| PAGE | |
| Great Possessions | [1] |
| Crime and Punishment | [26] |
| Christianity a Danger to the State | [48] |
| The Salt of the Earth | [63] |
| The Rights of Majorities | [85] |
| Discreditable Conduct | [109] |
| What is Womanly? | [135] |
| Use and Ornament | [157] |
| Art and Citizenship | [189] |
| Conscious and Unconscious Immortality | [218] |
GREAT POSSESSIONS
(1913)
“You never know yourself,” says Thomas Traherne, “till you know more than your own body. The Image of God was not seated in the features of your face but in the lineaments of your soul. In the knowledge of your powers, inclinations, and principles, the knowledge of yourself chiefly consisteth.... The world is but a little centre in comparison of you ... like a gentleman’s house to one that is travelling, it is a long time before you come unto it—you pass it in an instant—and you leave it for ever. The omnipresence and eternity of God are your fellows and companions. Your understanding comprehends the world like the dust of a balance, measures Heaven with a span, and esteems a thousand years but as one day.”
To this statement of man’s comprehensive powers, a further one might legitimately be added: You shall never know delight, till you delight in more than your own body.
Man’s body being the crucible wherein such vast things come to be tested, “Eternal Delights are,” says Traherne, in a further passage, “its only fit enjoyment.”
His doctrine is remarkable in this, that while he tends to see in everything a spiritual significance, and almost refuses to find beauty in externals alone, he insists, nevertheless, that man was sent into the world to enjoy himself, to stretch out for new acquisitions with all his faculties, and take to himself great possessions. He regards even the base and material form of conquest, expressed in endless covetousness and fierce desire for possession, rather as a lower type of what man should do and be, than of what he should not. Man’s faculties were given him so that he might be divinely unsatisfied, ever seeking more, ever assimilating more—regarding this earth not as a vale of misery or a source of temptation, but as a very Paradise and the true gate by which Heaven is to be attained and entered. “It is, indeed,” he writes, “the beautiful frontispiece of Eternity, the Temple of God, and the Palace of His Children.”
In this respect Traherne’s teaching is remarkably like the teaching of William Blake, who regarded the mere outwardness of things as nothing in comparison with their real inwardness, and yet was insistent that here and now the spirit of delight and energy and enjoyment was the true and undefiled way of life.