 are varied with every individual ; the first stages of the 
 process being the training of the moral nature in waiting 
 upon the Divine will. 
 
 The true life is one of hearty, willing, uniform obe- 
 dience, and it is only through that obedience that liberty 
 and genuine rationality can be unfolded. Many, who 
 abstractly receive the theory that human perfection de- 
 pends upon an absolute regard to the dictates of the 
 Supreme Will and Wisdom, shrink from the application 
 of the doctrine to themselves. Through the abuses of 
 ecclesiastical and political government, the noble senti- 
 ment of loyalty has withered from the breast. Obliged 
 to become protestants, radicals, democrats, spiritually 
 and socially, from a stern regard for the preservation of 
 our inalienable rights, the freedom of conscience, the 
 integrity of reason, the harmony of the affections, it is 
 difficult for men at first to recognise truths of equal 
 sacredness ; hierarchy, subordination, superiority, class 
 and rank and grade. 
 
 The question is asked. Why, if the bosom of Infinite 
 Truth is opened to each and all, should not all have access 
 without a priesthood to the boundless arcana of the uni- 
 verse? Why should one man expound doctrines, and 
 
 27^200
 
 ^S The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 another be necessitated to receive them at his hands ? The 
 answer is simple and clear. The boundless variety of uses 
 to be performed, requires a corresponding dissimilarity 
 of gifts and specialty of functions. No office is of mere 
 human election. All stand as servants before the Lord. 
 He gives to each the round of duties by which the 
 universal ends of righteousness and truth may best be 
 accomplished. 
 
 The common conception of Divine illumination is, that 
 it prepares the mind for the reception of a cosmopolite 
 intelligence. This is true, but it requires this qualifica- 
 tion, that, while it is the use of a sacerdotal genius, 
 specifically and adequately trained, to embody divine 
 knowledge in concrete expressions, minds in general are 
 prepared, by the same Providence, to read what is thus 
 brought down, with internal demonstrations sealing its 
 truths. In the present condition of the world, the 
 danger is not that the outpourings of heavenly doctrines 
 and illustrations will be too limited, but that the rich fruit 
 which they are designed to ultimate will not be ripened, 
 through lack of heroic application. 
 
 Another common thought is, that illumination is de- 
 signed to initiate men into some priestly office; in a 
 word, to train them for pulpit oratory, to organize a vast 
 propaganda. Here a core of truth is found embedded 
 in a matrix of illusion. It is designed to initiate men 
 into a sacerdotal state, compared to which prelacies and 
 papacies are but theatrical. But how? Ey initiating 
 them into a ministry of strenuous labour ; by making 
 them, as the rule, producers of wealth rather than con- 
 sumers. It is to make of every manufactory the holiest 
 cathedral ; to stamp the signet of divinity on common life.
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 39 
 
 The youthful convert is fond of hoping that he may 
 have a call to preach; but in this new kingdom that 
 never comes, except through a call to practice. The 
 stately industries of the future are in travail to be born. 
 It is the hand that is to be trained, and the eye cul- 
 tured, and the organism made one harmony. Preach- 
 ing, fasts, ceremonial rites, august pageants, rose into their 
 conspicuous position to meet the wants of a barbaric age. 
 They were designed to stimulate the fancy, to kindle the 
 imagination, to subdue the passions, to awe the brutalities, 
 to unveil a futurity which the mind, depressed into cor- 
 poreality, saw at best but dimly, and as in a dream. But 
 when men dwell, bodily, encompassed by the processions 
 of the living breaths of God, when they wake with 
 morning from His bosom, and sink with night into its 
 awful privacies, the mere natural use of the rite, the 
 pageant, is over. If religious ministrations continue, they 
 manifestly must be more vital, more awful, requiring not 
 alone memorised knowledges and kindly sentiments. 
 Of this more in another place. 
 
 Again, it is a common thought that respiration from 
 the Lord will establish a class of Theosophists and 
 illuminati, that a select circle will arise devoted to the 
 abstract themes of wisdom ; that reverie will increase, and 
 abstraction, and passive contemplation. It is true that 
 knowledge, which now hangs like a cloud in the air, will 
 then shine as in the moving constellations ; but no know- 
 ledge, except that which is fruitful, will be permitted to 
 exist. Day dreaming receives its quietus. The destinction 
 between the man of thought and the man of action, the 
 man of brain and the man of muscle, is destroyed ; and, 
 so far from the stream of emigration tending from the
 
 40 TJie Breath of God with Man. 
 
 marts of labour to the cloisters of the university, the school 
 will open into the workshop, and the palace be found 
 but through the pursuits of industr}^ 
 
 The prejudice against manual labour is, that it coars- 
 ens the nerve, deadens the taste, and abolishes the 
 higher splendours of the brain. This to an extent is 
 true, as regards labour conducted under the auspices of 
 natural respiration. But use makes the angel ! If the 
 carpenter labours with the divine precision in his eye 
 and the divine cunning in his hand, who dare presume 
 to say that the harmony and delicacy of the frame are 
 impaired ? Exceptional men, even now, combine ultimate 
 toil with refinement and a superior intelligence ; but the 
 divine respiration will make such exceptions universal. 
 The mechanical nature will become like the serviceable 
 mountain-ridge ; its rude grandeur beautified with flowers, 
 its veins opulent with unsunned gold, and its summit 
 glorified with all that walks abroad in the refulgence 
 of the heavens. Breath-labour Avill become a divine 
 exercise in due time, and every stroke be accompanied 
 with as rich a thrill as follows now the touch of the 
 organ. But ease, joy, exhilaration, are not the questions 
 for noble men to consider. The problem before the 
 new man is the redemption of the race. The joy of 
 God is the re-creation of humanity. 
 
 We have found our dear home, — the bosom of the 
 Father. We are encircled by the Everlasting Arms. The 
 thought of life is divested of its painful mystery, and 
 death is swallowed up in the fulness of a present immor- 
 tality. It is subjectively a re-admission into Eden. We 
 are to labour that the harmonies of that nascent paradise 
 may attain, within us and around us, to their perfect
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 41 
 
 bloom, their consummate fruition. The problem of the 
 SociaHst is, redemption from tyrannous material con- 
 ditions ; that of the ascetic devotee, individual salvation 
 from the horrors of eternal pain ; that of the man of 
 aesthetic culture, the attainment of individual symmetry 
 and beauty, irrespective of the condition of the race. 
 
 Each, doubtless, sees one aspect of a truth, which all 
 fail to grasp in its unity and completeness. The man of 
 the new life finds them all included in the plans of Pro- 
 vidence. The iron ring of social exaction, the despotic 
 pressure of spiritual impurities, the restrictions of igno- 
 rance and incompleteness, all give way before the mild, 
 persistent workings of the Divine Genius of our fates. 
 He alone knows what is the special archetype from 
 which each separate nature is constructed. He alone 
 knows the processes that are necessary for the embodi- 
 ment of the picturesque and magnificent ideal. 
 
 The sect never leads its subject above sectarism. 
 Society never emancipates its subject from the rigorous 
 exactions of society. God alone is the emancipator of 
 mankind. His plan, which embraces cycles of ages for 
 its operation, is physically inaugurated from the time 
 when body and soul, controlled by one respiration, 
 rise together by the embodiment of one perfection. We 
 shall find, as we become familiar with the Spirit's 
 modes of action, that unexpected potencies, springing 
 from the will, work recreative miracles in the understand- 
 ing and the bodily frame. He takes us as rough blocks, 
 that grow to living statues under the plastic hand. 
 
 But we have not yet reached the real difficulties of the 
 case, namely, the foreign causes operant in the world, 
 which bar the way to humanitary completeness and
 
 42 J'he Breath of God ivlth J\Tan. 
 
 social redemption. The cause is found, first, in the 
 chronic insanities in the moral will; second, in the dis- 
 ease, degradation, and inversion of the mind and soul of 
 the flesh ; and third, in the persistent and potent efforts 
 of the abandoned of all time, working with spiritual 
 powers against the Divine Man. Here we would not 
 dogmatise, but say, as before, the breath of Deity, as it 
 descends, affords the test of every doctrine. Reversing 
 the order in which these are named, we take up the sub- 
 ject of the spiritual obstructions to the reign of equity 
 and peace. 
 
 No man can advance to any extent in open respira- 
 tion, without demonstrating in his own experience, that 
 his every step is dogged, his every noble aspiration and 
 endeavour warred against by malignant and subtle intel- 
 ligences. The reverse of that which convinces him of 
 the Infinite Personality of his Father-friend removes all 
 doubt from his mind as to the existence of finite person- 
 alities, his deadly and cruel enemies. He may enter on 
 this ground with the pleasing theory of the restorationist, 
 but he will soon become convinced that, whatever the final 
 fate of his persecutors may be, their present condition is 
 one of absolute and fiendish depravity ; in a word, that 
 they are organic hatreds and lusts and sorceries and 
 murders ; their desires are all evil and their deeds all 
 cruel. Deadened in corporeal nature, men for the most 
 part are sapped in the vital springs of the constitution, 
 and are imi)erilled in will and imjDaired in reason, with no 
 direct consciousness of the presence and the action of 
 their foes. 
 
 But when the fire-breaths of the Divine Spirit began to 
 permeate the tissues of the organism, the physical senses
 
 77^!^ Breath of God with Man. 43 
 
 by degrees put on an hyper-physical character. The eye 
 detects the moral quality in the beams that strike the 
 retina ; the ear a moral quality in the sounds that vi- 
 brate through the tympanum ; the touch the moral 
 quality in the substances, visible or invisible, that thrill in 
 contact with its nerves. We are brought, in fine, into a 
 sensational experience of the Magic of the Hells. God, 
 even the Divine Man, stands in us, and, by the mighty 
 power of His breath, wars against this magic. He trains 
 us by quickenings of the sense to feel, by quickening of 
 the perception to discriminate, by quickenings of the will 
 to combat every impurity. Man's life becomes the real 
 apocalypse. We learn, through combating the evils that 
 invade, to conquer the evils that dwell within us. The 
 valours, the magnanimities, the chastities that we culti- 
 vate become new organic fomis in the re-created organ- 
 ism. For the second incarnation of our Lord is an 
 incarnation in the bosom of humanity, and there He 
 comes to conquer and to reign, and to be glorified for 
 ever and ever. 
 
 We are all aware of the existence of qualities which are 
 material, yet invisible. The latent electricity in a cup of 
 water is sufficient to explode, and topple down the noblest 
 edifice, as chemists assert. Moral qualities communicate to 
 physical objects, under suitable conditions, their specific 
 elements. Now we have in the world possibly a thousand 
 millions of inhabitants ; of these, but the small minority 
 are comparatively chaste, honest, reverent, humane. 
 Each body is the theatre where breathe the enormous 
 and innumerable cupidities of a depraved life. Each 
 moral evil, passing into act, loses its latent, and assumes 
 its positive character. The human flesh must, therefore
 
 44 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 reek with a moral-natural corruption. It must taint the 
 homes, the surroundings of the race. Conditions are 
 transmissible to offspring ; therefore the bodies of infants 
 hold the seeds of ancestral plagues. Moral qualities are 
 finitely imperishable, and therefore, for aught that we 
 can discover, the corruption of hundreds of generations 
 loads the effete substance of the globe. We are uncon- 
 scious of it, because habituated to it. 
 
 Why was Jesus a Man of sorrows, and acquainted with 
 grief? Because He was bowed under the pressure of 
 these world-mountains of depravity. Why do men ot 
 purified spirituality cry, in all ages, " Who shall deliver us 
 from the body of this death?" It is because they see 
 that the concrete physical nature of man is gangrened 
 with decay. 
 
 Why do we kill a little harmless snake that crosses our 
 path, yet socially court the friendship of the imperial 
 libertine or harlot whose presence makes Virtue shud- 
 der ? Because the best are half paralysed by the mag- 
 netism of evil. Why do the masses of cultured men 
 throughout the world make a jest of brutal imi)ieties and 
 uncleannesses ? Because the balance of their nature 
 sympathises with the multitude of lusts. Hereditary 
 depravity must be accepted as a fact, whatever be its 
 theory. With this hereditary and well-nigh universal 
 baseness, the fact that there is still an eternal protest and 
 reaction against evil, proves that the Divine-Man is still 
 immanent in nature, and in human nature. It is the tes- 
 timony of noblest spirits, deepest versed in moral know- 
 ledge, that even with them the balance of their life turned 
 to evil, from which they were only saved by the eternal 
 solicitation of the Spirit in the will. Now the individual
 
 The Breath of God zvith Man. 45 
 
 is bom an integrated member in the great human Com- 
 monwealth. Toward each man comes rolling the ocean 
 of its depravity, with long swells like those of the Atlantic 
 ever beating on his shores. 
 
 Like ever seeks like. Wherever we find individuals in 
 whom a deep organic taint and decay exists, the corres- 
 ponding taint and decay, whether of the family or the 
 race, flows toward, centres in, and pours its effluvia 
 through them. These are the plague-centres of humanity. 
 As there are natural idiots and cretins, so there are 
 moral ones. The plum-tree affected with the disease 
 called black knot, the peach corrupted with the yellows, 
 imparts the malady to healthful plants of the same species, 
 the only remedy being extirpation ; but we cannot ex- 
 tirpate the vitiated human trees. Tlie barbarism of a 
 vigorous young people is ameliorated by culture, and a 
 few generations in their lapse, witness the advent and the 
 growth of civilization ; but an old people, like the aged 
 individual, so far as history is a proof, never rises again 
 to power. 
 
 The same is true of special families ; unless a vigorous 
 life current from another stock is imported, the new off- 
 shoots exhibit a growing imbecility. Whole classes in 
 society sink permanently below the types of average 
 manhood. We have but to ascertain the hereditary 
 disease, and we know at once what specific streams of 
 the world's corruption will centre themselves in the 
 unhappy subject. The hopeless incurables of the race, 
 hereditarily corrupt, are not those to whom the respirations 
 of the Lord will open. For those not Avilfully and there- 
 fore irremediably perverted, the spiritual world will afford 
 hospitals of cure. It is to those who possess, constitu-
 
 46 TJie Breath of God with Man. 
 
 tionally, a fund of prime vitality that respiration comes. 
 To those, in a word, in whom there are organic vessels 
 for the reception and distribution of the divine auras. 
 In the lapse of ages, the gangrened human constituents 
 of the race will slough off, and no types survive but such 
 as are capable of the highest spiritual and physical 
 perfection. 
 
 In the beginnings of an age of open respiration, the 
 great body of the world's corruption presses against and 
 impedes the restorative effort of the Divine Man. Each 
 recipient being open to specific veins of this corruption, 
 not alone must he encounter the breadth, and length, 
 and height, and depth, and fulness of the physical and 
 moral decay within himself, but also meet the corres- 
 ponding universal stream that has always flowed through 
 him, and that seeks to maintain its level. Terrible is 
 the strife by which the corruptible puts on incorruption ! 
 
 All thieves in the world make organically one thief; 
 all murderers one murderer; all adulterers one adulterer; 
 sharing in a common fund of depraved appetite, insane 
 instinct, and infernal satisfaction. It is the effort to 
 press back out of the constitution the inflowing streams 
 of moral and physical corruj)tion ; to arrest, so far as we 
 are concerned, the tidal currents that circulate in the 
 world's depravity, that makes the battle, in a large mea- 
 sure; for organically the whole body of the evil in 
 humanity becomes our foe. The individual is not left to 
 himself in freedom to initiate and to perfect the new 
 conditions. As in a Despotism the Republican incurs the 
 peril of the dungeon or the scaffold, and as in the 
 oppressive Religion a Protestant is liable to torture and 
 martyrdom ; so the separate soul, a member of the des-
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 47 
 
 potic constitution of the race, finds its organic forces 
 arrayed against him, finds himself menaced at the point 
 of every nerve. It is well written that, " Every battle of 
 the warrior is with confused noise and garments rolled in 
 blood : but this shall be with burning, and fuel of fire." 
 As the discovery of open respiration is greater than the 
 first knowledge of a continent, and as the initiament into 
 its conditions is greater than the planting of a first colony 
 upon its shores, so the work of the maintenance and 
 perfection of respiration is greater than that continent's 
 subjugation and reclamation. 
 
 These introductory considerations being passed, we 
 may now unveil the inner arcana of respiration itself I 
 was in the World of Spirits, in the year 1859, and saw a 
 star of great magnitude burning with a majestic resplen- 
 dence. It seemed an unwonted visitor in that sky, and 
 the usual luminaries, as its light increased, first became 
 dim, and afterward invisible. It hung midway between 
 the horizon and the zenith, and made the darkness 
 luminous. One came out from the earth as through a 
 subterranean aperture, looked up, beheld the star, and 
 cried, " My fears did not deceive me. It is the star 
 that shone of old above the spiritual mid-heaven, when 
 our Great Enemy began to breathe the natural air. It is 
 the star of the Nazarene." Another followed him, and 
 another. They were attired in the garb of Jewish 
 priests, and each seemed possessed of the madness that 
 incited our Saviour's crucifixion. After this they returned 
 to their hell, and a council was summoned, composed 
 exclusively of demons who had been Israelites. 
 
 There are, perhaps, none of the infemals who possess 
 more powerful ultimate bodies, more determined wills,
 
 48 The Breath of God zuith Man. 
 
 more inflexible, long continued persistence in the pursuit 
 of objects. They live in the illusion that a great prince 
 is to appear in the lineage of David, and that he is to 
 subdue all nations, and lead them back into Palestine, 
 where they are to reign for ever. They look upon our 
 Lord, in their madness, as the Antichrist. They bound 
 themselves unitedly by an oath in that conclave, first, 
 that whoever should desist from the undertaking which 
 they contemplated should be subjected to a torture 
 analogous to internal crucifixion; and second, that 
 they would internally crucify the natural body of any 
 inhabitant of earth over whom the beams of that star 
 should be seen to descend and rest. 
 
 They then passed out into the natural world, clothing 
 themselves in the invisible emanating corruptions of all 
 persons in disorderly connection with the World of 
 Spirits. One wonders at the fact that Spiritists, as a 
 class, reject not alone the Divine Humanity, but also 
 the doctrine of moral freedom and responsibility. One 
 wonders, too, at the rapidity with which they seem to 
 have lost all power to believe in Him. With a itw 
 exceptions the truth is, that they are, as a body, inha- 
 bited by the spirits of the crucifiers, whose name is 
 legion, and who diligently search throughout the whole 
 earth to discover upon what brows the star of Christ 
 begins to beam. Their motto is, " Kill without mercy." 
 To this end all things else are subordinate, all their 
 passions focalised, and their hearts made a glowing sea 
 of rage. Owing to their gross corporeal peculiarities, 
 they attach themselves with ease to human constitutions. 
 As the world's riches flow toward those of that race who 
 inhabit the world, so the vitality of the animal spirits.
 
 The BrcatJi of God ivith Man. 49 
 
 detaches itself from the bodies of men, and accretes 
 toward them. 
 
 Organized as tribes under a liigh-priest, and with 
 armies which they call the hosts of David, they fight 
 with magical weapons ; and no sooner is one tribe tem- 
 porarily spent than another hastens to its position in the 
 vanguard. They attack the organs of hearing through 
 magical art, by which the dissonances of their hate and 
 rage perpetually sound, endeavouring thus to deaden and 
 paralyse the understanding. Because the Jews, as a 
 people, knew nothing of conjugial love, and are inhe- 
 rently and essentially scortatory, they are able, with great 
 violence, as the swelling waves of the sea, to rise against 
 those spaces in the constitution where the will, as a 
 bride, reposes in the arms of the understanding ; and thus 
 mightily they labour to suppress the procreation of ideas 
 and the descent of Divine truth into natural thought. 
 
 Whenever they see one whose thoughts and affections 
 begin to move in the direction of open respiration, they 
 waylay him day and night ; they load the brain with 
 a corrupt magical substance ; they invade the fine space 
 of the ear with deadly sounds ; they cast a cursed dust 
 into the eyes ; they inject noisome efiluvia into the 
 nostrils ; they anoint the lips with secretions of hates in 
 the saliva, and violently, if possible, inject the very quint- 
 essence of death into the lungs. If those who have 
 sought open respiration are drawn back into the vortex 
 that denies, they fall inevitably into the hands of the 
 crucifiers, who inwardly spit upon them in their contempt, 
 as fools and apostates, but who outwardly apply opiates 
 to conscience and stimulants to self-love. 
 
 The question is asked, Why does the Divine Man, our 
 
 D
 
 50 TJie Breath of God ivith Man. 
 
 Father, permit such invasions ? In answering it we are 
 to bear in mind, first, that it is not by the force of the 
 Omnipotent energy, but by the power of Goodness, 
 operant through Wisdom, that He governs the universe. 
 Multitudinous reasons will present themselves as we 
 advance, why this is permitted. In the meanwhile our 
 preliminary statement will be given. To educate a son, 
 the parent, when culture has advanced to a certain point, 
 sends him out into the world to meet it on its own 
 ground, and to develop energy from the stmggle that 
 ensues. It is to develop this energy, to transform men 
 into warriors and heroes, that the Disposer of events 
 allows the rage of evil spirits to be manifested. 
 
 " Sure we must fight if we would reign ; 
 Increase our courage, Lord. 
 We'll dare the cross, endure the pain, 
 Supported by Thy Word." 
 
 I was in the Heaven of ancient Israel in the year 
 1859, and there witnessed the armies who are prepared 
 to meet upon the theatre of earth the demons of their 
 own nation. They are an exceedingly mild and gentle 
 people. Their country is under the spiritual equator, 
 where the air is moist and bland as if tempered by the 
 presence of perpetual spring. I should say that there 
 are three Heavens of the ancient Hebrews, the one 
 above the other, and respectively celestial, spiritual, and 
 ultimate. In the lower Heaven they are excessively 
 warlike, though so mild and gentle. This spirit espe- 
 cially predominates in those who lived in the time of the 
 Maccabees. 
 
 In the Spiritual Heaven they live much apart, possess- 
 ing resplendent cities, which they call defences and
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 51 
 
 refuges ; they inlay the ceiHngs of their houses with 
 precious stones, and also decorate with them the sides of 
 the chambers and apartments of state. The floors are 
 often composed of silver. It is their delight to appear 
 in sumptuous apparel, which they frequently change. 
 Their whole land is opulent ; were a covetous man to 
 enter there, his heart would almost break at the sight 
 of the immense treasures. There is something in the 
 spiritual quality of this wealth, which excites upon the 
 part of those who covet riches with an evil love, bound- 
 less cupidity ; yet they value their opulence chiefly as a 
 means of confemng benefits. Here I saw one who was 
 represented to me as having been that Nathan who was 
 a prophet during the reign of David, but David I did not 
 see, nor any one representing him. 
 
 The criticisms which they pronounce upon the kings 
 of Judah and Israel, are generally of the most scathing 
 character. They declare Solomon to have been the 
 corrupter of their nation, a voluptuous tyrant, and even 
 a magician, a perverter of influx, a wrester of sacred 
 things from their true import, a defiler of the people's 
 heart ; and attribute the disasters that followed his 
 decease to the effeminacy and idolatry to which he was 
 given. They assert that Solomon, during the latter years 
 of his reign, was in many respects, a subject spirit ; his 
 rich, ardent nature, having been exhausted through his 
 enormous libidinousness, and his mistresses, who were 
 idolatresses, having woven through his organism a 
 magical sphere. So far from considering him the wisest 
 of men, they look upon him as a shrewd, worldly-minded 
 epicure, in thought as well as in morals. 
 
 For David they have more respect, though their 
 
 D 2
 
 52 TJie Breath of God tuith 3 fan. 
 
 estimation of him is one that would shock the orthodox 
 behever. David was, according to their words, a two- 
 fold character ; a man of genius who rose up into lofty 
 lyric inspirations, and a besotted gallant who quenched 
 his heavenly ardours in sensual indulgences. I asked 
 the question of them, if David ever had in their thought 
 any idea of conjugial love, and the answer was, " Has a 
 pig any ? " His chief captains they represent as banditti, 
 eaters of the substance of the people, violent, bloody, 
 and unprincipled. Criticising character from this lofty 
 ethical standard, they remarked, that their nation was 
 organically never a man, but only a wild beast. 
 
 Of all purely intellectual peoples, these Hebrews 
 seemed to me the most fiery. The remark pleased 
 them when I made it, and one added, " We are filled, 
 and overflow with fire." I attributed this to the im- 
 mediate manifestations of the Word in their midst, and 
 to the awful veneration in which they hold it ; but he 
 added, " That is so." And yet there is another reason. 
 The Hebrew stock came originally from the dim east 
 of Asia, and is akin to the Norseman, to Odin's men. 
 Another said, " Yes, by moral consanguinity." The 
 race wasted away in Palestine, and organically was better 
 suited for a hardier land. Their method of speaking is 
 abrupt, sharp, and commanding ; their tone sonorous and 
 from the depths of respiration. There is the sound of 
 the trumpet in their voice. 
 
 In the Celestial Heaven of the Hebrews, are dense 
 groves of trees like the cedars of Lebanon, thickets of 
 m)rrtle and oleander, olive gardens, vineyards, paradises 
 filled with odoriferous and exquisite flowers, pools, and 
 fountains of the most transparent water ; but so far as I
 
 The Breath of God with Man 53 
 
 was aware no cities, the inhabitants preferring habitations 
 in little series. The name of a Jew is to them an un- 
 utterable abomination ; and on receiving a guest, they 
 beseech him that he will make no reference to the 
 people whence they sprang. Nearly all of the inhabit- 
 tants were removed from the natural earth while babes 
 and children, though here and there one perceives a 
 group who distinguished themselves below by valour, con- 
 stancy, and devotion to the right. These latter live 
 separately in a measure from the others, and in habita- 
 tions which appear surmounted with blue domes inlaid 
 with stars, like the vault of the firmament. Unutterable 
 peace fills the mind on inhaling the atmosphere. The 
 Word appears in the woodland belt which is a little 
 below, and which encompasses their Heaven, extending 
 for many miles in a series of gigantic sculptures. I 
 entered by a gateway, representing the ascension of 
 Elijah. The colossal architecture is not of stone, but 
 of resplendent gold. 
 
 These three Heavens as one, make war against the 
 Hells of the Hebrews that have risen to destroy open 
 breathing men on earth. One said to me " Saw ye the 
 star ? " I replied in the aftirmative, and he answered, 
 " Here it was a sun. The Lord appeared in the midst 
 of it, and the whole atmosphere of our Heaven began to 
 change, filling us with a fiery, burning desire and deter- 
 mination to turn our wills towards the world, and to 
 concentrate them there in opposition to magic." 
 
 One of the problems of history is the inexhaustible 
 vitaUty of the Hebrew race. Without a national home, 
 without leaders, or local afiinities, or institutions ; con- 
 demned, like the Ahasuerus of the ancient legend, to
 
 54 The Breath of God ivith Man. 
 
 perpetual wanderings, because it mocked the Lord ; for 
 ages subject to the ban of social ostracism, it cannot be 
 destroyed, but flourishes from the decay of nations, ab- 
 sorbing to itself the riches of every successful people. 
 Other nations are rooted in the earth, but this is rooted 
 in the bark and woody substance of the nations, a 
 vigorous but deadly parasite. Terribly it avenges itself 
 for the insults and injuries which it has received during 
 ages of persecution from the peoples of Christendom, 
 oppressing the poor by its command of labour, and fur- 
 nishing to the despots the ready wealth which enables 
 them perpetually to maintain the standing armies that 
 hold at bay the righteous revolutionist and the upright 
 reformer. 
 
 It is a religious Plutocracy without conscience, sympa- 
 thising not with humanity, but holding itself as God's 
 peculiar people, to whom the Gentile world is lawful 
 spoil. It sits in the antiquated garb of old tradition, 
 wearing on its brow the crown of sacred revelation, a 
 massy golden circlet scintillant with precious stones. 
 Other nations prosper by the amenities of wholesome, 
 industrial toil ; but the Hebrew neither sows nor reaps, 
 he traffics in the productions of others, and for this 
 reason his prosperity is unwholesome and unreal. There 
 is that which gold cannot buy; unison with the fine 
 powers of nature, liberty in the fellowship of humanity, 
 and perfection in the solidarity of Heaven and the per- 
 petual presence and efiluence of God. 
 
 The Hebrew is the social disintegrator, rooting him- 
 self like the lasting ivy within the interstices of the walls 
 of the social structure. He eats out the cement that 
 unifies the massy edifice, and forces stone from stone.
 
 TJic Breath of God with Mmt. 55 
 
 His prosperity is a continual demonstration of the fact 
 that men may continually thrive by -the excision of 
 humanity from their sympathies. Millions of nominal 
 Christians are rendered materially powerful, by assimi- 
 lating to themselves the corrupt life of these fallen sons 
 of Abraham. Still their corporate existence is a slow 
 suicide, in Avhich present immunity is purchased for the 
 baser self, by the annihilation of the nobler faculties. 
 
 The historical Christ was instinctively warred against, 
 while incarnate, by the Hebrew's isolating genius. He 
 came to show the people how to die ; how sacrificing 
 the chimera of a favoured nationality, whom all the 
 world was to serve, it might pass through the throes and 
 crises of a public self-regeneration, and diftuse itself, by 
 the spirit of self-sacrifice, as a restorative virtue into the 
 body of the race. No people as yet has appreciated 
 this lesson of the Master, but Israel least of all. 
 
 It reaps as it has sown. It chose to exist with a 
 barbaric core of moral Atheism, and a corporate body 
 of rigorous exclusiveness, an anti-humanitarian entity. 
 It lives to demonstrate the supreme madness of its 
 choice. Yet it also abounds in other lessons. Never 
 has it ceased to worship as the Jew worshipped in his 
 palmy days. The successions of its Rabbis are immortal, 
 its holy days, its new moons, its solemn feasts, its pecu- 
 liar ceremonies, duly commemorated, pass as in the 
 bosom of time from cycle to cycle ; proving thus that the 
 customs of the institutions and the priesthoods of worship 
 may find a perpetuity, while that which alone makes 
 worship genuine, infinite aspiration, infinite endeavour 
 for the reconciliation of the race to the Divine Love, 
 may be extinct.
 
 56 TJie BrcatJi of God with Man. 
 
 The Hebrew people chose not merely to reject the 
 Incarnate Word as a Person, but also as a sacrifice. 
 They stand as a monument, teaching by opposites, what 
 that Word, now glorified and universal, makes obligatory 
 on the people who would receive Him ; a universal re- 
 spiratory Re-incarnation. For the new Christian must 
 be the opposite of the inverted Jew, both peculiar 
 people, but with traits that stand revealed in the most 
 infinite antagonism. It may be said here, by the ob- 
 jector, that the Jew brings prosperity, that his banish- 
 ment fi-om Spain brought impoverishment, and his 
 emigration into western Europe enhanced industry and 
 increased opulence. These were eddies in the stream. 
 
 The banishment of the Spanish Jew was but part of a 
 system of false political economy that wrought ruin in all 
 its parts. Moreover, the Jew was then more of an in- 
 dustrialist than now. It may be said also, and with 
 truth, that in all time Israelites have exhibited truly 
 humane, that is, truly Christian characteristics. This 
 we admit, but as exceptional. Into the bosom of the 
 inverted Hebrew race the spirit opposed to Christianity 
 slides as naturally as water into its channels ; as a cor- 
 poreity it perpetually repeats our Saviour's crucifixion. 
 Its surface morals may be higher than those of an ordi- 
 nary civilized community, but in its spirit it traverses 
 the lower, the infernal plane, representing the counter- 
 movement which opposes the introduction of divine har- 
 mony. It does not proselyte by a propaganda. The 
 spectacle of a born Christian embracing Judaism is rare 
 indeed. It conc^uers as the plague does, by insinuating 
 an almost palpable element, poisoning the world's morals 
 in their deepest seat.
 
 The Breath of God zvith Man. 57 
 
 The spirit that entered into the Jewish race when it 
 strove to annihilate the Incarnate Gospel, has never 
 forsaken it ; all its successive historical acts being the 
 evolutions of one continuity. The Christian sects pre- 
 serve the worst features of its barbarous monotheism, 
 and the beautiful and fragrant gospels are misinterpreted, 
 as the Talmudists reversed the meaning of the ancient 
 prophecies. In many respects, indeed, the creeds received 
 by the bigoted masses are cruel beyond the conceptions 
 of the Pharisees. Christendom shifts and changes, but 
 Judaism remains immovable. It chills the living, glow- 
 ing, generous instincts of quickened peoples and natures, 
 as the dwellers in a habitation are rendered cold and 
 melancholy by the presence of a corpse within the doors. 
 
 The Jewish time-conception of God's plan of govern- 
 ment, carried beyond the grave, and made an eternity- 
 conception, is the victorious creed which everywhere 
 conquers opposing religious nationalities, and reduces 
 solid walls of men to powder and atoms. The most 
 eminent of American preachers has said, " Give me a 
 Love, and even in the churches but few will rally around 
 it ; but give me a Hate, and millions will rally to my 
 standard." This is so. Islam conquered by the offer of 
 paradise to the believer, and the inexorable doom of Ge- 
 henna to the enemy. Those Christian sects which have 
 inscribed upon their banners, " Eternal salvation to the 
 convert, eternal damnation to everybody else," have 
 swept continents, and carried the fire and sword of doc- 
 trine from Britain to India. 
 
 Religious teachers of an opposite thought, who have 
 made salvation equivalent to love, purity, harmony, per- 
 sonal sweetness, fidelity to the loftiest ideals, have met
 
 58 The Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 with but narrow acceptance, and have never succeeded 
 in building up a dominant power. The sterner sects are 
 entrenched in the native ferocity of man. Christendom 
 itself would crumble in the successful effort to introduce 
 the doctrine that eternal salvation is conditioned, not on 
 favouritism but on human worth. As agent and re-agent, 
 the inverted Hebraism and the prevalent theological form 
 of Christendom sustain vital relations. Inside of the 
 Christian's idea of a Saviour are the stern, terrific features 
 of the barbarian Hebraic conception of God ; the idea 
 which our Lord came to abolish when He revealed the 
 Universal Father. The minorities in the great sects hold 
 different views, and painfully endeavour to accept the 
 doctrinal standards with an accommodated interpretation. 
 Language is indeed so flexible that with sufficient inge- 
 nuity it may be twisted into almost any form. 
 
 Yet Christendom is like Mount Hecla, covered with 
 snow above, and pumice and scoria and thick-ribbed 
 ice; but within, the molten elements that heave upon 
 the planet's inner fiery heart. Christ came into the 
 world and left His Spirit in the bosom of a great 
 body of believers. They soon chilled as the world 
 chilled at the close of its tertiary age. Belts of hea- 
 venly bloom, that once wove their laughing, fragrant 
 circles to the poles, contracted with the increasing cold 
 of ages, till winter led its squadrons to the very equator. 
 Whoever presses his bosom against the heart of any sect 
 finds it cold as ice. We are to look within, and there in- 
 sight may discover the fire that holds the seeds of life. 
 As, after this geological frost epoch, the earth re-acted 
 against its chill, so even now the frost epoch of Christen- 
 dom is melted by the first beams of a directer sun. The
 
 The Breath of God ivith Man. 59 
 
 breath of God plays upon the bosom, and the Divine fire 
 bursts forth to dissipate the cold of ages. 
 
 The Hebrew, as to his humanitary instincts, lives in a 
 perpetual chill. I once saw this illustration ; a bird was 
 singing from the affections of unity and solidarity, by 
 which men are gathered at once into the bosom of God, 
 the health of nature, and the fraternity of the race. It 
 was in the Celestial Heaven of the Hebrews that this 
 exquisite creature poured forth its lay, and the notes 
 sounded far and wide, awakening a whispering chorus in 
 the tender flowers. An angel called tlie bird, which 
 came fluttering into his breast, and then caused it to 
 descend until it flew forth a jewelled radiant phoenix, in 
 the interior or spiritual space of a Hebrew family on 
 earth. The bird, on feeling the breath of their affections, 
 was first covered with hoar frost, then masked in ice, and 
 then embedded as in a tiny glacier. The angel, by his 
 touch, caused the ice to melt, and, tenderly taking the 
 bird into his bosom, it revived, being immortal. 
 
 I was in the same place, and beheld a little snow-white 
 lamb, pure and spotless. The angel lifted it in his arms, 
 and with great care conveyed it into the same interior ; 
 instantly, smoke rose from the bosoms of the family, 
 covering it with a fuliginous noisome soot, as from the 
 fat of burnt meat. Layer succeeded layer ; and when the 
 substance had acquired consistence, it became like the 
 body of a black goat, emitting intolerable effluvia, and 
 endeavouring by its constrictions to pollute the lamb 
 within. In the same manner as before, the angel dis- 
 persed the goat form, and the lamb was seen, perfectly 
 unsullied, as the angel removed him to the heavenly 
 pasture where he fed.
 
 6o The Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 The same angel then took a resplendent diamond, and 
 held it in the internal space before the eye of the elder of 
 these Hebrews. The stone was inscribed within itself with 
 a precious truth concerning the true riches of the Spirit- 
 On being thus exposed, the gem ceased to shine, and 
 seemed a mass of opacity, the darkness in the eye of 
 this lover of the unreal riches entirely shutting up its 
 pure brilliancy. When the stone was removed, it burst 
 forth to great lustre ; and in it I saw this written, " Sell 
 that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have 
 treasure in heaven." 
 
 The angel then took a strip of white velvety paper, on 
 which were the words, " Through conjugial love our Lord 
 provides eternal union in heaven for the pure." The 
 sentence, when written, glistened with a diamond light, 
 interspersed with rubies, and was encompassed by a 
 little atmosphere of lucid gold. He laid this upon the 
 forehead of another of the Hebrews, and instantly the 
 writing became invisible, and the paper like black tinder; 
 but out of the brain of the man, as if stirred up by anta- 
 gonistic forces, shone lucidly, in the midst of phospho- 
 rescence, hieroglyphical characters, thus rendered, " Mar- 
 riage is permitted scortation, and nothing else." 
 
 At another time I met two Hebrews in a field of the 
 Spiritual World ; both, as to their natural bodies, resi- 
 dents of earth. One said to the other, " Dig ; we shall 
 find treasure." The other answered, " Why should we 
 labour, when we can waylay?" I then saw that robbery 
 was in their hearts ; and they both resolved that they 
 would spoil the first Gentile, having the appearance of 
 riches about him, who might pass that way. Soon after, 
 one resembling a very aged man drew nigh, in his hands
 
 The Breath of God zuith Man. 6i 
 
 bearing the likeness of a bag of treasure. Each grasped 
 his weapon, and springing upon the wayfarer from be- 
 hind, they began cruelly to beat him over the head. He 
 fell, in appearance lifeless, whereupon each seized the 
 bag, which burst open, strewing the ground with the gold 
 and silver. The old man, meanwhile reviving, begged 
 in a piteous tone that they would leave him two or three 
 pieces, that he might not be left both disabled and pen- 
 niless ; but the elder of them picked up a stone, and 
 thrust, in his mouth, crying, " That is your share, and all 
 you will get." They ran, hearing a coming footstep, 
 such panic seizing them that they had not time to gather 
 up the treasure. I was told by an angel, himself of this 
 race, that the Jews from our earth are inveterate spolia- 
 tors, and rove hither and thither as they may, many of 
 them forming companies of banditti. 
 
 I was once introduced into a company of Israelites in 
 their hell. The den resembled a habitation constructed 
 by spiders. There were, perhaps, twenty gathered, each 
 in his fantasy having put on, to celestial sight, a spider's 
 likeness, and the chief of them a shape more monstrous 
 than all, as if gorged to repletion with long successions 
 of victims. He said, " I am the founder of this house. 
 A fig for Jerusalem ! Let the fools go there if they will ; 
 I am content with usury." One replied, " Father, you 
 must be full of riches." He answered, " My body is 
 full, but my heart is so hungry for more, that were a man 
 to present himself made of gold, I would tear his flesh 
 and drink his blood." Another said, "Father, what is 
 the secret by which you have become so opulent ? " He 
 answered, " Craft, and the appearance of straight dealings. 
 My observation teaches me that it is wisest always to
 
 62 The Breath of God with Mati. 
 
 observe the laws of commerce ; the law gives us our ad- 
 vantage." The reply was, " The Gentiles are dogs and 
 thieves." But the old man answered, " Dogs ! I hate 
 them ; cursed be their mothers to Gehenna ; but they 
 say they have the kingdoms. Which is best, to be cast 
 in their prisons, or to adroitly slip into the inheritance 
 of their estates ? Go to ! The Law of the Gentile is made 
 for the advantage of the Hebrew." Another said, " Fa- 
 ther, beyond getting wealth, what do you purpose to do ? " 
 He answered, "When Messiah comes, He will lead us 
 to Jerusalem. I shall then be the richest inhabitant ; 
 you, my sons, Avill be princes. There is no end to the 
 riches which, after this, shall fill our coffers. But I have 
 said enough ; talking of gold is good, it whets the appe- 
 tite for more. Let us to our gains again." I was after- 
 ward, as to my spirit, in the society of certain Hebrews 
 in the natural world, and heard this conversation almost 
 verbatim repeated. 
 
 While the Hebrew loves gold, races under the influence 
 of Christendom uniformly crave land, even when its pos- 
 session is not so materially profitable. Spirits are fre- 
 quently seen, on leaving the body, anxiously inquiring 
 for desirable territories, and when they are informed that 
 there are such beyond, in the possession of peaceful races, 
 they ask if they have armies like those of France and 
 Britain, and if they can defend themselves. Sometimes 
 their conditions are such that they behold in the distance 
 the peaceful cities of the angels, delicious paradises, 
 broad lands, made rich by harmonious industry. On 
 beholding them, the spirit which has prompted the civil- 
 ized nations of Europe to overrun the earth, takes pos- 
 session of them, the spirit of Cortez and Pizarro.
 
 TJie Breath of God luith Man. 63 
 
 It is as if they beheld the tropical Bahamas, the gardens 
 of Mexico, the golden temples of Peru. The first excla- 
 mation is, " We are Christian people, and have the right 
 to discover and conquer all countries where the Christian 
 Religion is not in vogue." The infatuation which would 
 prompt the sectarist on earth to declare that the non-be- 
 liever in peculiar dogmas cannot be a Christian man, 
 incites these multitudes to declare that there is no Chris- 
 tianity in the Heavens. 
 
 Sometimes, when angels come down, they converse 
 with them, and this is permitted in order that men may 
 be brought to their real states by the calling forth of their 
 cupidities. Ungodly spirits, who are of the Evangelical 
 persuasion, declare, on hearing these statements, that it 
 is doing God service to go up and convert them to the 
 true faith, to carry them a pure gospel, to teach them 
 how to pray, and to convince them of the error of their 
 practices. They scent from afar the breath of those pure 
 lands, and instantly assert that these are countries which 
 await the triumphs of the Cross. Scenting nothing san- 
 guinary in the wafted atmospheres of worship and of love, 
 they conclude that what is known and practised there is 
 natural religion, which they have been taught to consider 
 a uniform infidelity. They quote the example of their 
 ancestors, who despoiled the North American continent, 
 and in the name of God make attempts to rob, subdue, 
 and deflorate the very Heavens. 
 
 The essence of the nominally Christian Society is 
 licensed robbery. It is but the casting off of a cloak 
 and the removing of an obstacle, and the unjust shop- 
 keeper becomes a bandit. Men whose cupidities have 
 been restrained on earth by the dread of present im-
 
 64 The Brcatli of God ivith Man. 
 
 prisonment and a final Hell, enter the Earth of Spirits 
 to emerge into their real characters. Living and d3ang 
 with but natural thoughts, their corporeal states unite 
 to persuade them that what they behold is but an ex- 
 tension of the earth. The education which they have 
 received, the passions which they have cherished, com- 
 bine for a period to fill them with the idea that they 
 stand on the borders of a new El Dorado, which awaits 
 the conqueror. One beholds Englishmen with the 
 banner of St. George, Frenchmen with the tricolour, 
 Americans with the stars and stripes ; and in curious 
 juxtaposition the clergyman who has doffed his cassock, 
 with the shopkeeper who has left the ledger, and the 
 malefactor whose neck yet bears a ghastly imprint of 
 the hangman's rope. " Beauty and booty " is the motto. 
 Yet differences here declare themselves, the more 
 outwardly sanctimonious proposing to possess these fair 
 lands by cunning, to introduce chicanery and all the arts 
 by which shrewd dealers acquire wealth, to marry the 
 rich and beautiful daughters, to establish the Sabbath- 
 school, the prayer-meeting, and the stated ministrations 
 of the gospel, to immerse the converts, if they are 
 Baptists, and to organize dioceses and build cathedrals, if 
 Episcopalians. One of their frequent practices is rigidly 
 to interrogate the proposed members of their predatory 
 bands, nosing out heresies among them with the keen 
 scent of practised theologians, and not admitting Socini- 
 ans, Universalists, or the like, unless converted by God. 
 " How," said one, " can Heaven smile upon our enter- 
 prise, unless it partakes purely of a missionary character ? 
 Poor naturalists, benighted pagans, how blessed it will 
 be to save them as brands from the burning !"
 
 The Breath of God luith Man. 65 
 
 So steeped in artificialities is the common sectarian 
 mind, that when they see a gentle, simple, exquisitely 
 natural man, from one of those regions, they will not 
 believe that the Spirit of the Crucified One fills his 
 being ; and again, beholding them so peaceful, so gentle, 
 harmless as doves, inoffensive as lambs, with no fire of 
 selfish passion boiling in the veins and giving colour to 
 the face, yet withal the possessors of lands fair as virgin 
 Eden, they cannot but conclude that they are a race 
 easy to be subdued. The temptation proves irresistible. 
 
 It has never entered into the heart of the natural man 
 to conceive of a purely harmonic society, radiating from 
 a centre of absolute integrity, through circles of absolute 
 obedience. The introduction of this doctrine inaugu- 
 rates a new Christian era. When spirits from Chris- 
 tendom leave the natural world, never having known 
 wherein true harmony consists, they are, for the most 
 part, slow to believe that the radiant empires, from time 
 to time made visible in the distant and superior expanse, 
 are other than the seats of races with whom they can 
 blend or associate, or at least victimise or overcome. It 
 is as if the Spaniard had been told that he could not 
 acquire the wealthy empire of Peru, or the Briton in- 
 formed that the dominion of India was beyond his 
 power. It is soon discovered, however, that other laws, 
 other forces operate than those which assist the material 
 conqueror, and after a time the predatory hordes begin 
 to cry, that they do not war with men, but with sorcerers 
 and magicians. 
 
 Sometimes these invading bands are permitted to 
 enter Paradises. They move on hilariously, intent on 
 spoiling some exquisite city which shines before them, 
 
 £
 
 66 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 and in the whirhvind of their fierce desire they enter its 
 precincts. Suddenly a choir of unarmed youths and 
 maidens encircle them, robed but for festivities, crowned 
 with chaplets, and with no weapon of defence beyond 
 the lute or viol. One perhaps puts forth his hand to 
 seize the person of some resplendent beauty. Her mild, 
 beaming eyes are uplifted ; she breathes in the unison of 
 the respirations of her companions. Instantly, without a 
 visible cause, the would-be violator begins to suffer the 
 pangs of impeded respiration, and sinks cold as the un- 
 sunned ice, immobile as a statue. 
 
 Others make signs for a truce, veil their purposes, and, 
 like the Spaniards with the unsophisticated aborigines 
 of America, assume the appearances of amity, declare 
 themselves sent on embassies from high Christian poten- 
 tates, empowered among other things to indoctrinate 
 them in the gospel of Jesus ; at the same time asking to 
 be received upon a friendly footing. The answer is 
 generally, " We bid you welcome, and shall not seek to 
 restrain you so long as you conform to our laws." They 
 are treated hospitably; refreshing food and drink is given 
 them, as it is written, " If thine enemy hunger, feed him ; 
 if he thirst, give him drink." They ravenously devour 
 the delicious viands, and quaff ^vith eagerness the rich 
 beverage. 
 
 A herald then stands forth and invites them to de- 
 clare their message. The subtle propagandist thereupon 
 begins to set forth his creed. He stops ; labours with 
 painful breath ; at last owns himself unable to speak. 
 A wise angel then courteously says in substance, " Per- 
 haps you are not aware that the breath of our Lord, 
 which softly undulates in the bosom of the atmosphere,
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 67 
 
 dwells in its might within our bosoms. He breathes 
 in us, and through us, and we respire wholly in and of 
 Him. If you will speak the truth concerning religion, 
 your discourse may proceed. If you assert untruths, the 
 breath of the Father binds your lungs." 
 
 Some of great skill in dissimulation reply, for the sake 
 of acquiring dominion there, " We are willing to think as 
 you do." Instantly they are seized with mortal pains, 
 and begin to writhe as serpents. The angel then con- 
 tinues, " To think as we do is not sufficient ; you must 
 will as we do, not compulsorily, but freely." Some cry 
 out in return, " What do you mean by willing as you 
 do?" Response is courteously given, "We mean, by 
 willing thus, that we will to have no ^^'ill but the will of 
 the Lord." When they hear this, internal horrors begin 
 to seize them, and the more violent shout, " Have at 
 them ! kill them ! " and the like, at the same time essay- 
 ing to compass violence. 
 
 Eyes are upturned to Heaven ; hands perhaps crossed 
 upon the bosom ; serenity is undisturbed. All those 
 holy breasts respire in one unison, and the bandits begin 
 to suffer the agonies of approaching suffocation, and are 
 soon helpless. It is thus demonstrated to these pre- 
 datory hordes from the lower Christendom that Heaven 
 is not to be molested. They are then kindly recon- 
 ducted to the frontiers, and suffered each to go toward his 
 own congenial place. 
 
 We have spoken of the passion for territorial acquisi- 
 tion which characterizes Christendom ; it assumes another 
 form in the Earth of Spirits. Soil is formed there by the 
 accretions and extensions of the spiritual passions of man; 
 good soil from the good, evil from the evil ; but mixed in 
 
 E 2
 
 6S The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 all cases with the opposite elements, because all there are 
 in mixed conditions. In the soil itself are hollow nmi- 
 tlings of earthquakes and violent explosions of subterra- 
 nean fires. "Whosoever touches the soil about me touches 
 me," said one. When a powerful Magical Spirit arrives 
 there, he soon discovers arts by means of which to render 
 his own peculiar soil a means for the accomplishment ot 
 his ambitious purposes. But he meets with perpetual 
 disappointments. The edifices which he builds crum- 
 ble, the defences which he rears yawn in chasms, the 
 implements which he creates decay. He 'must labour 
 with immense force and pertinacity to maintain the seem- 
 ings of power and state. If a consummate adept in the 
 arts of dissimulation, he develops the faculty of glossing 
 ■over the substances, causing the sordid elements to wear 
 the surface look of the precious minerals and metals; but 
 the mimic gold speedily becomes tarnished, and the ficti- 
 tious gems opaque and lustreless. Theologians, who 
 wrought with a great wealth of purple words to adorn and 
 dignify repulsive doctrines, are especial adepts in this 
 craft, but soon become weary of it. One of stronger will 
 frequently enters into the possessions of another, enslaving 
 the spirit and appropriating his effects. As spirits of a 
 given class assimilate, so their extended soils mass to- 
 gether. Thus barbaric societies are instituted, with their 
 accompaniments of scenery. As, in the hearts of those 
 whose inmost loves are evil, there are moral avenues that 
 open downward into Infernus, so corresponding passages 
 exist in the earths about them ; and as the evil ones rise, 
 and are subjectively operant in their bosoms, they also 
 rise by these winding ways, and appear issuing through 
 the soil.
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 6g 
 
 But on earth man is a spirit, though with a discreted 
 natural sjDhcre and body. The substanced emanations 
 of his frame are invisibly stratified about him and below 
 him. AVhenever his heart is open to the pit, the demons 
 rise to labour in the occult depths of his being ; but 
 whenever openings are made for the wicked, who are 
 able to clothe themselves in the finer substances of nature, 
 they enter his sphere and are then present with him, both 
 subjectively and objectively. Substances cohere by 
 similars, and hence all Christendom is encompassed and 
 interencompassed by a magical earth, coherent in the 
 unity of its passions and acting in their vitality. 
 
 When a man begins to rise into Divine respiration, he 
 is like one who has returned to life in the caverns of the 
 dead. The fetid soils cling about his body. The cor- 
 rupt miasms are gathered about his breathing organs. It 
 is only as the Divine respiration advances that a new 
 moral earth is formed about him. After respiration has 
 somewhat advanced, the new sphere by which he is en- 
 compassed violently disconnects itself from the old ; he is 
 then bodily discreted from the old Christian world, and 
 begins to be the inhabitant of a new earth, as he is the 
 recipient of a new Heaven. 
 
 We have considered, hitherto, the beginnings of the 
 new respiration and the obstacles. We now advance, 
 passing over intermediate stages, to the close of its ag- 
 gressive period in the frame. Man was created primarily 
 with a natural soul, capable of a conditioned immortality. 
 The wilful violation of the law of right subverted its 
 integrity ; it sank below the line of life, and entered the 
 realm of darkness and dissolution. The sentence pro- 
 nounced upon the natural soul of the first man of our
 
 70 TJic BrcatJi of God with Man. 
 
 earth was, "Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt 
 return." He transmitted to posterity his own physical 
 conditions. INIan, had not this occurred, would have 
 shared in that glorious process of ascension which 
 characterizes the harmonic universe, where sin is not. 
 Without here considering the question whether an ap- 
 pearance of decease would have attended his glorious 
 ascension, without either affirming or denying that cer- 
 tain corporeal exuvia in the outlines of the body would 
 have been left in a concrete mould, instead of being instan- 
 taneously and electrically dissipated, we may infer that 
 the natural soul, by the involution of its elements, would 
 have arisen, encompassing the spirit proper, a resplendent 
 and powerful form, serving the ends of the inner and 
 higher personality. (See A. of C. i, I. index.) 
 
 In the resurrection of the visible body of the Divine 
 Man, the glorious precursor of his rehabilitated and im- 
 mortal people, we have an illustration of the tenet. (See 
 also A. of C. I, I.) When the sentence was pronounced 
 against the natural soul of man, it was absolute and uni- 
 versal. It is the breath of our now glorified Lord, the 
 breath not of Deity without, but of Deity in humanity, 
 that begins to renovate the human constitution. It sweeps 
 on in majestic cycles, at every stage dissipating sordors, 
 casting out plagues, reducing inchoate elements to order, 
 at once solidifying and powerfully vitalising the frame. 
 At length it reaches the most intimate seats of the struc- 
 ture, the habitation of the natural soul. When this occurs, 
 that organism perishes. At this awful and solemn crisis 
 of our fate, a new natural soul, created through the Divine 
 Humanity of our Lord and therefore without evil, beau- 
 tiful as morning attended by the rosy hours, as spring
 
 The Breath of God with Man. /i 
 
 with the maidens of her floral train, a radiant apparition 
 of innocence and beauty and abundant joy, is insemi- 
 nated in its place. The spirit is thus clothed upon, in the 
 apt language of the apostle, with a house which is from 
 Heaven. After this, the rehabilitation of the frame is con- 
 tinuous. While the old natural soul maintained its evil life, 
 warfare existed between it and the recreating breaths ; but 
 now both spirit and soul breathe in one harmony, which 
 unifies the composite structure of existence. 
 
 This however, is the seed germ of a new beginning. 
 The new natural soul is first infantile, then juvenile, then 
 youthful, and finally adolescent ; becoming at each stage 
 more powerful, more active, more imperative. Now for the 
 first time begins to be formed about the new man, in the 
 fine spaces of nature, a human earth, which, unlike the 
 former earth, is permanent and indestructible, except as 
 wilful evils are suffered to intrude. Truth, goodness, 
 power, are its derived characteristics ; light, heat, and 
 harmonic motion its phenomena. It glows with a fine 
 purity, as a virgin light goldenly radiant. Its ardours 
 mount from those of the early spring to those of meridian 
 summer, and there remain ; for neither darkness nor de- 
 cay are among its contingencies; nor does its motion ever 
 cease, but becomes more rapid, a fiery belt, ruddy and 
 crystalline, radiating by its action the beams that are its 
 life. 
 
 When the cycle of terrestrial existence closes, the circle 
 narrows. The wheels revolve inwardly. The substances 
 are inter-attracted. They form about the natural soul a 
 radiant vesture. The breaths of the Lord, which in their 
 omnipotent outgoing have recreated man in the divine 
 image and likeness, plenarily uplift him in their final
 
 72 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 ascension. Whatever visible exuvia may remain in the 
 shell of the body, they contain no relics of the natural 
 soul. It is not death, for death is abolished. May such, 
 brother who readest, be thy blessed transit ; and may 
 those who see thee pass triumphantly, affirm, that "death 
 is swallowed up in victory." 
 
 Swedenborg, in his natural experience, was an illustra- 
 tion of the fact of open respiration in its earlier stages ; 
 while in his writings he cogently and very clearly sets 
 forth the nature of the respirations which existed in the 
 ancient Golden Age, and shows that the typical deluge, 
 involving far greater than a mere material catastrophe, 
 was a flood of elements which overwhelmed the ancient 
 breathings of the world. 
 
 That bounteous Wisdom, which ever delights to sur- 
 prise its creatures with fair and still more fair disclosures 
 of its face, has properly, if we may here use the word, 
 veiled over this most exquisite of all natural truths until 
 the present day. It lies, a virgin world, where the 
 flowers die not, and the fruits wither not, and the ele- 
 ments contend not ; where beauty celebrates her eternal 
 nuptials of innocence, amid the epithalamiums of celestial 
 choirs. It rises, an orbed star, in the heavens of con- 
 sciousness, a star of advent and hope. Blessed that 
 household, blessed all households, upon whom its beams 
 shall fall ! And blessed the brows encircled by its 
 aureole, and the bosoms that thrill and kindle to the 
 marches of its mystic gladness ! Orb of the new 
 nativities of man, which builds Bethlehem Ephratah in 
 the obedient, receptive frame ; orb, that if it shines above 
 the countenance, uplifted to the Father, upon lonely 
 mountains of temptation, or on the brow cinctured with
 
 The Breath of God with Man. 73 
 
 its ^^Teath of bloody sweat amidst the sorrows of Gethse- 
 mane, or if it pauses in suspense of light over the Calvary 
 where love consummates its days in martyrdom; yet breaks 
 forth with thrice Divine refulgence when the composite 
 man, leaving no element of either soul or spirit in the 
 embraces of corruption, follows its Infinite Precursor, 
 not unclothed but clothed upon, that mortality may be 
 swallowed up in life. 
 
 If we use the word Christendom as synonymous with 
 the pure, or real Christendom, we must yet bear in mind 
 that the corporate body, so called, is not Christendom ; 
 neither is heathendom, heathendom. The assumption 
 that any extant sect purely represents the Church Mili- 
 tant is a monstrous chimera, and the doctrine that any 
 creed represents a saving faith is equally fallacious. 
 Pure truth saves by its connection with pure good, and 
 otherwise there is no absolute salvation. Man may rise 
 into states of immature excellence, through the unitary 
 action of partial truth combined with partial good. The 
 grand old religions of the Orient, the faiths of Brahma, 
 Buddha, and of Zoroaster, and even Fetishism, the 
 lowest of all, according to their genius, each possess a 
 greater, lesser, or least degree, both of veracity and 
 morality. The rude African tribes, the dense myriads of 
 Asia, of whatever faith, and in whatever idolatry, dwell 
 not in unrelieved darkness. It is only when the indi- 
 vidual is elevated to a mental and moral superiority above 
 his creed, that it becomes an absolute injur}' to him. So 
 the Greek and Latin Churches, the various Protestant 
 bodies, are good to whomsoever of their disciples are 
 below their standards and amenable to their best and 
 truest influences and inculcations. They are uniformly
 
 74 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 injurious to whomsoever is striving to embody the purer 
 and nobler ideal. So long as the Methodist, the Baptist, 
 the Universalist, the Episcopalian, each according to his 
 respective proclivities and opennesses, morally and intel- 
 lectually grows under the combined operation of their 
 ministries, rites, and literatures, they represent, however 
 imperfectly, Divine helps. When a sceptic becomes a 
 Universalist, he advances ; when a sensualist becomes a 
 Wesleyan, it is a vast improvement ; when a worldling 
 embraces Episcopalianism, it is a change for the better. 
 No communion is one of unmixed falsity and evil, where 
 men are taught to shun depravities as sins against religion 
 and Divinity. 
 
 Considering this doctrine from another point, it is even 
 true that a pirate may receive a higher tone, under the 
 influence of gentle thieves, who have some remains of 
 conscience, which forbids their taking life. The man 
 who is both a gambler and a libertine may be improved 
 in the society of those — and there are those — who, while 
 given to the tricks of the sharper, look with scorn upon 
 debauchery. When Mahomet said that the lowest of the 
 Hells was for the hypocrites of all religions, he caught 
 the profile view of a noble doctrine ; for the hypocrite 
 lets all good and truth pass through him, appropriating 
 none. Hy[:)Ocrisy is the last prostitution of humanity. 
 So long as the soul really possesses a religious hatred of 
 this vice, there is one solid point in it whicli may serve 
 as a fulcrum for the Divine moral lever. 
 
 A doctrine of pure truth is the hope and desire of the 
 intellect, and a system of pure life the earnest and 
 agonised expectation of the will. The unrestful, the 
 unhappy seekers after both, especially in chaotic, un-
 
 Tlie Breath of God ivith Man. 75 
 
 settled times like the present, subject sect after sect 
 as to a crucial test 3 and, if they are growing in a 
 right direction, may reject one after the other; painfully 
 it is tme, yet not without advantage. When a man 
 arises above the standard of Methodism he will be in 
 agony until he leaves it, but this proves nothing against 
 its use to multitudes. It is impossible to apply a uniform 
 admeasurement, for each sect is good or bad to the 
 individual, as it facilitates or retards the extirpation of 
 the evils and the falsities, the quickening and the evolu- 
 tion of the purities and the veracities. The hyper-Cal- 
 vinist may be improved for a time by an experience of 
 Universalism, which is most true on the side where 
 Calvinism is untrue. Each sect commends itself to the 
 relatively good and true, by the prominence v/hich it 
 gives to some doctrine of truth or morals, of which they 
 feel the special need, and toward which they incline 
 warmly and sympathetically. It is only when men begin 
 to demand an absolute hannony of truth, for the purpose 
 of embodying it in the harmony of individual and uni- 
 versal existence, that the faith which here finds expres- 
 sion becomes a necessity. So long as one is not, as to 
 his spirit, as to his whole composite personality, pining 
 for a plenary union with the Divine Spirit, the lesser 
 faith will serve him ; the greater becomes only impera- 
 tive when the lesser fails to meet the exigencies of the 
 soul. 
 
 It is a great step for a man immersed in corporeality, 
 when he becomes convicted at heart with the truth that 
 there are great absolute moral distinctions between good 
 and evil, that the former is commendable, the latter dam- 
 nable. Upon this foundation he may raise, in time, the
 
 y6 TJic Breath of God with Ulan. 
 
 noblest superstructure. Where this groundwork is es- 
 tablished, a solid base is laid for the Divine temple ; 
 but the systems which annihilate this distinction are fatal 
 to the soul. That theory which teaches that vice is the 
 rudimental form of virtue, and that the difference be- 
 tween the Christ and the pirate is one of mere pro- 
 gression, works gradually upon the mind and heart with 
 the baneful enchantments of Circe, who transformed her 
 votaries into swine. In the ratio in which any sect 
 approaches this error, it divorces itself from Heaven, and 
 connects itself with Hell. This is the only faith on 
 earth that teaches an absolute infernalism ; it is pande- 
 monium in disguise. That such a doctrine is permitted 
 is, however, in the Divine providence ; it works good in 
 the age now passing away. Men were grouped and knit 
 together by habit, custom, the force of creeds and cir- 
 cumstances. 
 
 In the age upon which the world is just entering, the 
 reverse will obtain, and individuals will associate by the 
 stern yet beneficent operation of the Lord, by moral 
 proclivities and affinities. The doctrine which asserts 
 so positively that evil is but good in its germinal state, 
 and which therefore annihilates the final ground of moral 
 distinctions, subserves this important end ; forming a 
 nucleating point which will attract to itself its kindred 
 spirits, detaching them from the old religious parties, and 
 giving visible shape and consistency to that latent senti- 
 ment in the world, which not invidiously may be styled 
 the Antichrist. 
 
 On the other hand, the doctrine of absolute harmony, 
 resulting from absolute integrity, which is expressed in 
 these pages, will serve the opposite purpose. Moham-
 
 The Breath of God with Man. yy 
 
 medanism can rise no higher than the ideal of Mahomet ; 
 passing that ideal it is Mohammedanism no more ; Epis- 
 copalianism can rise no higher than the standards of its 
 creeds and liturgies. When it breaks these it is Episco- 
 palianism no more. But a faith of pure harmony in- 
 strumentally lifts men into the very bosom of Deity, 
 where the Divine respirations are led out through all the 
 frame. Unlike the creeds, which perish because they 
 make no provision for the knowledges of higher truth 
 through the evolution of nobler faculties, this answers 
 the final ends of Providence. It is a finality. The 
 time will come when what is here stated will be looked 
 upon as having served its day. Men will say, " So 
 sprang from earth this mighty tree, which now over- 
 shadows the world." The smallest of all seeds, but 
 because it contains the provisions for boundless growth, 
 it cannot be cancelled. It can never interpose any 
 barrier of limitations to the evolution of the Divine good 
 and truth in man. 
 
 This, therefore, is the Absolute Christianity. The ob- 
 jection, in the way of creeds, is not that they are state- 
 ments of doctrine, but that there is no absolute method 
 for their verification. It is monstrous to force on men 
 doctrines which they cannot verify, and consequently 
 the human intellect exists in a state of suppressed revolt, 
 ever gathering forces for spasms of revolution. But, on 
 the other hand, doctrinal standards, which, however super- 
 natural in their statements, however cosmical or psychi- 
 cal, can be organically demonstrated, and proven by 
 methods provided in the economies of the human frame, 
 are never liable to this objection. 
 
 Christendom is divided into three great schools of
 
 yS The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 thought ; the CathoHc, the Protestant, and the Rational- 
 ist. The Catholic holds that the canonical Scriptures 
 embody the Divine Revelation, and are to be received as 
 true ; but that such a thing as the right of private inter- 
 pretation does not exist ; that in matters of belief the 
 Church is the final authority. To the conscientious 
 Catholic, therefore, the voice of the Church is as the 
 voice of God. By the Church, it understands all those 
 who accept and obey that ecclesiastical organization of 
 which the metropolis is Rome. Whatever the Romish 
 hierarchy, assembled in general council, declare to be the 
 true exposition of any dogma, the majority of these ex- 
 pressing the voice of the Church, it is ipso facto an eternal 
 verity. This theory is imposing as it is venerable. There 
 is something august in the conception of a pontifical 
 body, the ancients of the faith, subsisting from generation 
 to generation, embosoming the Divine Presence and 
 authoritatively announcing the wisdom of Infinity. 
 
 The doctrine of the Protestant party is that the Bible 
 is the sole rule of faith and practice, and capable of in- 
 telligent interpretation, through the individual reason of 
 believers. It maintains the right of private judgnient, on 
 the ground that the dogmatic contents of the Scripture 
 can be understood through its exercise. Against the 
 Catholic idea of unity and authority it off-sets the con- 
 ception of liberty and individuality. This theory is also, 
 upon a different ground, sublime. No man can wonder 
 at the strong hold which it took upon the affections of 
 Christendom. It was a bulwark for the rights of men 
 against that most odious of despotisms, a tyranny which 
 builds around the intellect a dungeon, and excludes the 
 vital air until it becomes a tomb.
 
 The Breath of God with Man. "jc) 
 
 The third school is the Rationahstie, It denies both 
 that an hierarchal organism is final authority in matters 
 of religion, and that any writing or collections of wTitings 
 is master of the soul. Its theory is that all truth is sacred, 
 wherever found, and all error base, no matter by whom 
 taught, or where, or on what assumptions of authority. 
 It makes the enligthened consciousness, the most tho- 
 roughly and comprehensively cultured human reason, in 
 all matters, both of theology and ethics, a tribunal of final 
 appeal. From the obvious tyrannies of Rome, from the 
 seemingly incongruous statements of Scripture, it is not 
 to be wondered at that a large and increasing class of 
 thinkers recede to this last position ; it stands, a lofty 
 assertion of the dignity and grandeur of the human intel- 
 ligence, the exhaustive accuracy of its processes, the recti- 
 tude of its powers, the absolute value of its final con- 
 clusions. 
 
 But the Catholic School builds upon a foundation 
 which is untenable. The primitive Church ramified into 
 a multiplicity of parties : where is the evidence that 
 any one of these purely held the doctrine of Christ ? 
 Which was, and which was not the Church ? Rome 
 says, "Behold it in me!" But where is the proof? 
 Analysed, it amounts to no more or less than this, — that 
 in a period when rival dogmas fiercely contended, its 
 party, after a series of defeats and victories, obtained a 
 decided preponderance over the others. A preponde- 
 rance of what? Of numbers. So then, it rests purely 
 upon the fact of having cast a majority of votes in the 
 excitement of popular suffrages. In a word, God is on 
 the side of the heaviest battalions. Practically it divides 
 its adherents into two classes, a small minority of prac-
 
 8o "^hc BrcatJi of God with Man. 
 
 tised theologians, the philosophers of its dogma, and an 
 ovenvhelming majority of indifferent disciples, who, with- 
 out exercising the reason, are content to assent to a mass 
 of incomprehensible propositions, exercising no higher 
 attributes than those of a devout credulity. For be it 
 bonie in mind, that this system offers no test of doctrine 
 that can be applied successfully by the individual be- 
 liever. Be its tenets accurate or inaccurate, they are 
 wholly incapable of proof It is a theory of relative 
 weights, which cannot be demonstrated because the 
 scales balance in a vacuum. 
 
 The Protestant School holds simply the Catholic doc- 
 trine, pulverised to atoms ; merely substituting the indi- 
 vidual unit for the composite society. It makes the 
 decisions of the individual believer individually valid, as 
 its rival makes the decisions of the hierarchal conclave 
 generally valid. The same objection applies to both 
 methods. It is furthermore open to the most destructive 
 criticism. First, the Bible, as containing a dogmatic sys- 
 tem, is not a simple statement, but one of infinite com- 
 plexity. But how many, in the multitude of individual 
 believers, possess the centrality and continuity of thought 
 requisite for the translation of its myriad of statements, 
 many of them in apparent conflict, into one grand and 
 veritable harmony? Again, when one has arrived at 
 conclusions of his own, concerning what the Bible teaches 
 of God, of creation, of judgment, of Heaven, and Hell, 
 and the awful series of most momentous doctrine, by what 
 process can he prove his conclusions; especially in the pre- 
 sence of myriads of hostile thinkers, each going to the 
 same record as prayerfully, as conscientiously, andas ration- 
 ally, yet each elaborating his widely dissimilar system.
 
 The Breath of God with Mati. 8i 
 
 There is no doubt that each of the Protestant sects 
 originated in the honest application of the individual 
 judgment to the self-same Scripture. In this respect the 
 original Protestant assumption has proved a failure. It 
 has led, and is leading great multitudes to the honest 
 conviction, that there is no certainty in the conclusions 
 of any sect, and that the grave doctrines of theology are 
 incomprehensible in the present state of man. Practi- 
 cally, the great Protestant sects are obliged, in self- 
 defence, to copy the Romish example. Each assumes 
 the infallibility of its system of interpretation, and conse- 
 quent doctrinal formulas. The Baptist, the Calvinist, no 
 more reads the Scriptures to form a creed for himself. 
 He reads them for the purpose of collating texts and 
 adducing arguments to support the hypotheses of the 
 creed of the sect which enrols him among its disciples. 
 In a modified sense the system works as does the Romish 
 one ; the ecclesiastical few stand in place of the reason to 
 the secular many : the whole structure is built on assump- 
 tions which, when tested, are as the airy fabric of a dream. 
 
 Finally, of the Rationalistic School, which translates 
 the ultimate court of appeal from the council and the 
 Scripture to the individual reason. Men arrive at right 
 conclusions in science, because they can apply material 
 tests to material estimates. In a question so remote as 
 that of the distance and the bulk of Sirius, there is a 
 material gauge and demonstration. But when we enter 
 on the ground of spiritual facts, forms, laws, and forces ; 
 when we analyse revelations, which deal with these in 
 parables, metaphors, illustrations, no less than in appa- 
 rently direct phrase, how can the natural intellect educe 
 a rational and universal truth? Hence Rationalism 
 
 F
 
 82 TJic Breath of God with Man. 
 
 breaks up into schools as varied and fantastic as the clouds. 
 What German philosophies rise and fall ! What periodical 
 developments of " Liberal Theism" or " Liberal Christian- 
 ity !" The effect is the production of a profound sadness 
 in mind and heart ; the gold turns to dross in the crucible, 
 and the gem shivers to atoms in the lathe of the polisher. 
 Alas, the conclusion is, unfaith in the processes of reason, 
 a sinking back from mere exhaustion, and from the aching 
 and craving appetite for infallibility and certainty, from 
 one religious cloud-bank to another, till the soul welters 
 at last into the stagnated mother-pool — Rome. 
 
 A final and more recent nebula of a party demands a 
 passing notice ; that of the modern Spiritists or Spiritual- 
 ists. But it cannot be assigned a dogmatic place, because 
 it has no place, it is protean. Among Spiritists are Ca- 
 tholics, Protestants of nearly every type, and Rationalists. 
 In all its distinctions there is one unifying tenet, that the 
 departed communicate with men. It was believed by 
 •many intelligent persons, that as communications were 
 opened between the natural and spiritual worlds, the 
 mysterious veil which hides the face of Truth from mor- 
 tals would be drawn aside. But the sphinx is not thus 
 read, the countenance of Isis not thus made visible. 
 Here, if anything is proved, it is that communications are 
 received which confirm each man in the faith which his 
 spirit cherishes. If in America nearly all become the 
 adherents of the doctrine of natural progression, it is 
 because this is the doctrine inscribed in the constitution 
 of the inverted fleshly man; and if it annihilates the ground 
 of moral distinctions, it is because this falsehood is organ- 
 ized in the midst of the disease and depravity and per- 
 versity of the fallen natural soul.
 
 TJic BrcatJi of God tvith Maji. 83 
 
 The more numerous class of Spiritists make, theoreti- 
 cally, reason and nature the test of truth; but, underlying 
 the statement, is the assumption that the reason which 
 ignores the radical distinctions of good and evil is the 
 true reason, and the world in which depravities have 
 made the history of humanity a long abomination is a 
 normal, healthful world. It assumes first what it cannot 
 prove, and second Avhat is utterly repugnant to the puri- 
 fied and quickened heart. Theology to-day occupies the 
 position which Geography did before men knew the 
 rotundity of the globe, and that Astronomy held in times 
 when learned and studious men balanced between the 
 hypotheses of Ptolemy and Aristotle. 
 
 It is affecting to observe, in all religious organizations, 
 the same Divinity striving to descend in loving benefac- 
 tion ; the same humanity struggling to arise in faith and 
 aspiration. Most pathetic also to behold, amidst the 
 throng gathered together, some by curiosity, some by 
 novelty, others by worldly interests or morbid supersti- 
 tion, the same Divine Stranger : and here one pressing 
 closely to betray, and there another to stretch forth the 
 hand and touch the hem of His garment and be healed 
 of a life's infirmity. The God of Islam, of Buddhism, of 
 Rome, and Protestant Orthodoxy, and Liberalism, and 
 Rationalism is the same God, The Christ of the Catho- 
 lic, the Wesleyan, the Unitarian, is the same Christ. The 
 one Heaven, that is without a rent or stain, folds its pure 
 and seamless mantle around the penitent, the virtuous of 
 all religions. 
 
 Deeply instructive too are the lessons suggested by the 
 opp'osite developments of character in the bosom of the 
 same belief. Those who yearn for the purest purity and 
 
 F 2
 
 84 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 the most loving love, find, even in the narrowest creeds, 
 a means of grace ; while those whose tendencies are to 
 bitterness and strife grow hard and cruel under the most 
 genial ministrations. Two of the most devout of Catho- 
 lics were Pascal and Torquemada, each a son of the 
 church, but the former an Abel or a John, the latter a 
 Cain or an Iscariot ; the one all tenderness and sympathy, 
 possessing the maximum of virtue and the minimum of 
 defect, and the other cruel as the fire he kindled, and un- 
 feeling as the instruments of torture that he applied with 
 the same remorseless purpose to tender maidens and 
 learned and pious men. Could we sift any sect, we should 
 find everywhere incipient Pascals, germinantTorquemadas. 
 
 What lessons, also, both of hope and terror, are de- 
 rived from facts like these. Universalism is commonly 
 considered as but an epidermis of religion drawn over 
 the lifeless anatomy of belief; yet here, amidst the 
 worldly who crave a faith that makes salvation inevitable, 
 may be found troops of tender-hearted women, merciful 
 and hopeful men, youths who cherish transcendent aspi- 
 rations, venerable matrons, nursing, amidst the snows of 
 age, the purest flames of that sweet piety that broadens 
 and brightens to the eternal morn. 
 
 On the other hand, no morality is so high as that of 
 Swedenborg, no philosophy so intellectual, no faith so 
 utterly hostile to self-love and to its worldliness ; yet here, 
 where Heaven and Hell are translated almost into visible 
 actualities, and freedom asserted upon its broadest pre- 
 mises, the sensualist is confirmed in voluptuousness, and 
 the formalist in an eviscerated, petrific pharisaism. Beside 
 the holy heart that expatiates in a wide realm of inflow- 
 ing beatitudes, another nurses scorjiions, and its fires
 
 TJic Breath of God zvith Man. 85 
 
 and forges harden the ore of its hatreds into the weapons 
 of spiritual assassination. 
 
 All too present the same stratifications of a human 
 geology : a broad layer of religionists, whose attribute is 
 utter worldliness ; above it one characterised by pharisai- 
 cal morality; and still higher a vitalised soil, mellow from 
 the sunlight, and adorned with the springing verdure of 
 a fresh humanity. 
 
 So with all priesthoods : there is a class who make the 
 pulpit a profession, as medicine or law ; a class who make 
 it a charlatanry ; another a chicanery : another a refined 
 perfumery and jewellery; another who carry into the ser- 
 vices of religion pure hypocrisy. Then again, we behold 
 the good natured, kindly, but lax and easy sensualist; the 
 fiery zealot and propagandist ; the rigid, chill ascetic ; the 
 insist er on ritual as paramount to doctrine ; the expounder 
 of the system as rather a proposition and a philosophy ; 
 and still beyond, a class who interpret the doctrine from 
 a standpoint of Catholic fellowship, who make its very 
 scorpions into fishes, who turn its stones into bread, and 
 transform its water into wine. 
 
 And once more, its sacraments are implements more 
 piercing than any pain, and palliatives more dangerous, 
 more seductive, more stupefying than any perfumed, medi- 
 cated poison. The clergyman whose heart is hollow as 
 the tomb, and a co-labourer whose heart is vital with 
 Divinity, alike administer them. The bread and wine 
 from the hand of the secret idolater may nourish one 
 communicant as with the body of holiness and the blood 
 of self-sacrifice ; the Eucharistic elements, even at the 
 pure hands of the other, may confirm the hardened bigot 
 in a life's unfaith, and establish the delusions that rise
 
 S6 TJie Bj-cath of God ivith Man. 
 
 like exhalations from the growing putrefaction of the soul. 
 The conclusion we arrive at is, that truth and falsity, good 
 and evil, honesty and imposture, liberty and slavery, God 
 and Satan, Heaven and Hell, in multiplicities of inter- 
 involved powers, are ramified through all. That all have 
 stairways into a paradise, all secret paths into the deep 
 Gehenna, all rivers of life that cleanse and renovate the 
 nature, all counter-streams of death that chill the spirit 
 into stone. 
 
 The advantage which the Respirationist possesses 
 over either of the foregoing parties is, first, a standard 
 of truth, including all that is valid in church tradition 
 with the Catholic, the divine contents of Scripture with 
 the Protestant, and the universal facts and laws of nature 
 with the Rationalist. 
 
 "No pent Uticn. contracts our powers, 
 But the whole boundless continent is om-s." 
 
 But the Catholic is not able to winnow his traditions, 
 to separate the verity from the imposture, the celestial 
 from the infernal. The Protestant is not able to enter 
 into an accurate analysis of Scripture. In the exhausted 
 receiver of his natural mind the feather and the ingot 
 weigh alike. He is unable to distinguish fully between 
 the historical, the prophetical, and the allegorical ele- 
 ments ; unable, from ignorance of any systematic doc- 
 trine of the value and relations of its symbols, to decipher 
 those occult correspondences ; unable, from the absence 
 of the laws of illumination and inspiration, to justify the 
 Divine origin of prophecy. He is like the savage who 
 has become the possessor of a theodolite or an electrical 
 battery — aware that the metals of which they are com- 
 posed have uses, but only able to make them serve some
 
 TJic BrcatJi of God with Man. 87 
 
 feeble end, as they are resolved into their brass or steel. 
 The iron, when hammered, serves him as a fish-hook or 
 a spear-point. 
 
 If the theory of the Protestant were correct, Scripture 
 would serve, when faithfully studied by the conscientious 
 disciple, as a lucid system of Divine truth, and the wise 
 would differ no more in its interpretations than astro- 
 nomers differ in their readings of the ^^ Mechanique 
 Celeste.^'' Far from this being the case, the antagonisms 
 developed between the different schools are irrecon- 
 cilable. But while the Protestant is crushed under the 
 weight of the letter and bewildered by the rushing forces 
 of the Spirit of the Word, the Respirationist enters into 
 the possession of the Scripture as the child into his 
 Father's house ; that Parent being present as his neces- 
 sities require, patient to explain of its construction, to 
 throw open its doors, to interpret the significance of 
 sculpture and picture ; in a word, to indoctrinate him in 
 tlie use and peculiarity of its every treasure. 
 
 What, after all, can the Rationalist know of nature ? 
 Its surfaces, but not its contents ; its forms, but not their 
 origins or destinies. He lives intellectually in subter- 
 ranean crypts, but has no access to its earthly halls and 
 heavenly watch-towers. The known is a group of iso- 
 lated points, the inevitably unknown all that is beyond 
 them. We are far from underrating the natural sciences, 
 natural philosophies, increasingly true and copious in 
 their own spheres; but beyond what is there to the 
 natural reason ? Comte, Parker, take refuge at last in a 
 groundwork of unproved assumptions ; they assume an 
 anatomy and physiology of Providence, but the varied 
 and rival assumptions are incapable of demonstration.
 
 88 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 This is also correct of the various classes of Spiritists. 
 Where the intellect requires assurance and stability, the 
 rock proves quicksand, the light an ignis fatjius, the 
 uplifted celestial vision a mirage painted on the eyeball. 
 But how with the Respirationist ? He is in his dear 
 home. It is firm earth, pure water, sweet air, and solid, 
 transparent sky. He who lives in the bosom of his 
 Maker dwells in the open secret of His work ; for the 
 All-illumining Intelligence at once warns him of the 
 fallacy, and convinces him of the verity. 
 
 A second advantage which the Respirationist pos- 
 sesses is a Church which is not a sect, but a people; 
 not a mechanism constructed from without, but a living 
 organism unfolded from within ; a body not fashioned of 
 heterogeneous materials, but homogeneous. It is the pro- 
 perty of a living, healthful organism to repulse and cast 
 out effete and noxious substances. The various eccle- 
 siasticisms may exclude the avowed heretic ; they have 
 no process by which to separate the secret one. They 
 may exercise a supervision over the surfaces of the 
 morals, but cannot discriminate between the morality 
 which is the wolf's clothing and that which is tlie lamb's 
 personality. Hence the churches are composed of the 
 good and evil, and the one class can neither exclude nor 
 absolutely test the real essentials of the other. The 
 fault is not with bodies or individuals, but grows out of 
 the inherent necessities of things. 
 
 It is true that, in the early stages of respiration, 
 through which all must pass, there is an ever-recurring 
 danger of relapse into worldliness ; but when both 
 character and constitution are reconstructed, a point is 
 reached from which few will recede ; the divine breaths
 
 The BreatJi of God zvith Man. 89 
 
 in their copiousness flowing continually, and impulsing 
 through their unitary body, will so consolidate them that 
 it must be impossible for any hostile element to find a 
 place; while, should lapses occur, it is not probable 
 that the wilfi^il transgressor could continue to breathe the 
 breath of life. Even were existence continued, the with- 
 drawal of the Divine breath would operate as an organic 
 disseverance and exclusion. Thus provision is made for 
 a constituted body, consisting wholly of new men, new 
 in the regenerate will and understanding, new in the 
 reconstituted natural soul ; absorbing into its structure 
 by attraction all men of whatever class, made spiritually 
 and physically regenerate, and casting forth by repulsion 
 everything intrinsically hostile to Divine purity. 
 
 A third advantage is, that in the nature of things neither 
 adversity nor prosperity can destroy this vital union, 
 or cause it to decease by corruptions. Prosperity is fatal 
 to the religious life of all ecclesiastical corporations. It 
 is impossible for any sect long to maintain the height of 
 its earliest moral state. Ecclesiastical history demon- 
 strates that the first days of a sect are spiritually its best 
 days. Whenever a religious body becomes socially digni- 
 fied, numerous and opulent, it attracts a larger and larger 
 class of mere surface livers, men and women of the world. 
 The ministry becomes a profession, and is sought as other 
 professions, from the distinction to be obtained by pul- 
 pit oratory, from the social advantages which accrue to 
 the sacred profession, and from the competence which 
 it secures. The primitive fervour of the sect is quenched. 
 It becomes involved in the perpetration and preservation 
 of great social iniquities. It lends its influence to those 
 conservative institutions which confer additional prestige,
 
 90 TJie Breath of God ivith Man. 
 
 while it becomes the enemy of the radical reforms that 
 seek not merely to lop the limbs, but to uproot the mighty 
 tree of tyranny. It is seldom that a new religious or- 
 ganism is the result of a simple intellectual revolt. Ideas 
 alone never embody themselves in institutions. A class 
 of fervent, earnest persons are driven by the conviction 
 of the corruption in the bosom of their own religious 
 society, first to strive for its reformation, and failing in 
 this, to leave it, and unite for the purpose of more fully 
 embodying the Christian ideal. The corruptions of 
 Rome prepared Europe for the Protestant Reformation, 
 and the corruptions of Protestantism in its decline are 
 attended by Reforms which constantly evolve minor 
 religious bodies. Still ideas play a part, yet commonly 
 an inferior one. 
 
 But for a body, composed of noble spirits, possessing 
 the Divine life in the very circulations of the frame, to be 
 debauched by prosperity is impossible. First, no world- 
 ling can live in its atmosphere. Second, it can never 
 compromise, either upon a radicalism of doctrine or of 
 life \ never enter into a moment's truce with any evil, 
 however plausible, or profitable, or gigantic. It is op- 
 posed, both by the essentials and the ingredients of its 
 constitution, to the entire body of the inversions of the 
 world. It can, therefore, never cease to war against those 
 inversions till the Divine harmony becomes universal. 
 Third, no man in whom the Divine respiration has begun 
 can stand still ; he must advance or perish. So of the 
 body in which all are constituents. The Divine breaths 
 never pause ; that body must advance or perish. In the 
 sects, the form may subsist after the spirit has become 
 corrupt; but here the form, for its existence, depends
 
 TJic Breath of God zuith Man. 91 
 
 upon that spirit's ever growing perfection. There is no 
 possibihty for the repetition of the experience either of 
 Protestantism or of Rome. 
 
 A fourth and final point. In the old sects hereditary 
 depravity is transmitted ; parents do not bequeath to 
 their children physical harmony, equilibrium, sanity, and 
 purity. But offspring born of parents who possess the 
 Divine harmony insphered in the spirit, and embodied in 
 the new natural soul, can impart to their progeny nothing 
 but good. It is a new beginning of the generations. No 
 mother will bear a child like Aaron Burr, whose gigantic 
 depravity sprang through the loins of a succession of 
 pious ancestors. Goodness will ripen from goodness in 
 the long processions of the ages. 
 
 Heaven and Hell, words of light and mystery, words 
 of bale and terror, exercised in all ages a potent charm, 
 challenging for their elucidation the powers of all philo- 
 sophy, and moving with a various force on every moral 
 and intellectual faculty of man. The more recent thought 
 of Christendom has narrowed each conception to its 
 least possible limits, while the coarse theory of the Posi- 
 tivist reduces each to a spectral image. Practically, 
 almost all men live at present for aims and objects 
 limited to the mundane sphere. That time is the seed 
 field of eternity, is a thought confined to the few. The 
 imagination loves to be cheated with brilliant spectacles, 
 and the most popular pulpit oratory is that which dazzles 
 the eye with a profusion of histrionic splendours. The 
 deepest experience cannot be communicated through the 
 channels of either the pulpit or the religious press, for 
 the reason that both are committed to the eternal com- 
 monplace. No higher thought can find access to the
 
 92 TJic B7'catJi of God with Mati. 
 
 popular mind, drugged as it with the opiates or stimu- 
 lated with the fiery draughts of a purely artificial theology. 
 The so-called liberal classes, as a si7ie qua non, demand 
 that every original statement shall deny the incarnation 
 of the Divine Man. The thinker who proceeds upon the 
 premise that Christ is God, finds here no audience. On 
 the other hand, the Orthodox public, under the discipline 
 of their leaders, as rigorously require that no statement 
 shall contravene their cherished tenet, that it is not possi- 
 ble to know anything of Heaven or Hell except through 
 gross natural interpretation of the verbiage of Scripture. 
 
 The man who enters into and passes through the pre- 
 paratory stages of the Divine breath, requires a more 
 comprehensive statement, both of the celestial and the 
 infernal worlds. We now proceed to define their real 
 significance. Properly speaking, there is no Heaven 
 possible, subjectively, but that of human nature glorified 
 by indwelling Deity. No Hell, subjectively, but that of 
 human nature occupying the antagonistic pole. The 
 good man, divested of all evil, embodies the celestial 
 state, possesses it plenarily within itself, breathes in its 
 breath, thinks in its intelligence, wills in its virtue, and 
 enjoys in the interminable ranges of its beatitudes. The 
 true conception of an angel is that of the rectified' and 
 balanced man, whose state of moral excellence has 
 ripened into an immortal habitude. 
 
 Heaven, objectively, is the art-world of the soul : not 
 a vacuum, because the works of the Spirit are substantial 
 creations ; not a floating fantasy mirrored from within, 
 because the spirit in its determinate activities continually 
 evolves the essential qualities of substance into its own 
 space. Within the natural home, taste delights to gather
 
 The Breath of God ivith Man. 93 
 
 beautiful adornments ; man surrounds himself, so far as 
 possible, with the objects that portray his bosom loves. 
 The effort of art is perpetually to wed sentiment to sub- 
 stance. Every man is first incarnate in flesh, and second 
 inworlded in nature. 
 
 We know little of the nature of our incarnation, first, 
 because the conjunction bet^veen the spirit and the body 
 is one not of concords, but of discords, owing to the 
 disorders and casualties which have befallen the race : 
 and second, because the faculties which man was sure to 
 per\'ert have been temporarily eclipsed, until such a time 
 as Divine restorative powers might be let down into the 
 world. Through those restorative agencies, man as a 
 spirit first becomes re-incarnated, and secondly re-in- 
 worlded organically. He then experiences the powers 
 and the delights of Heaven, and, by the contrast of 
 opposite conditions, becomes sensible of the constituents 
 that enter into the substance and the insanity of Hell. 
 
 The delights which on earth have a physical basis, in 
 Heaven have the same. This is true also of those which 
 have an intellectual or moral foundation. In order that 
 the man of the new age may be pleasantly exhilarated 
 and refreshed by suitable presentations of the state into 
 which the respirations of our Lord will finally uplift him, 
 my eyes were opened, and I was permitted to translate 
 into natural language one of those volumes which exist 
 in Heaven ; its title. The Pleasures of the Angels. By 
 considering that which now follows, the reader will form 
 a clear idea of the object which the Divine Father seeks 
 to obtain, especially, by His present providential dealings 
 with those whom He visits in the recreation, alike of the 
 spirit and its frame.
 
 94 The Breath of God zvith Man. 
 
 The Pleasures of the Angels. 
 
 Constantius and Constantia, a wedded pair, at home, 
 received upon the five-hundredth anniversary of their 
 celestial nuptial union, as inmost bosom guest, the Crea- 
 tor of their spirits, and the eternal Restorer of their joys. 
 He filled at once their twofold person. His hands were 
 in the hands that touched each other ; His eyes within 
 the eyes that looked upon each other ; His image in the 
 countenances that reflected unknown beatitudes. And 
 Constantius was a man-child in whom willed and spake 
 All-Father, and Constantia was a woman-child in whom 
 responded All-Mother. And from the inmost oneness of 
 the Divine Being they were embosomed each in each, as 
 loveliness in loveliness, innocence in innocence, and 
 blessedness in blessedness. 
 
 In that sacred interpervasion they were conscious at 
 once of unity and duality, of sex in all the degrees of 
 spirit, and thence in all the attributes of person ; of 
 eternal youth, of immortal vigour, of pure affection, trans- 
 lucent intelligence, and exquisite sensation. In possess- 
 ing each other, they possessed the Lord, and knew the 
 innumerable joys that move within the harmonious infi- 
 nitude of Deity ; and they received power unitedly from 
 that thrice holy communion, to clothe in the words of 
 Heaven that which is herein written concerning the 
 angelic joys. 
 
 We began our life upon the earth in the midst of 
 penury, war, ignorance, and oppression. In childhood 
 our Lord removed us from mortality. At ages which 
 correspond respectively to nineteen and seventeen, our 
 garments were given us, called beauty ; our shoes, called
 
 Tlic Breath of God with Man. 95 
 
 innocence ; our crowns and coronets, called knowledge 
 and perception; becoming members of the youthful 
 society in a Heaven called " Respiria," because it is that 
 expanse which corresponds to the breathing organs of 
 the frame. We were of that genius which is called com- 
 posite. The fire-Adam of the will, a resident for the Fire- 
 Christ of affection ; the light- Adam of the understanding, 
 a habitation for the Fire-Christ of intelligence ; and the 
 breath-Adam of the body, the temple for the Fire-Christ 
 of sensation, Three in One. But, within the fire-Eve, 
 dwelt the Fire-Christ-woman of the delight of affection ; 
 and within the light- Eve, dwelt the Christ-woman of the 
 delight of wisdom ; and within the breath-Eve, dwelt the 
 Christ-woman of the delight of sensation. Three in One. 
 Thus it is with all who inherit into the life of the Divine 
 Spirit. So, giving Himself, our Creator prepares the two 
 to become one heart, one mind, one body, one love, 
 one wisdom, one felicity. 
 
 Blessed are all they who enter into the bosom felicity 
 of the Infinite Love in unison with its own Infinite Wis- 
 dom. The home of Constantius, where he dwelt with 
 many youthful brethren, was an embodiment of the fire- 
 truth of the Fire-Christ's love, the light-truth of the Light- 
 Christ's wisdom, the breath-truth of the Breath-Christ's 
 person. This wrought a triune firmament for the stars of 
 three heavens, and midway in the orient shone the visible 
 sun of the Divine Presence, giving light to all. 
 
 And when Constantius breathed in the fire-heart of his 
 love, he respired in unison with the fire-heart of the 
 highest, the Celestial Heaven. It was the heart that 
 breathed, the heart of the immortal frame ; and in the 
 breath were songs, odours, and festivities. '
 
 96 TJlc Breath of God with Mati. 
 
 But Constantia dwelt in a Xwm paradise with many- 
 virgin companions. In the Motherhood of All-embracing 
 Deity was that blessed home. Her eyes, dark and lumi- 
 nous, beheld the woman firmament, and saw within the 
 day's luminary the Woman Infinite. There she sang — 
 
 Woman's heart and woman's hand, 
 
 Pure and virgin and alone, 
 By the Woman's arch are spanned. 
 
 Circled by the Woman zone. 
 
 Nothing there may interfuse 
 
 With the light that flows beside, 
 Odours, harmonies, nor hues ; 
 
 Being flows with single tide. 
 
 E'en the Father God appears 
 
 Through the Eternal Mother's face, 
 
 Till the blooming vestal years 
 
 Robe and crown the maiden grace. 
 
 Heavenly King and Heavenly Queen, 
 
 Father, Mother, two in one. 
 First in Deity are seen. 
 
 Beaming from the Bridal Sun. 
 
 The true order of the angels requires for its perfection 
 that every spirit shall be from inmosts conjoined to its 
 eternal counterpart, since the harmonies of the Heavens 
 are unfolded through the unison of two hearts in one 
 love, two minds in one truth, and two bosoms in one 
 coactive joy. Otherwise the Heavens could not cohere 
 together, their substances would be dissolved, their fir- 
 maments folded up, their flowers never multiply, their 
 orchards bear no fruits, and their birds of song be 
 silent. 
 
 In that sweet Paradise, in whose bosom Constantia
 
 The Breath of Cod with Man. 97 
 
 had lier home, was an inmost labyrinth. Thither, led by 
 the inward breathings of the Mother Deity, she retired to 
 meditate in the day of the utmost perfection of maidenly 
 innocence. The festive loves within her bosom sang, 
 accompanying their voices in an audible refrain with 
 sweet-toned instruments, vibrating through the bosom, 
 and encompassing her in a chiming atmosphere. The 
 pavilion to where she was conducted was illumined from 
 within by the light of the purity of the Infinite Woman- 
 hood, and there she hetird the voice of AU-Alother, sing- 
 ing "Daughter, first born within my own love, and sheltered 
 beneath my Word, my joy cannot be full in thee till thou 
 art given to thy inmost bosom's twin created spirit ; thy 
 life 's life, as thou art his." And while these words were 
 being spoken in her ear, she looked up and beheld a 
 youth who had been conducted through the same laby- 
 rinth by the breathings of All-Father. He saw her, and in- 
 stantly knew that she was formed as the love of his love, the 
 wisdom of his wisdom, and the person of his person ; while 
 she, in turn, with tender innocent delight beheld in him the 
 image of her soul's love, the likeness of her spirit's truth, 
 and the expression of her breathing thought in form. 
 
 We shrink from repeating these high strains. To cast 
 them upon the stream of the world's thought is like throw- 
 ing a wreath of white lilies upon the black current of a 
 sewer. In nothing is man's depravity so evident as in 
 the coarseness of his thought concerning sexual love. 
 This vein of his ordinary sensation is obviously a jet of 
 the infernal fire; yet this subject cannot be passed over, 
 for out of it are all the issues of renovated life. Con- 
 stantius and Constantia, two in one ! The pure woman is 
 the receptive form for the indwelling of the Infinite Woman- 
 
 G
 
 98 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 hood, the pure man for the Infinite Manhood. As there 
 is an infinite play and procession of divine affections be- 
 tween the Love and Wisdom of Deity, so the man and 
 the woman, constituting in marriage unity one composite 
 individuahty, endlessly reciprocate in each other's bosoms 
 the delights which descend from Deity and dwell within 
 the wondrous frame. 
 
 It is obvious that neither Rome or Protestantism incul- 
 cate this faith, nor do they leave it as an august problem 
 to be solved within the portals of a better life. Rome is 
 essentially in its theory monastic. jNIarriage is a permitted 
 impurity, or at least, in point of holiness, far below celi- 
 bacy. Rome never twined a wreath of celestial flowers 
 for Hymen's brow ; never chanted a heavenly epithala- 
 mium; never overshadowed the nuptial couch with reverent 
 wings ; never diffused a sanctifying power to exorcise the 
 genii who invade and desecrate its mysteries. It leaves 
 the sweetest of all human affections in the grave, where 
 the body perishes, and inscribes the sentence of everlast- 
 ing oblivion above the mute remains. 
 
 But if Rome is monastic, Protestantism is corporeal. 
 From a celestial point of view its ideas resemble, not 
 winged cherubs, not hymning seraphs, but beasts and 
 creeping things. It marries for time, it divorces for 
 eternity. As a worldly convenience, a temporal morality, 
 a present divine ordinance, it recognises a mere form of 
 union, and does well when it insists upon its mainte- 
 nance, denouncing the violations of its ordinances with 
 extreme spiritual i)enalties. But, while it consecrates 
 and ratifies the external bond, and for tliat matter never 
 hesitates to pronounce its awful binding phrase, though 
 every consideration of moral fitness, every higher har-
 
 The Breath of God ivitJi Man. qq 
 
 mony is obviously violated, — it betrays too often the 
 impurity of its internal thought, by denouncing as carnal 
 the doctrine that finds in Heaven a unison of two kin- 
 dred chastities in one beatitude. The rejection of this 
 faith from its pulpits, the denial of it there, fatally dis- 
 proves its claim to be considered as the church of God 
 in any absolute and final sense. There is a point be- 
 yond which no man, no woman can advance, in the 
 reception or assimilation of Divine breaths, without* a 
 knowledge of the doctrine of the conjugial order in its 
 truth, and a bowing down of the whole being before its 
 majestic purity. 
 
 Neither Rome nor Protestantism have any conception 
 of chastity as to its essence. The highest Romish idea 
 is that of the utter disseverance of the sexes. The 
 highest Protestant idea is that of a sexual union between 
 partners, upon the ground of natural desire. The popular 
 philosophy of the day follows out this train of thought. 
 The basal organs are called animal, the coronal organs 
 intellectual and moral. The organs of sexual desire are 
 located in the lower brain, and therefore the solicitations 
 of sex are considered brutal and corporeal. Without 
 doubt almost all youths, almost all married men, enter 
 into wedlock with this idea, and it is as much a part of 
 the popular thought as that two and two make four. 
 
 When the Divine breaths have so pervaded the ner- 
 vous structures that the higher attributes of sensation 
 begin to waken from their immemorial torpor, and to 
 react against disease, a sixth sense is as evident as hear- 
 ing is to the ear, or sight to vision. It is distributed 
 through the entire frame. So exquisitely does it pervade 
 the hands that the slightest touch declares who are 
 
 G 2
 
 ICO The Breath of God zvith Alan. 
 
 chaste and who are unchaste. Names it has many, 
 according to its quaUties ; let us here call it " a sense of 
 chastity." God is the Infinite Chastity. If we may 
 style Him the All-powerful, the All-merciful, for the 
 same reason we adore Him as the All-chaste. The 
 chastity of man is derived from the specific chastity of 
 the Infinite Wisdom, and that of woman from the In- 
 finite Love. United counterparts, angels of the universal 
 Heaven, celebrate this chastity in their eternal coales- 
 cence, and this order is initiated upon every earth in its 
 beginning ; while, except as evil is initiated, it character- 
 izes the universal race. 
 
 But within this sense of chastity nuptial love has its 
 dwelling-place. So utterly hostile is it by nature to what 
 the Avorld understands by desire and passion, that the 
 waftings of an atmosphere, bearing these elements in its 
 bosom, affects it with loathing, with mortal anguish, and 
 with a dreadful horror. If passion is in the glance, the 
 darts of the eye are as poisoned javelins. If passion is 
 in the inflexions of the voice, the tones become as the 
 hissing of vipers. If passion is in the magnetic fluids of 
 the hands, their touch is as the stinging of ants, the 
 biting of vitriol. If passion is in the emanations of the 
 frame, their contact is as a cold plague, a living rotten- 
 ness. This sense of chastity literally clothes every nerve. 
 A living, sensitive garment, without spot or scam, it 
 invests the frame of the universal sensations. 
 
 One born a thief requires a specific re-birth to become 
 honest ; but all require a specific re-birth in order to 
 become chaste. All bodies of our earth are hereditarily 
 and organically unclean. In consequence of the sup- 
 pression of tlie sense of chastity, marriage unions on
 
 The Breath of God with Man. loi 
 
 earth are without guarantee as to their internal and 
 eternal ground. Doctrinally, the young of both sexes 
 are without defence. A pleasing person attracts the eye, 
 a magnetic radiation penetrates the bosom and calls 
 forth soft emotions. The two natural souls desire each 
 other, and at length commingle their elements. This is 
 the usual ground of marriages of inclination. ^Marriages 
 of convenience are still lower, being mere questions of 
 bargain and sale. A few nobler natures are united from 
 mutual respect for characters, s}Tnpathy of tastes, and 
 fine harmony of dispositions ; these are, however, ex- 
 ceptional. We are not to forget that the lines of Provi- 
 dence run tlirough all the world, and it may be found 
 that, in many instances, true counterparts are really con- 
 joined in external relations, each ignorant of the blessed 
 fact. No church, no sect, no philosophy in all the 
 world, has power to discriminate in a single instance 
 between what are temporal and what are eternal unions. 
 Constantia, the maiden, dwelt apart with her virgin 
 companions. Young daughter of the holy breath, this 
 lesson thine. From the eternal relations of male and 
 female, truth and goodness, the young virgin, in the 
 sacred recesses of consciousness, desires to find the mate. 
 Our words are not designed for those who live contented 
 in their natural respirations. The open respiring maiden 
 will see the unseemhness, the immodesty of presenting 
 herself as an implied or possible expectant in the society 
 of her youthful compeers, while as yet the hereditary 
 impurities of her constitution linger even in conjunction 
 with the atoms of the frame. The merely natural maiden, 
 a mixed form of two opposites, ventures in the beguiling 
 path of courtship ; her light is no higher, and she is 
 judged according to it. But for one who has received
 
 102 The Breath of God with Man. 
 
 the better part, it is sacrilegious to invite or permit the 
 attentions of a lover till first the sense of purity has 
 become full fonned and constitutional. May we not 
 say more, till soul and body have both become one 
 purity, and eVery degree of the organism a vital senso- 
 rium, hallowed, energised, completed in the chastity of 
 God. 
 
 Constantius dwelt alone ; young brother, this for thee. 
 The breaths of God make bare the depths of hereditary 
 evil. We would not touch a flower with stains upon the 
 fingers ; the awful, high-blooming flower of virgin woman- 
 hood, filling its sacred chalice from the nepenthe of the 
 Heavens, who shall venture to put forth the finger of the 
 thought toward it, till evil has been excluded from the 
 frame? Constantius waited. He became a living re- 
 pository of strength and valour and magnanimity and 
 devotion and obedience. He walked with God, nor 
 sought to penetrate with the curious eye into the hearts 
 of the celestial virgins. He walked with God, and in 
 the hour of his fitness, All-Father led him to his own. 
 
 But one says, "Waiting is hard." The answer is, 
 Those in whom the respirations of God have descended, 
 who are not willing to attain to perfect bodily purity 
 before entering into the wedded state, are not fit for the 
 kingdom of God. The probability is that they will find 
 their names erased from the record of the inheritors of 
 the Divine kingdom with man, and the sin of presump- 
 tion be written over against them. 
 
 Why should they not pass together tlirougli the toil- 
 some stages, a mutual help, solace and support ? First 
 from the wrong liable to ensue to j^osterity. During the 
 beginnings of physical regeneration, the natural soul is 
 perturbed, and the latent evils of a hundred generations
 
 TJie BreatJi of God witJi Man. 103 
 
 stirred up in the most intimate and vital chambers of tlie 
 system. These increments, which the system is casting 
 out, inevitably become so many vital seats of evil in the 
 babe. By precipitate nuptials, the ancestral depravity is 
 transmitted into new creations. By nuptials strictly in 
 the consequences of an absolute purification, the river of 
 hereditary depravity finds no outlet, and the children 
 reap as the parents have sown for them. The voices of 
 the unborn ones ask for bread; shall we give them a 
 stone ? For fish ; shall we render them scorpions ? 
 There are permitted exceptions, where virgins have been 
 spiritually crushed and physically weakened through the 
 ravages of evil spirits, and when, unable by themselves 
 to maintain rationality, the Lord permits the counterpart 
 to appear for- the purpose of preventing them from deli- 
 rium and destruction. Other exceptions may doubtless 
 exist, but the law is uniform as given above. 
 
 Constantius and Constantia recognised each other ; 
 regenerated spirits in recreated bodies, possessed, per- 
 meated, vitalized, and guided by the Lord. What solid 
 ground of nuptials ! Spirit of ancient Eden, spirit that 
 livest in the soul of the world, come forth, clasp them 
 in all sweet, natural airs, lead, through the rehabilitated 
 frame, the long procession of the harmonies, for these 
 are thine. Spirit of the sun, whose beams are living 
 entities of light and heat, who bringest fertility, and dis- 
 sipatest blight, and makest beautiful the earth for the 
 endless bridals of the still renewing year ; spirit of the 
 sun, let thy quickening essence delight to move in 
 rhythmic dances through the jocund frame. They have 
 come up from great tribulation ; they have washed their 
 robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb ; 
 they follow the Lord whithersoever He goeth, for they
 
 104 TJie Breath of God with Man. 
 
 are virgin, pure from the contaminations of mankind. 
 Father God, Mother God, unite them in every wisdom's 
 man-iage and every love's pure nuptials ; they in Thee, O 
 Lord, and Thou in them, that they may be made perfect 
 in one. If Heaven is founded in conjugial love, it is ob- 
 vious that the Divine kingdom cannot be established with- 
 out the consent of corresponding conditions and relations. 
 If in Heaven the basis of social order is marital order, so 
 must it be below. If there all the senses are completed 
 and included in the sense of chastity, so must it be 
 below. If that sense of chastity is there the body for 
 the spirit of conjugial desire, so must it be below. If 
 the corporeal element of passion is excluded from the 
 nuptial senses, so must it be below. If the utterly pure 
 alone are permitted to enter into the Divine state in- 
 volved in the nuptial union, so must it be below. If our 
 Lord there provides and orders marriages which are 
 conjugial for his renovated children, so must it be below. 
 
 " Then come the world's gi^eat bridals chaste and cahii, 
 Tlicn springs the crowning race of human kind." 
 
 The doctrines here enunciated embody the cardinal 
 principles of religion, in forms made comprehensible to 
 every earnest seeker for the renovation both of the spirit 
 and the soul. The path is marked out, the way is opened ; 
 "and the Spirit and the bride say, Come, and let him that 
 heareth say, Come, and let him that is athirst come, and 
 wh.osoevcr will, let him take the water of life freely." 
 
 Butler & Tanner, Tlic bdwood I'riiitiiiK Works, Froinc, and London.
 
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