August 19

It is expedient for you that I go away.

THE qualities which we revere in men are growing powers, which have their value in their promise, and can only be fully understood by one who sees in them the future to which they point. They are undeveloped germs in which a finite form hides an infinite potentiality. And though, as life goes on, such hints may acquire more definiteness, yet the veil of human individuality is generally too dark to let us discover in what ways and in what measure the individual has become and is becoming one with his ideal. The imperfections of growth, and the limits of finite personality keep, so to speak, the human separated from the divine, till the idealising touch of death removes the division between them, and enables us to see in the man, our fellow, a new organ of the universal spirit of goodness. The revelation of the divine in the human is perhaps the highest use of sorrow, as it is the one thing which has plucked from many human hearts its bitterest sting.

EDWARD CAIRD, The Evolution of Religion

LOVE'S PERFECT IMAGE