There is a ladder to heaven, whose base God has placed in human affections, tender instincts, symbolic feelings, sacraments of love, through which the soul rises higher and higher, refining as she goes, till she outgrows the human, and changes, as she rises, into the image of the divine.  At the very top of this ladder, at the threshold of paradise, blazes dazzling and crystalline that celestial grade where the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type, the distant shadow.  This highest step, this saintly elevation, which but few selectest spirits ever on earth attain, to raise the soul to which the Eternal Father organized every relation of human existence and strung every chord of human love, for which this world is one long discipline, for which the soul’s human education is constantly varied, for which it is now torn by sorrow, now flooded by joy, to which all its multiplied powers tend with upward hands of dumb and ignorant aspiration,—­this Ultima Thule of virtue had been seized upon by our sage as the all of religion.  He knocked out every round of the ladder but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to the world, “Go up thither and be saved!”

Short of that absolute self-abnegation, that unconditional surrender to the Infinite, there was nothing meritorious,—­because, if that were commanded, every moment of refusal was rebellion.  Every prayer, not based on such consecration, he held to be an insult to the Divine Majesty;—­the reading of the Word, the conscientious conduct of life, the performance of the duties of man to man, being, without this, the deeds of a creature in conscious rebellion to its Eternal Sovereign, were all vitiated and made void.  Nothing was to be preached to the sinner, but his ability and obligation to rise immediately to this height.

It is not wonderful that teaching of this sort should seem to many unendurable, and that the multitude should desert the preacher with the cry, “This is an hard saying; who can hear it?” The young and gay were wearied by the dryness of metaphysical discussions which to them were as unintelligible as a statement of the last results of the mathematician to the child commencing the multiplication-table.  There remained around him only a select circle,—­shrewd, hard thinkers, who delighted in metaphysical subtilties,—­deep-hearted, devoted natures, who sympathized with the unworldly purity of his life, his active philanthropy and untiring benevolence,—­courageous men, who admired his independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinion,—­and those unperceiving, dull, good people who are content to go to church anywhere as convenience and circumstance may drift them,—­people who serve, among the keen feeling and thinking portion of the world, much the same purpose as adipose matter in the human system, as a soft cushion between the nerves of feeling and the muscles of activity.