1. To begin with, then, there was reared up in the midst of this town of
Mansoul a most famous and stately palace. And that palace and the town
immediately around it were the mirror and the glory of all that its
founder and maker had ever made. His palace was his very top-piece. It
was the metropolitan of the whole world round about it; and it had
positive commission and power to demand service and support of all
around. Yes. And all that is literally, evidently, and actually true of
the human heart. For all other earthly things are created and upheld,
are ordered and administered, with an eye to the human heart. The human
heart is the final cause, as our scholars would say, of absolutely all
other earthly things. Earth, air, water; light and heat; all the
successively existing worlds, mineral, vegetable, animal, spiritual;
grass, herbs, corn, fruit-trees, cattle and sheep, and all other living
creatures; all are upheld for the use and the support of man. And, then,
all that is in man himself is in him for the end and the use of his
heart. All his bodily senses; all his bodily members; every fearfully
and wonderfully made part of his body and of his mind; all administer to
his heart. She is the sovereign and sits supreme. And she is worthy and
is fully entitled so to sit. For there is nothing on the earth greater
or better than the heart, unless it is the Creator Himself, who planned
and executed the heart for Himself and not for another with Him. 'The
body exists,' says a philosophical biologist of our day, 'to furnish the
cerebral centres with prepared food, just as the vegetable world, viewed
biologically, exists to furnish the animal world with similar food. The
higher is the last formed, the most difficult, and the most complex; but
it is just this that is most precious and significant--all of which shows
His unrolling purpose. It is the last that alone explains all that went
before, and it is the coming that will alone explain the present. God
before all, through all, foreseeing all, and still preparing all; God in
all is profoundly evident.' Yes, profoundly evident to profound minds,