Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the most general manner. So congruous in all ages are the aspirations and the hopes of men that it would be rash indeed to attempt to assign the moment when any spiritual truth rises for the first time on human consciousness. But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that the maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered before Wordsworth only in the sense in which the maxims of Christianity were uttered before Christ. To compare small things with great--or rather, to compare great things with things vastly greater--the essential spirit of the _Lines near Tintern Abbey_ was for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of the _Sermon on the Mount_. Not the isolated expression of moral ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, is that which connects them for ever with a single name. Therefore it is that Wordsworth is venerated; because to so many men--indifferent, it may be, to literary or poetical effects, as such--he has shown by the subtle intensity of his own emotion how the contemplation of Nature can be made a revealing agency, like Love or Prayer,--an opening, if indeed there be any opening, into the transcendent world. The prophet with such a message as this will, of course, appeal for the most part to the experience of exceptional moments--those moments when "we see into the life of things;" when the face of Nature sends to us "gleams like the flashing of a shield;"--hours such as those of the Solitary, who, gazing on the lovely distant scene, Would gaze till it became Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain The beauty, still more beauteous. But the idealist, of whatever school, is seldom content to base his appeal to us upon these scattered intuitions alone. There is a whole epoch of our existence whose memories, differing, indeed, immensely in vividness and importance in the minds of different men, are yet sufficiently common to all men to form a favourite basis for philosophical argument. "The child is father of the man;" and through the recollection and observation of early childhood we may hope to trace our ancestry--in heaven above or on the earth beneath-- in its most significant manifestation. It is to the workings of the mind of the child that the philosopher appeals who wishes to prove that knowledge is recollection, and that our recognition of geometrical truths--so prompt as to appear instinctive--depends on our having been actually familiar with them in an earlier world. The Christian mystic invokes with equal confidence his own memories of a state which seemed as yet to know no sin:--