Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
Sympathetic people are often incommunicative about themselves: they give back reflected images which hide their own depths.
The pond said to the ocean, "Why do you rage so? The wind is not so very violent—nay, it is already fallen. Look at me. I rose into no foaming waves, and am already smooth again."
Felix qui non potuit.
Many feel themselves very confidently on safe ground when they say: It must be good for man to know the Truth. But it is clearly not good for a particular man to know some particular truth, as irremediable treachery in one whom he cherishes—better that he should die without knowing it.
Of scientific truth, is it not conceivable that some facts as to the tendency of things affecting the final destination of the race might be more hurtful when they had entered into the human consciousness than they would have been if they had remained purely external in their activity?
Divine Grace a Real Emanation.
There is no such thing as an impotent or neutral deity, if the deity be really believed in, and contemplated either in prayer or meditation. Every object of thought reacts on the mind that conceives it, still more on that which habitually contemplates it. In this we may be said to solicit help from a generalization or abstraction. Wordsworth had this truth in his consciousness when he wrote (in the Prelude):—
"Nor general truths, which are themselves a sort
Of elements and agents, Under-powers
Subordinate helpers of the living mind"—
not indeed precisely in the same relation, but with a meaning which involves that wider moral influence.
