I cannot fasten on the revelation which needs another to make it revelation to me; but when the divine aid is given, we seek no farther, for in this communion we have already all that was sought.  The private illumination converts to gospel every creature on which its ray may fall; it makes a Bible of the world, a Bible of the heart.  The doctors with dandling have now kept the child from his feet till there is doubt whether he have any feet.  In this cradle of the record he shall spend his snug and comfortable life.  “Here is safety!” Of course, he is bed-ridden.

But the weakness of man is no impediment to God.  Remember who creates, who renews, who goes abroad in perpetual miracle of building, inhabiting, becoming.  It is not a question of human power, but of divine.

Spiritual presence, apocalypse of every apocalypse, becomes our primal fact.  It is the root of Protestantism, Democracy, Individualism.  The sanctity of conscience is a rest of man upon undeniable Deity.  There is no room for intervention of Peter or Paul.

The mind is immanence of Being, an original relation to all we have named reality and worshipped as divine.  There are truths which we must reckon with Swedenborg among the Fundamentals of Humanity.  To hold them is to be Man,—­to be admitted to the hopeful council of our kind.  Freedom is such a fundamental of the moral sense.  From the thought of property in man we erect ourselves in God’s name with indignant protestation, wiping it and its apologists together as dirt from our feet.  By an equal necessity we count out from every discourse of reason those who find in them no organ of ultimate communication, who refer from common consciousness to saint and sage, as though God could be shut from presence and supremacy in thought.  They are intellectual non-combatants who so refer.  We take them at their own valuation; their certainty of uncertainty, their confession of remoteness from the centre we accept; but we must turn from the very angels, if they be not permitted for themselves to know.  There is no outside to the universe except this embryotic condition, wherein a man may think that there is no result of thought.

I suppose no individual thinker will ever again have the importance which attaches to a few names in history.  No man will found a religion with Mahomet, or overlie philosophers like Calvin, or shoulder out the poets like Shakspeare; still less will any man again be worshipped as a personal god.  Let the newcomer be never so great, there is now a greatness in public thought to dwarf his proportions.  He antedated all discoveries who first uttered the sacred name.  That ray on darkness tells.  Now we have nations of philosophers, thought flies like thistle-down, and the sublime speculations of the fore-world are cradle-songs and first spelling-lessons to excite the guesses of every barefooted boy.  In early ages men met face to face with Nature, and spent their strength directly in questioning her.