That host is a throng of ants, its evolutions are in a back garden. In what do we excel the ants, save in the measure of the puny little body? That is a mere point in which you sail, and war, and dispose your kingdoms. Your kingdoms are lilliputian even when they stretch from Ocean to Ocean. Only on high are the domains spacious; to their 9 possession the mind is admitted, provided always that it bring with it no taint of the body, but wipe off all stain and pass forth like an armed man, lightly equipped, nimble, modest in his wants. When the soul reaches those regions, it receives nourishment and growth; as if freed from the shackles of earth, it returns to the true source of its being. A proof of its divine origin is furnished by the pleasure it derives 10 from what is divine; here it feels itself at home, not in a strange land. Without alarm it views the setting of the stars and their rising, and the mazy orbits of the heavenly bodies that yet move all in unison. It notes when each star first shows its light on earth, when it attains its meridian height, observes its orbit and the limits of its descent. An interested spectator, it examines and investigates every detail. And why should it not? It feels that they are akin to itself. Then contempt for the narrow limits of its former dwelling succeeds. For 11 what after all is the space that lies from India to the farthest shores of Spain? A few days’ journey if a prosperous wind waft the vessel. But that heavenly region affords a route during full thirty years to the swiftest of the planets, rushing with untiring velocity, never once hal ting. Here at last the soul comes to learn what it has long sought, it begins to know God. But what is God? The universal intelligence. What is 12 God, did I say? All that you see and all that you cannot see. His greatness exceeds the bounds of thought. Render Him His true greatness and He is all in all, He is at once within and without His works. What, then, is the difference between the divine nature and the human? In us the better part is spirit, in Him there is nothing except spirit. He 13 is wholly reason: though mortal eyes are so sealed by error that men believe this frame of things to be but a fortuitous concourse of atoms, the sport of chance. And yet than this universe could aught be fairer, more carefully adjusted, more consistent in plan? But men will have it that it is tossed about at random in the confusion of thunder, cloud, and storm, and the other forces by which the earth and its purlieus are haunted.