These several parts of our being are not independent of one another, but are in the closest alliance.  They act conjointly and with one result in the single soul in which they find their unity as various energies of one personal power.  It cannot be that contradiction should arise among them in their right operation, nor the error of one continue undetected by the others; that the base should be joyful or the wicked beautiful in reality, is impossible.  In the narrow view the lust of the eye and the pride of life may seem beautiful, but in the broad perspective of the inward world they take on ugliness; in the moment they may seem pleasurable, but in the backward reach of memory they take on pain; to assert eternity against the moment, to see life in the whole, to live as if all of life were concentrated in its instant, is the chief labour of the mind, the eye, the heart, the enduring will, all together.  To represent a villain as attractive is an error of art, which thus misrepresents the harmony of our nature.  Satan, as conceived by Milton, may seem to be a majestic figure, but he was not so to Milton’s imagination.  “The Infernal Serpent” is the first name the poet gives him; and though sublime imagery of gloom and terror is employed to depict his diminished brightness and inflamed malice, Milton repeatedly takes pains to degrade him to the eye, as when in Paradise he is surprised at the ear of Eve “squat like a toad”; and when he springs up in his own form there, as the “grisly king,” he mourns most his beauty lost; neither is his resolute courage long admirable.  To me, at least, so far from having any heroic quality, he seems always the malign fiend sacrificing innocence to an impotent revenge.  In all great creations of art it is necessary that this consistency of beauty, virtue, reason, and joy should he preserved.

It is true that the supremacy of law in this inward world, so constituted, is less realized than in the physical world; but even in the latter the wide conviction of its supremacy is a recent thing, and in some parts of nature it is still lightly felt, especially in those which touch the brain most nearly, while under the stress of exceptional calamity or strong desire or traditional religious beliefs it often breaks down.  But if the order of the material universe seems now a more settled thing than the spiritual law of the soul, once the case was reversed; God was known and nature miraculous.  It must be remembered, too, in excuse of our feebleness of faith, that we are born bodily into the physical world and are forced to live under its law; but life in the spiritual world is more a matter of choice, at least in respect to its degree; its phenomena are, in part, contingent upon our development and growth, on our living habitually and intelligently in our higher nature, the laws of which as communicated to us by other minds are in part prophecies of experience not yet actual in ourselves.  It is the touchstone of experience, after all, that tries all things in both worlds, and experience in the spiritual world may be long delayed; it is power of mind that makes wide generalizations in both; and the conception of spiritual law is the most refined as perhaps it is the most daring of human thoughts.