APHORISM XI.

In whatever age and country it is the prevailing mind and character of the nation to regard the present life as subordinate to a life to come, and to mark the present state, the world of their senses, by signs, instruments, and mementos of its connexion with a future state and a spiritual world;--where the mysteries of faith are brought within the hold of the people at large, not by being explained away in the vain hope of accommodating them to the average of their understanding, but by being made the objects of love by their combination with events and epochs of history, with national traditions, with the monuments and dedications of ancestral faith and zeal, with memorial and symbolical observances, with the realizing influences of social devotion, and, above all, by early and habitual association with acts of the will,--there religion is. There, however obscured by the hay and straw of human will-work, the foundation is safe. In that country and under the predominance of such maxims, the National Church is no mere State-institute. It is the State itself in its intensest federal 226 union; yet at the same moment the guardian and representative of all personal individuality. For the Church is the shrine of morality: and in morality alone the citizen asserts and reclaims his personal independence, his integrity. Our outward acts are efficient, and most often possible, only by coalition. As an efficient power, the agent is but a fraction of unity; he becomes an integer only in the recognition and performance of the moral law. Nevertheless it is most true (and a truth which cannot with safety be overlooked) that morality, as morality, has no existence for a people. It is either absorbed and lost in the quicksands of prudential calculus, or it is taken up and transfigured into the duties and mysteries of religion. And no wonder: since morality (including the personal being, the I am, as its subject) is itself a mystery, and the ground and suppositum of all other mysteries, relatively to man.