this progress or another, whether it is my act which succeeds or is thwarted, or whether it is the act of another, is altogether indifferent to me.  I regard myself in every case but as one of the instruments of a rational design, and I honor and love myself, and am interested in myself, only as such; and I wish the success of my act only so far as it goes to accomplish that end.  Therefore I regard all the events of this world in the same manner and only with exclusive reference to this one end—­whether they proceed from me or from another, whether they relate to me immediately, or to others.  My breast is closed against all vexation on account of personal mortifications and affronts, against all exaltation on account of personal merits; for my entire personality has long since vanished and been swallowed up in the contemplation of the end.

* * * * *

Bodily sufferings, pain and sickness, should such befal me, I cannot avoid to feel, for they are events of my nature, and I am and remain nature here below.  But they shall not trouble me.  They affect only the Nature with which I am, in some strange way, connected; not myself, the being which is elevated above all Nature.  The sure end of all pain, and of all susceptibility of pain, is death; and of all which the natural man is accustomed to regard as evil, this is the least so to me.  Indeed, I shall not die for myself, but only for others, for those that remain behind, from whose connection I am severed.  For myself, the hour of death is the hour of birth to a new and more glorious life.

Since my heart is thus closed to all desire for the earthly, since, in fact, I have no longer any heart for the perishable, the universe appears to my eye in a transfigured form.  The dead inert mass which but choked up space has vanished; and, instead thereof, flows, and waves, and rushes the eternal stream of life, and power, and deed—­of the original life, of thy life, O Infinite!  For all life is thy life, and only the religious eye pierces to the kingdom of veritable beauty.

I am related to thee, and all that I behold around me is related to me.  All is quick, all is soul, and gazes upon me with bright spirit-eyes, and speaks in spirit-tones to my heart.  Most diversely sundered and severed, I behold, in all the forms without me, myself again, and beam upon myself from them, as the morning sun, in thousand dew-drops diversely refracted, glitters back toward itself.

Thy life, as the finite being can apprehend it, is volition which shapes and represents itself by means of itself alone.  This life, made sensible in various ways to mortal eyes, flows through me and from me downward, through the immeasurable whole of Nature.  Here it streams, as self-creating, self-fashioning matter, through my veins and muscles, and deposits its fulness outside of me, in the tree, in the plant, in the grass.  As one connected stream, drop by drop, the forming life flows in all shapes and on