that with the same neuralgia we may find ourselves one day without spirit and energy for conduct, and another day with them. So that we may most truly say, with the author of the Imitation: 'Left to ourselves, we sink and perish; visited, we lift up our heads and live.'[1] And we may well give ourselves, in grateful and devout self-surrender, to that by which we are thus visited. So much is there incalculable, so much that belongs to not ourselves, in conduct; and the more we attend to conduct, and the more we value it, the more we shall feel this.
The not ourselves, which is in us and in the world around us, has almost everywhere, as far as we can see, struck the minds of men as they awoke to consciousness, and has inspired them with awe. Everyone knows how the mighty natural objects which most took their regards became the objects to which this awe addressed itself. Our very word God is, perhaps, a reminiscence of these times, when men invoked 'The Brilliant on high,' sublime hoc candens quod invocent omnes Jovem, as the power representing to them that which transcended the limits of their narrow selves, and by which they lived and moved and had their being. Everyone knows of what differences of operation men's dealing with this power has in different places and times shown itself capable; how here they have been moved by the not ourselves to a cruel terror, there to a timid religiosity, there again to a play of imagination; almost always, however, connecting with it, by some string or other, conduct.
But we are not writing a history of religion; we are only tracing its effect on the language of the men from whom we get the Bible. At the time they produced those documents which give to the Old Testament its power and its true character, the not ourselves which weighed upon the mind of
- ↑ Relicti mergimur et perimus, visitati vero erigimur et vivimus.
