Because nature and human kind are so _vast_ that, as a whole they daunt the young mind, even to the point of checking its growth, it is necessary that some one, who has had time to analyze it in some degree, should call attention to points; and it is the consummate art of education to know what points to touch, so that the mind shall make out the octave; for, unless it does so, it will not act to purpose. As exercise of the limbs is necessary to physical development, and the act of perceiving, understanding, and fancying, with actual manipulation of nature, is necessary to intellectual development; so is kindness and justice acted out, to the development of the social and moral nature or conscience.
But there is something else in man than relations to external nature and fellow-man. This self-determining being, who moves, perceives, understands, fancies, loves, and feels moral responsibility to the race in which he finds himself a living member, is only consciously happy when he is magnanimous, which he can only be, if he feels himself a free power in the bosom of infinite love; in short, a son of the Father of all men! "We are the offspring of God" is the inspiration alike of heathen poet and Christian apostle.
As the psychological condition of the human love which is man's social happiness, is that sense of individual want and imperfection which stimulates the will to seek the mother and brother; so the psychological condition of the piety which makes man's beatitude, is the sense of social imperfection, in respect both to moral purity and happiness, stimulating the will to seek a Father of all spirits. The more we love, the more we feel the need of God. But is God nothing but "an infinite sigh at the bottom of the heart," as Feuerbach, the holiest of infidels, sadly says? or, as in thinking, we discover the entity we name I; so in loving, do we not discover God, or rather does not God reveal Himself to us, as Essential Substance? Wordsworth declares that
"Serene will be our days and bright, And happy will our nature be, When love is an unerring light, And joy its own security; And blest are they, who in the main, This faith even now do entertain, Live in the spirit of this creed, Yet find _another strength_ according to their need."
