Man must begin; know this, where Nature ends;
Nature and man can never be fast friends.
Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave!"
Religionist and humanist alike share this clear sense of separateness.
Literature is full of the expression of it. Religion, in especial,
has little to do with the natural world as such. It is that other and
inner one, which can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell, with
which it is chiefly concerned. Who can forget Othello's soliloquy as
he prepares to darken his marriage chamber before the murder of his
wife?
"Put out the light, and then put out the light.
If I quench thee, thou flaming minister,
I can again thy former light restore,
Should I repent me; but once put out thy light,
Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature,
I know not where is that Promethean heat,
That can thy light relume. When I have pluck'd the rose
I cannot give it vital growth again,
It needs must wither."
Indeed, how vivid to us all is this difference between man and nature.
"I would to heaven," Byron traced on the back of the manuscript of
_Don Juan_,
"I would to heaven that I were so much clay,
As I am bone, blood, marrow, passion, feeling."
Ah me! So at many times would most of us. And in that sense that we
are not is where the religious consciousness takes its beginning.
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