December 1823

Love is a holy passion, and is the instrument of our connexion with Deity; and when we drop the body, this, perhaps, will constitute the motive and impulse to all the acquisitions of an immortal education. As we are instinctively- ashamed of selfishness, we venerate love, the noble and generous nature of which seeks an- other's good. . . . Embryo powers of which we were not hitherto conscious are nursed into the manhood of mind. A powerful motive is to the character what a skilful hypothesis is to the progress of science ; it affords facility and room for the arrangement of the growing principles of our nature. What lay in chaos and barren before, is now adjusted in a beautiful and use- ful order, which exposes to the light numberless connexions and relations and fine issues of thought, not easily perceived until such a sys- tem is laid. A motive thus powerful and of such benignant fruits is /oi;^. . . . It bears many forms, but is love. It is the attachment to truth, to a sentiment, to our country, to a fellow being or to God, that has won and worn the crown of martyrdom, and that has stirred up in men's minds all the good which the earth has seen. Indeed pure love is too pure a principle for human bosoms ; and, were it not mixed with the animal desires of our nature, would not meet that unqualified and universal honour it now finds among men. . . . What does the sensu- alist know of love ? of such love as exists be- tween God and man, and man and God ; of such love as the pure mind conceives for moral grandeur, for the contemplation of which it was made ?