«°,18 THE HUMAN FORM. 



bow down to wood and stone, beast and bird, in all fantastic forms. 

 There are also fossil religions, records obscure and terrifying of past 

 conditions of our race ; hieroglyphics too large to live in our petty 

 present time ; and which speak of warmth and fertility in regions 

 of the mind now cold and dead ; of great perceptions and mighty 

 propagations ; gigantic promises of the world's childhood, only to 

 be justified in her second innocency. Again, above and around 

 these solid creeds we have the philosophical religions, the sciences 

 of the atmosphere of the religious world, or the theologic wind ;* 

 pretences to regard Deity under no form, and as " neither in body 

 mankind resembling, neither in ideas." But as the reader now 

 foresees, each of these creeds has the same principle, namely, the 

 human form, which is portrayed in the atmosphere as in the earth, 

 in the vegetable as in the mineral, and in the animal as in the 

 vegetable. Abstract philosophy is the furthest of all from the 

 centre : idolatry itself falls more easily under that rank and disci- 

 pline of natures which leads to Christianity, or the Omnipotent 

 Human Form. 



But the skeptical ghost still haunts us, for are there not higher 

 beings than man, whose form is consequently above the human. 

 Truly such beings there are, known from of old under the names of 

 angels and spirits; but then their form is the human. For the 

 human is a traveling form, which reaches from man to God, and 

 involves all beings as it goes. There are then men higher than man, 

 but there is none superior to the human form, which itself is supe- 

 riority advancing for ever to the supreme. Revelation declares as 

 much as this, for if the human form is the image of God, there can 

 be no more eminent form. 



However, what we call the human form, is doubtless the least 

 truth and manifestation of that Divine image. For minds, souls, 

 societies, nations are themselves in this form. But time fails us to 

 attempt a flight through these second spheres, and we must leave to 

 other hands the tracing of manliness through polities and socialities, 



=* The sensuality of creeds which oppose nothing but flatus and criticism to 

 the instigations of the flesh, is set forth in that hieroglyphical proverb, that " pigs 

 see the wind," which marvelously signifies the lace to face posture of stolidity 

 and abstraction. 



