It is thus that the Glanvillians reason. First, they assume the facts as objectively as if the question related to the experimentable of our senses. Secondly, they take the imaginative possibility--that is, that the [assumed] facts involve no contradiction, [as if it were] a scientific possibility. And, lastly, they [advocate] them as proofs of a spiritual world and our own immortality. This last [I hold to] be the greatest insult to conscience and the greatest incongruity with the objects of religion.
N.B.--It is amusing, in all ghost stories, etc., that the recorders are "the farthest in the world from being credulous," or "as far from believing such things as any man."
If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke--Aye! and what then?
The more exquisite and delicate a flower of joy, the tenderer must be the hand that plucks it.
Floods and general inundations render for the time even the purest springs turbid.
For compassion a human heart suffices; but for full, adequate sympathy with joy, an angel's.
[Footnote G: A projected satire, of which, perhaps, the lines headed "A Character" were an instalment. See _P. W._, 1893, pp. 195-642. _Letters of S. T. C._, 1895, ii. 631.]
Where'er I find the Good, the True, the Fair, I ask no names--God's spirit dwelleth there! The unconfounded, undivided Three, Each for itself, and all in each, to see In man and Nature, is Philosophy.
[Sidenote: THE MOON'S HALO AN EMBLEM OF HOPE]
The moon, rushing onward through the coursing clouds, advances like an indignant warrior through a fleeing army; but the amber halo in which she moves--O! it is a circle of Hope. For what she leaves behind her has not lost its radiance as it is melting away into oblivion, while, still, the other semi-circle catches the rich light at her approach, and heralds her ongress.
It is by strength of mind that we are to untwist the tie or copula of the besom of affliction, which not nature but the strength of imagination had twisted round it, and thus resolve it into its component twigs, and conquer in detail "one down and t'other come on"! _Dividendo diminuitur_--which forms the true ground of the advantage accruing from communicating our griefs to another. We enable ourselves to see them each in its true magnitude.