Throughout the whole of the organic creation every being in a perfect
state exhibits certain appearances, or evidences, of happiness, and
besides is in its nature, its desires, its modes of nourishment,
habitation, and death, illustrative or expressive of certain moral
dispositions or principles. Now, first, in the keenness of the sympathy
which we feel in the happiness, real or apparent, of all organic beings,
and which, as we shall presently see, invariably prompts us, from the
joy we have in it, to look upon those as most lovely which are most
happy; and secondly, in the justness of the moral sense which rightly
reads the lesson they are all intended to teach, and classes them in
orders of worthiness and beauty according to the rank and nature of that
lesson, whether it be of warning or example, of those that wallow or of
those that soar, of the fiend-hunted swine by the Gennesaret lake, or of
the dove returning to its ark of rest; in our right accepting and
reading of all this, consists, I say, the ultimately perfect condition
of that noble theoretic faculty, whose place in the system of our nature
I have already partly vindicated with respect to typical, but which can
only fully be established with respect to vital beauty.
Sec. 2. The perfection of the theoretic faculty as concerned with vital
beauty, is charity.
Its first perfection, therefore, relating to vital beauty, is the
kindness and unselfish fulness of heart, which receives the utmost
amount of pleasure from the happiness of all things. Of which in high
degree the heart of man is incapable, neither what intense enjoyment the
angels may have in all that they see of things that move and live, and
in the part they take in the shedding of God's kindness upon them, can
we know or conceive: only in proportion as we draw near to God, and are
made in measure like unto him, can we increase this our possession of
charity, of which the entire essence is in God only.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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