What can be more sublime than this doctrine that the soul of the world does impregnate every atom and every spirit with its omnipotent virtue, so that all things are tuned and set to good. Evil is merely privative not absolute. It is like cold which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much nonentity, so much death. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit which is differently named love, justice, temperance in its different applications just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks these ends he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries, his being shrinks out of all remote channels and he disuniversalizes and he individualizes himself—and becomes all the time less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute privation. Pure badness therefore could not subsist. It is annihilation.

Observe how man is strong. His entire strength consists not in his properties but in his innumerable relations. There is nothing in the world that does not correspond to properties in him. If you embrace the cause of right of your country, of mankind, all things work with and for you,—the sun and moon, stocks and stones. The virtuous man, the seeker of truth, finds brotherhood and countenance in so far forth in the stars, the trees, and the waters. All Nature cries to him, All Hail! The bad man finds opposition, aversation, death in them all. All mankind oppose him. No whisper from secret beauty or grandeur cheers him. The world is silent: the heaven frowns. What is that star to him whose beam called out a sentiment of love in the hero? A white point. And being not in the current of things, but an outlaw, a stoppage, the wheels of God must grind him to powder in their very mission of charity.