And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they
are only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a
coarse type, and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally
accurate one. Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find
out the meaning of "Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin
word "breath," and an indistinct translation of the Greek word for
"wind." The same word is used in writing, "The wind bloweth where
it listeth;" and in writing, "So is every one that is born of the
Spirit;" born of the BREATH, that is; for it means the breath of
God, in soul and body. We have the true sense of it in our words
"inspiration" and "expire." Now, there are two kinds of breath with
which the flock may be filled,--God's breath, and man's. The breath
of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven
is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath--the word which HE
calls spiritual,--is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of
the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a
dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is
literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last,
and fatalest sign of it, is that "puffing up." Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who
teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in
cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar
people and messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and
great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as
they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong;
and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be
saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead
of act, and wish instead of work;--these are the true fog children--