The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863, page 59 by Various Authors
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aching themselves in their vast and unfinished forms from primeval and gigantic rocks, grow into a kind of dull, embryonic, and stagnant life, far more abhorrent than death itself--do we not clearly recognize the idea of the infinite absorbing all things into itself, crushing the soaring spirit of man under a blind fatalism, robbing him of all hope and aim in life, of the dignity of personal effort and moral responsibility, presenting as the only aim of all his glowing desires, the utter absorption of his own individuality in the bosom of the limitless whole--thus reducing the vivid action of his varied life to the stillness of the grave, without its repose?'
It is a strange fact, which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, man was yet forced to submit to its irrational and pitiless decrees) than was even the hopeless fatalism consequent upon the pantheistic absorption of the East.
What a step from the vague yet crushing, abstract yet deadening dreaming of a fearful and misinterpreted infinite; from the cruel rigors of an unreasoning and implacable fate--to that full revelation that the Infinite is a personal God, cognizant of the human, gifting it with a free will to choose good or evil, and united with it in mercy and love through the mystic life and still more mystic death of the Divine Redeemer!
In sculpture, the thirst for the infinite is manifest in the various statues of the gods which it has given us; in painting, an art more closely related to Christianity, in the numberless figures of angels and heads of cherubs, in the countless pictures upon holy subjects with which it has presented us. The marble speaks, the canvas glows with