Those who in this life love in perfection, if such there be, in proportion as their love has no struggles, see God darkly and through a veil. For when duty and pleasure are absolutely co-incident, the very nature of our organisation necessitates that duty will be contemplated as the symbol of pleasure, instead of pleasure being (as in a future life we have faith it will be) the symbol of duty. For herein lies the distinction between human and angelic happiness. Humanly happy I call him who in enjoyment _finds_ his duty; angelically happy he, who seeks and finds his duty in enjoyment.
Happiness in general may be defined, not the aggregate of pleasurable sensations--for this is either a dangerous error and the creed of sensualists, or else a mere translation or wordy paraphrase--but the state of that person who, in order to enjoy his nature in the highest manifestation of conscious _feeling_, has no need of doing wrong, and who, in order to do right, is under no necessity of abstaining from enjoyment.
[_Vide Life of S. T. C._, by James Gillman, 1838, pp. 176-78.]
Thought and reality are, as it were, two distinct corresponding sounds, of which no man can say positively which is the voice and which the echo.
Oh, the beautiful fountain or natural well at Upper Stowey! The images of the weeds which hung down from its sides appear as plants growing up, straight and upright, among the water-weeds that really grow from the bottom of the well, and so vivid was the image, that for some moments, and not till after I had disturbed the water, did I perceive that their roots were not neighbours, and they side-by-side companions. So ever, then I said, so are the happy man's thoughts and things, [or in the language of the modern philosophers] his ideas and impressions.
The two characteristics which I have most observed in Roman Catholic mummery processions, baptisms, etc., are, first, the immense _noise_ and jingle-jingle as if to frighten away the dæmon common-sense; and, secondly, the unmoved, stupid, uninterested faces of the conjurers. I have noticed no exception. Is not the very nature of superstition in general, as being utterly sensuous, _cold_ except where it is _sensual_? Hence the older form of idolatry, as displayed in the Greek mythology, was, in some sense, even preferable to the Popish. For whatever life did and could exist in superstition it brought forward and sanctified in its rites of Bacchus, Venus, etc. The papist by pretence of suppression warps and denaturalises. In the pagan [ritual, superstition] burnt with a bright flame, in the popish it consumes the soul with a smothered fire that stinks in darkness and smoulders like gum that burns but is incapable of light.