Touch Any Man and You Touch Heaven

Philaletheians UK · Mystic Verse and Insights Series · 2 pages

Two pages assembling *three short passages from three writers under two headings, with each source given precisely in the footnotes: Franz Hartmann's With the Adepts, a line from Carlyle quoted in The Secret Doctrine, and a paragraph from Emerson's Self-Reliance*.

The first heading states that the outer man is the symbol of the inner man, and Hartmann is quoted for the claim that a man's form and body are not the real man at all but merely a symbol and personification of his character and attributes — a form of matter in which the thoughts of the real man have found external expression. The second heading widens that into the sentence the file is named for. Carlyle is quoted as saying that there is but one Temple in the universe and that is the body of man, that nothing is holier than that high form, and that we touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body. Emerson closes the file with the practical consequence, and in his usual combative register: let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the divine fact, bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet because God is here within, and let our own simplicity judge them and our docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and fortune beside our native riches.

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