But indeed the market value of this commodity has greatly fallen in these times. “Damn the Laws of God,” answered a City merchant of standing to a personal friend of mine, who was advising him the other day to take a little of that capital into his business. [[319]]
Then, finally, there is just one article of property more to be catalogued, and I have done. The Lawgiver Himself, namely; the Master of masters, whom, when, as human dogs, we discover, and can call our own Master, we are thenceforth ready to die for, if need be. Which Mr. Harrison and the other English gentlemen who are at present discussing, in various magazines, the meaning of the word ‘religion’[5] (appearing never to have heard in the course of their education, of either the word ‘lictor’ or ‘ligature’) will find, is, was, and will be, among all educated scholars, the perfectly simple meaning of that ancient word; and that there can be no such thing, even for sentimental Mr. Harrison, as a religion of Manity, nor for the most orthodox hunting parson, as a religion of Dogity; nor for modern European civilization as a religion of Bitchity, without such submission of spirit to the worshipped Power as shall in the most literal sense ‘bind’ and chain us to it for ever.
And now, to make all matters as clear as may be, I will put down in the manner of a Dutch auction—proceeding to the lower valuation,—the articles of property, rightly so called, which belong to any human creature.
I. The Master, or Father, in the old Latin phrase, [[320]]‘Pater Noster;’ of whom David wrote, “Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee;” but this possession, includes in Plato’s catalogue, the attendant spirits, “θεοὺς, ὄντας δεσπότας, καὶ τοὺς τούτοις ἑπομένους”—“the Gods, being Masters, and those next to them,” specially signified in another place as “the Gods, and the Angels, and the Heroes, and the Spirits of our Home, and our Ancestors.”
II. The Law or Word of God, which the Bible Society professes to furnish for eighteenpence. But which, indeed, as often heretofore stated in Fors Clavigera, is by no means to be had at that low figure; the whole long hundred and nineteenth Psalm being little more than one agonizing prayer for the gift of it: and a man’s life well spent if he has truly received and learned to read ever so little a part of it.
III. The Psyche, in its sanity, and beauty (of which, when I have finished my inventory, I will give Plato’s estimate in his own words). Some curious practical results have followed from the denial of its existence by modern philosophers; for the true and divine distinction between ‘genera’ of animals, and quite the principal ‘origin of species’ in them, is in their Psyche: but modern naturalists, not being able to vivisect the Psyche, have on the whole resolved that animals are to be classed by their bones; and whereas, for instance, [[321]]by divine distinction of Psyche, the Dog and Wolf are precisely opposite creatures in their function to the sheepfold; and, spiritually, the Dominican, or Dog of the Lord, is for ever in like manner opposed to the Wolf of the Devil, modern science, finding Dog and Wolf indistinguishable in their Bones, declares them to be virtually one and the same animal.[6]
IV. The Body, in its sanity and beauty: strength of it being the first simple meaning of what the Greeks called virtue: and the eternity of it being the special doctrine of the form of religion professed in Christendom under the name of Christianity.
V. The things good and pleasing to the Psyche; as the visible things of creation,—sky, water, flowers, and the like; and the treasured-up words or feats of other Spirits.
VI. The things good and pleasing to the Body; summed under the two heads of Bread and Wine, brought forth by the Amorite King of Salem.
VII. The documents giving claim to the possession [[322]]of these things, when not in actual possession; or ‘money.’