cosmos whence, you yourselves admit, all things derive their being?" Are we asked for the supreme object of religion? Here it is, unveiled so far as mind and speech of man may discover the great reality. It is the God, not "who dwelleth in inaccessible light, who is enthroned on the floors of the heavens," or "walks on the wings of the winds"; it is the God who is "not very far from any one of us," for he is in us, in very deed and truth; he is the mind, the intelligence; he is the soul of man, and yet the "Over-soul," the soul of all souls, and we are not so much made in his image, as it was taught of old, _but we are he_, we are the Divine, there is no line of division 'twixt us and him; the light in man, the good in man is God. Pray no more, then, we urge, to the skies, nor in a holy city or consecrated shrine, a temple, though it were of gold. Like the angels that stood by the open, empty grave of the Christ and said, "he is not here," your souls cry aloud that therein alone is the infinite Soul whose truth and being alone can satisfy your own. This is the temple not made with hands of man, in which alone the Supreme can be enshrined and worshipped, "Foolish doctor, foolish doctor," says Carlyle of Johnson, who went tapping for ghosts in Cock Lane, "thou thyself art a ghost!" Foolish and superstitious beyond bounds, we may say, is the man that thinketh to find the light of life in a church when it cannot be found within himself. He who has steeped his soul in this teaching will need no more to commune with an imagination in the heavens, an anthropomorphic deity in the skies--it is a merciful thing we see no more of these painful profanities upon the canvases of our artists--nor will he need that his soul should rise on wings of fasting and prayer "to pierce the clouds" with his importunings and entreaties. No, his communings will be with himself, his worship of the silent sort, for he knows now _that there is no God anywhere who is not within him_. He will need no Chrishna, Buddha or Christ to "make intercession with the Father" for him, no god-babe in a manger or deity walking the earth in sorrow or expiring in shame, for lo! the Divinity is also every son of God, and suffering humanity is ever with us, the repression of the flesh is an unceasing sacrifice which we offer up in the temple of our bodies out of reverence for the Divinity within them. NOTE.--The best account of Emerson's ethical and speculative teaching is to be found in Cooke's _Life of Emerson_, obtainable through Green & Co., Essex Hall, Strand. I am indebted to it for much of the expository portion of this chapter. [1] The fact that Petavius, a Jesuit theologian, felt it his duty to condemn several ante-Nicene writers as heretical, though honest, offenders against orthodoxy, is evidence enough that Athanasianism is a spurious development unknown to the earlier ages. [2] Tennyson's description of the "average Englishman's" theology.