316 THE HUMAN FOEM. 



and exulting voice, and in abdicating nature's crown, it treads upon 

 pride with greater pride of its own. We suspect that it proceeds 

 from dislike of work, for certainly the duties of the opposite view 

 are sufficiently stupendous. The true humility then, we argue, 

 lies in man taking his hard, high place with its responsibilities — 

 the place that he has in history and property, as the lord of the 

 visible earth. Let him accept the title-deeds, and obey the declara- 

 tions, of his Genesis. The higher the station, the higher the 

 humility. 



But on the other hand we will not grant, that nature is so much 

 bigger than man as to escape his handling. For if the world be 

 providentially coordinate with him, then as he is, so will it be ; 

 or in other words the threads of the mundane Noras are managed 

 in that end of them which constitutes our human nature. A world 

 made by the Word is plastic to the Word, and the Word in its 

 second projection exists in man alone. It is then a part of our 

 faith in Providence, to believe that the magnetism as well as the 

 handiworks of good men and good societies, are the first beginning 

 of the natural laws ; and that there is nothing so ponderous as to 

 outlie the power of the moral and spiritual kings (pp. 238, 239). 

 The harvests and rain- clouds of Judea were once obedient to the 

 obedience of its nation to God : how if nature now be equally 

 symbolic and ready ; and for new springing of theocratic crops, 

 only await a new Judea in which the whole earth shall be a Holy 

 Land? 



2. A word also to the intellectual objection, that other creatures 

 besides man doubtless look out from their places as central points, 

 consider themselves as foci, and the universe as their subject 

 and servant. " See man for me, exclaimed a lordly goose." 

 (N. B., the sly poet puts this into the neb of a goose.) Were such 

 the fact, it would only show, that the animals are images of man 

 in these perceptions, and that in the wide madhouse of animal ity, 

 they all conceit themselves kings and potentates. But are there 

 signs that it is a fact ? Has an ass with ribs belabored, anything 

 like our perception, that we are " lords of what we survey V With 

 regard to our slaves, and even our lower classes, they do not 

 imagine that the state is for them ; on the contrary, they complain 



