great fabric of truth, which (like the Pyramid of Cheops) is consistent and real and intelligible, when seen from any point, under any circumstances, or in any light. But if it be granted that there is this mutual connection between the abstract and its material exhibition in every case, it will be readily admitted that a principle of sacramentality must be especially a condition of all religious acts. If we were merely spirits, without bodies or any necessary connection with matter, it would be possible perhaps for us to worship the Great Spirit in an abstract way by a sort of volition of devotion; but not being so, our souls cannot engage in adoration without the company of their material home. Hence every effort of devotion is attended by some bodily act. Whether we lift our eyes or hands to heaven, or kneel in prayer, we show forth this necessity of our being: our body has sinned, has been redeemed, will be punished or glorified, no less than the soul: it must therefore worship with the soul. Now the symbolism of the bodily acts of devotion is understood by all. We have even personated Prayer by a prostrate figure with uplifted hands. [Footnote 18] [Footnote 18: The necessity which the body seems to feel for this symbolism may be seen in the constantly occurring fact, that in making signs, whether of inquiry or adieu, to a person at a distance, we naturally speak the words, though inaudible to him, which the gestures we use express.] {liv} It has been felt not only right but necessary, in all ages and places, to accompany the inward feeling of devotion with some outward manifestation of it. In other words, all religious actions are from their nature symbolical and figurative. But if the most obvious corporeal accompaniments to spiritual worship show this clearly, how much more evidently must all ritual systems appear to be symbolical? A system of worship, whether heathen, Christian, or heretical, is only the development and methodising of the simplest figurative acts of devotion; the whole affected by the peculiar relation between the object of adoration and the worshippers which in each particular system may have been pre-supposed. Why does the Mussulman take off his shoes, kneel on his carpet towards Mecca, and perform his stated ablutions? Is not each act in itself figurative and full of meaning? How could such a system, or any other system, have been originated, but with some intended typification of certain given facts or doctrines or feelings? Why does the heartless Quaker go with covered head into his bare conventicle, and sit in enforced silence? He will answer, to express his independence of idle forms, the spirituality of his worship, his repudiation of any media in his intercourse with the Divine Being. We thank him for his admission of a symbolical purpose, but we read the symbolism differently. We perceive it to express clearly enough the presumptuous pride and vanity of his sect, his