He whose life is in the right cannot, says Pope, in any sense calling for blame, have a wrong faith. But the answer is that his life cannot be in the right unless in so far as it bends to the influences of a true faith. How feeble a conception must that man have of the infinity which lurks in a human spirit, who can persuade himself that its total capacities of life are exhaustible by the few gross acts incident to social relations, or open to human valuation? The true internal acts of moral man are his thoughts, his yearnings, his aspirations, his sympathies or repulsions of heart. This is the life of man as it is appreciable by heavenly eyes.—De Quincey.
[1397] MS.:
Prefer we then the greater to the less,
For charity is all men's happiness.
[1398] MS.:
But charity the greatest of the three.
1 Cor. xiii. 13: "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity."
[1399] The MS. adds this couplet:
Th' extended earth is but one sphere of bliss
To him, who makes another's blessing his.
[1400] At the same time.
[1401] From the Spectator, No. 588, said to be written by Mr. Grove: "Is benevolence inconsistent with self-love? Are their motions contrary? No more than the diurnal rotation of the earth is opposed to its annual; or its motion round its own centre, which might be improved as an illustration of self-love, to that which whirls it about the common centre of the world, answering to universal benevolence."—Warton.