APHORISM XII.

Leighton and Coleridge.

What a full confession do we make of our dissatisfaction with the objects of our bodily senses, that in our attempts to express what we conceive the best of beings, and the greatest of felicities to be, we describe by the exact contraries of all, that we experience here--the one as infinite, incomprehensible, immutable, &c, the other as incorruptible, undefiled, and that passeth not away. At all events, this coincidence, say rather, identity of attributes is sufficient to apprize us, that to be inheritors of bliss, we must become the children of God.

This remark of Leighton's is ingenious and startling. Another, and more fruitful, perhaps more solid, inference from the fact would be, that there is something in the human mind which makes it know (as soon as it is sufficiently awakened to reflect on its own thoughts and notices) that in all finite quantity there is an infinite, in all measure of time an eternal; that the latter are the basis, the substance, the true and abiding reality of the former; and that as we truly are, only as far as God is with us, so neither can we truly possess (that is, enjoy) our being or any other real good, but by living in the sense of his holy presence.

A life of wickedness is a life of lies; and an evil being, or the being of evil, the fest and darkest mystery.