In religion, therefore, and that entire union of the inner man and soul with God which it demands, or at least hopes and desires to bring about as essential and necessary, and which the higher philosophy of antiquity, no less than revealed religion, strove and longed to attain, there lies a something inconceivably sublime and beautiful. Nay, we might almost call it an impossible result, similar in some degree to that which is involved in the higher and more intricate of algebraic equations for which there is no solution, or which, at least, appear to have none till it is actually discovered. Now this finite, changeable, and in all respects incomplete and in no one point satisfactorily, or at least not perfectly defined (_a_) of our own individual self, with which we are wont to commence the whole of our thought and life, is to be brought into communion with, or, in other words, to be equaled to the wholly incomprehensible (_x_) of the incommunicable Godhead. How is this possible? By what means is it to be accomplished? Properly, indeed, our Ego is no such (_a_), and can not be defined as such in the wonderful algebraic equation of our inmost life and highest pursuit. For nowhere does man feel himself to be _a first_; all things prove him to be secondary and derivative, wherever it may be that he is to take or seek his beginning. And not only does the alphabet of our life carry us beyond itself and toward its end in this incomprehensible (_x_), but it is also defective at its commencement, and wants a beginning and the first (_a_), which ought to form its very opening. And even the (_b_) (could this satisfy us) is nowhere distinctly and clearly to be found such as it is in and by itself, or such even as it was originally. It is invariably mixed and involved with something else equally unknown. We have, therefore, in this equation of our life, to do with two wholly unknown magnitudes--with the incomprehensible (_x_), and with the (_y_). For by the latter sign we will at present designate that which every where meets and opposes us. For the fact of such an inborn and connatural obstacle every one will admit, even though he may refuse to explain it by the evil principle and may be unwilling to receive the explanation which revelation gives of it.