It was a dream—there is no longer any doubt of it. And yet it was so real to appearance,—man was so entirely under the mesmeric spell,—that it seemed impossible for him to regain the power to see things in the reality of their being. For, the mist which rose over the earth, the sleep which seemed to fall upon him, changed his whole thought, —he even forgot his relation to God. The sense of the Infinite became finite, the Perfect, imperfect. He could no longer distinguish between the substance and the shadow. Lost in the dream of mortal sense, good and evil became inextricably and hopelessly confused. He strove to conceive of the God, who had made him in His own image and likeness; but, fettered and bound by that which he called sight, he could only evoke a magnified picture of this inverted self, by turns, cruel and loving, revengeful and forgiving.
Originally the image and likeness of the one God, reflections of the same Mind, manifestations of the same Life; man's hand was reddened now with his brother's blood; with the name of God on his lips, he murdered or put to torture the innocent! Under the influence of the seeming force, which he had made equal to, if not greater, than Him that was still spoken of as the "Omnipotent" the "All in All" of the universe. Man believed himself a creator believed the body fashioned in the image and likeness of his own sensual thought; a sentiment being possessed of Life, Substance, and Intelligence. In whatever direction he turned, with whatever thought expressed or unexpressed —he came in contact, between him and it rose a monster, unappeasable, dissatisfied, asking all, but giving nothing in return—the mortal EGO.
Life now became to him limited,—"a little noise between two silences," "a barren peak between two eternities." In this dream, time is measured by minutes, hours, days and man's time for labor is short. Death is held to be certain, and there is only a hope of immortality Man commences here in time, and eternity is yet to come. How he is to get from the finite into the Infinite, he cannot explain. Along the ages, according to his measurement, leaders in the world of mortal thought have arisen. One of these leaders advocates a purely negative existence; man is to lose himself in meditation on the unseeable, until little by little, his sense of existence becomes deadened; he is to dream his life away, removed from temptation, until he thus attains self-abnegation. Yet the wants of this self, constantly grew until it assumed the proportion of a giant with feet that touched either pole, with his head in the clouds. Going down, down, lower and lower in his sensuous conceptions of life; constantly increasing the inevitable penalty, his recollection of the time when he was in deed and in truth a son of God, grew more and more shadowy; the mesmeric bonds of sense ever tightened their hold upon him, and his awakening seemed more hopeless.
