A more remarkable instance of this tendency is Samuel Johnson's volume on the religions of India. None save a Transcendentalist could have succeeded in extracting so much deep spiritual meaning from the symbols and practices of those ancient faiths. The intuitive idea takes its position at the centre, and at once all blazes with glory. "Man is divinely prescient of his infinity of mind as soon as he begins to meditate and respire." "That a profound theistic instinct, the intuition of a divine and living whole, is involved in the primitive mental processes we are here studying, I hold to be beyond all question." "From the first stages of its growth onwards, the spirit weaves its own environment; nature is forever the reflex of its life, and what but an unquenchable aspiration to truth could have made it choose Light as its first and dearest symbol, reaching out a child's hand to touch and clasp it, with the joyous cry, 'Tis mine, mine to create, mine to adore!'" "Man could not forget that pregnant dawn of revelation, the discovery of his own power to rekindle the life of the universe." "Man is here dimly aware of the truth that he makes and remakes his own conception of the divine; that the revealing of duty must come in the natural activity of his human powers." "As far back as we can trace the life of man, we find the river of prayer and praise flowing as naturally as it is flowing now; we cannot find its beginning, because we cannot find the beginning of the soul." These passages give the key to Mr. Johnson's explanation of the oriental religions, and to his little monograph on "The Worship of Jesus," and to the printed lectures, addresses, essays, sermons, in which subjects of religion, philosophy, political and social reform have been profoundly treated.