that by the Atlantic I did not mean the ocean, nor by America the western continent, but that the Atlantic meant the village green, and America the squire’s house on the other side of it, I should justly gain credit for a very silly mystification.  As Nicholas Nickleby very justly remarked, If Dotheboy’s Hall is not a hall, why call it one?  Mr. Squeers, in his reply, no doubt stated the law of the case:  If a man chooses to call his house an island, what is to hinder him?  If the author of Man and his Dwelling-Place means to tell us only that we want some spiritual capacity, which it pleases him to call life, but which not one man in a million understands by that word, is he not amusing himself at our expense by telling us we want life?  We know what we mean by being dead:  our author means something quite different.  Let him speak for himself: 

That man wants life means that the true life of man is of another kind from this.  It corresponds to that true, absolute Being which he as he now is cannot know.

He cannot know it because he is out of relation with it.  This is his deadness.  To know it is to have life.

Yes, reader—­this is his deadness!  Something, that is, which no plain mortal would ever understand by the word.  When I told you, a long time ago, that this book taught that man is dead and nature living, was this what the words conveyed to you?

Still, though there may be something not natural in the word, the author’s meaning is a broad and explicit one.  For the want of that which he calls our true life (he maintains) utterly distorts and deforms this world to our view.  Here is his statement as to the things which surround us: 

There is not a physical world and a spiritual world besides; but the spiritual world which alone is is physical to man, the physical being the mode in which man, by his defectiveness, perceives the spiritual.  We feel a physical world to be:  that which is is the spiritual world.

The phenomenon, that is, is physical:  the fact is spiritual.  A tree looks to us material, because we want life:  if we had life, we should see that it is spiritual.  Really, there is no such thing as matter.  Our own defectiveness makes us fancy that to be material which in truth is spirilual.  So I was misinterpreting the author, when I said that all that we see in nature is there, and a great deal more.  The defect in us, it appears, not only subtracts from nature, it transforms it.  Not merely do we fail to discern that which is in nature, we do actually discern that which is not in nature.

And to be delivered from all this deadness and delusion, what we have to do is to betake ourselves to the Saviour.  Christianity is a system which starts from the fundamental principle that man is dead, and proposes to make him alive.  Under its working man gains true life, otherwise called eternal life; and in gaining that life he finds himself ipso facto conveyed into a spiritual world.  This world ceases to be physical to him, and becomes spiritual.