Etzler, J. A. (John Adolphus). Paradise within the reach of all men
He who is conversant with the supernal powers will not worship these
inferior deities of the wind, waves, tide, and sunshine. But we would
not disparage the importance of such calculations as we have described.
They are truths in physics, because they are true in ethics. The moral
powers no one would presume to calculate. Suppose we could compare the
moral with the physical, and say how many horse-power the force of
love, for instance, blowing on every square foot of a man’s soul, would
equal. No doubt we are well aware of this force; figures would not
increase our respect for it; the sunshine is equal to but one ray of
its heat. The light of the sun is but the shadow of love. “The souls of
men loving and fearing God,” says Raleigh, “receive influence from that
divine light itself, whereof the sun’s clarity, and that of the stars,
is by Plato called but a shadow. _Lumen est umbra Dei, Deus est Lumen
Luminis._ Light is the shadow of God’s brightness, who is the light of
light,” and, we may add, the heat of heat. Love is the wind, the tide,
the waves, the sunshine. Its power is incalculable; it is many
horse-power. It never ceases, it never slacks; it can move the globe
without a resting-place; it can warm without fire; it can feed without
meat; it can clothe without garments; it can shelter without roof; it
can make a paradise within which will dispense with a paradise without.
But though the wisest men in all ages have labored to publish this
force, and every human heart is, sooner or later, more or less, made to
feel it, yet how little is actually applied to social ends! True, it is
the motive-power of all successful social machinery; but, as in physics
we have made the elements do only a little drudgery for us,—steam to
take the place of a few horses, wind of a few oars, water of a few
cranks and hand-mills,—as the mechanical forces have not yet been
generously and largely applied to make the physical world answer to the
ideal, so the power of love has been but meanly and sparingly applied,
as yet. It has patented only such machines as the almshouses, the
hospital, and the Bible Society, while its infinite wind is still
blowing, and blowing down these very structures too, from time to time.
Still less are we accumulating its power, and preparing to act with
greater energy at a future time. Shall we not contribute our shares to
this enterprise, then?
[1] _The Paradise within the Reach of all Men, without Labor, by
Powers of Nature and Machinery. An Address to all intelligent Men._ In
Two Parts. By J.A. Etzler. Part First. Second English Edition. London,
1842. Pp. 55.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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