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Page 14
The soul is free, but its abode is in a limited body. The movement of
the soul is swift and unconstrained as thought. It is not limited by
time. It may project itself a thousand years into the future or travel a
thousand years into the past; but it dwells in the body and is more or
less restrained by it. Bodily limitation narrows experience and compels
ignorance. It makes large acquaintance impossible. The flowers beneath
the ice on the Alps are small; the flowers of the tropics have the
proportions of trees. Thus environment modifies growth. The body cannot
put fetters on the will, but it may hold in captivity the powers which
acquire knowledge, withhold from the emotions persons worthy of
affection, and make the range of objects of choice poor and pitiful. The
soul has often been compared to a bird in a cage,--fitted for broad
horizons but confined within narrow spaces. This hindrance is a very
real one. The man who grows swiftly must be in the open world with
beings to love and to serve ever within his reach. Hence the life beyond
death is often called the unhindered life because of its freedom from
the body. The old story of "Rasselas" is symbolical. In the Happy Valley
a man might be as good, but he could not be as great and wise, as in the
larger world. The soul will meet fewer temptations there, but those it
does encounter will be more insistent and harder to escape. He who would
respond to a call to service must needs have about him those whom he
may serve. Large views are for those who are able to rise to the
heights. He who lives in a cave may be true to his little light, and
surely is responsible for no more, but he will see far less than the one
whose home is on the mountaintop. Thus even bodily limitations, to which
are attached no moral qualities, are hindrances to the growth of the
being, whose destiny is not only purification but expansion:--its
movement is not only toward goodness but also toward greatness; not only
toward virtue but also toward power.
The animal entail is one of the greatest mysteries of our mortal life.
The soul in its moments of illumination feels that it is related to some
person like itself, but far higher, and aspires to it. Sir Joshua
Reynolds' figure of "Faith" in the famous window in the chapel of New
College, Oxford, suggests the attitude of the newly awakened soul. In
freshness and beauty it is turning toward the light. But in human
experience something occurs which Sir Joshua has not tried to depict. A
clammy hand reaches up from the deeps out of which rise suffocating
clouds, and that pure spirit finds itself enveloped in darkness and
fastened to the earth. The humiliation is complete. What has occurred?
Only what has happened again and again; and what will continue to happen
for no one knows how long. The animal has gotten the better of the
spirit. The soul has sinned--for sin is little, if anything, but a
spirit allowing itself to return to the fascinations of the animal
conditions out of which it has been evolved, and from which it ought to
have escaped forever. The animal entail is the chief hindrance to the
aspiring spirit. The animal lives by his senses. He is content when they
are satisfied. It can hardly be said that animals are ever happy.
Happiness is a state higher than contentment. Paul said he had learned
in whatsoever state he was to be content, but even he never said that in
all states he had learned to be happy. Animals are contented when their
senses are gratified and they are savage when their senses are
clamorous. Lions and bears are dangerous when they are hungry, and cruel
when other desires are obstructed.
Whatever the theory of evolution, from the beginning of its upward
movement, the nearest, most potent, and most dangerous hindrance to the
soul is this entail of animalism, which it can never escape but which it
must some time conquer. The spirit and the body seem to be in endless
antagonism, and yet the body itself will become the fair servant of the
soul when once the question of its supremacy has been determined. The
tendency to revert to animalism has been vividly depicted by the poets,
and the clamorous and insistent nature of the passions portrayed by the
artists.
The liquor in the enchanted cup of Comus may be called "the wine of the
senses." Its effect is thus described by Milton. Comus offers
... "To every weary traveler
His orient liquor in a crystal glass,
To quench the drought of Phoebus; which, as they taste
(For most do taste through fond, intemperate thirst)
Soon as the potion works, their human countenance,
The express resemblance of the gods, is changed
Into some brutish form of wolf or bear,
Or ounce or tiger, hog or bearded goat."
A famous passage from Ovid's "Metamorphoses"[4] represents Act�on as
changed into a stag; but, if I read the fable aright, the glimpse of
Diana in her bath, while not an intelligent choice, was more than a mere
accident--it was the uprising of innate sensuality; for even the Greek
gods were supposed to have had senses.
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