Nath! Greene

with the exspects of the author

THE

BLAZING STAR;

WITH AN APPENDIX TREATING OF

THE JEWISH KABBALA.

ALSO A TRACT ON

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MR. HERBERT SPENCER,

AND ONE ON

NEW-ENGLAND TRANSCENDENTALISM.

BY

WILLIAM B. GREENE.

BOSTON:

A. WILLIAMS AND CO.

1872.

Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872,

BY WILLIAM B. GREENE,

In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.

Boston:

Stereotyped and Printed by Rand, Avery, & Co.

THE BLAZING STAR.

not all men

SOME men see always before them an ideal, a mental picture if you will, of what they ought to be, and are not. Whoso seeks to follow this ideal revealed to the mental vision, whoso seeks to attain to conformity with it, will find it enlarge itself, and remove from him. He that follows it will improve his own moral character; but the ideal will remain always above him and before him, prompting him to new exertions. What is the natural conscience if it be not a condemnation of ourselves as we are, mean, pitiful, weak, and a comparison of ourselves with what we ought to be, wise, powerful, holy?

It is this Ideal of what we ought to be, and are not, that is symbolically pictured in the Blazing Star.

The abject slave on an East-African rice plantation, brutal, ignorant, and a devil-worshipper, sees this Day-Star rising in his heart, and straightway he becomes intellectually of age. For it is the soul, not the body, that attains to the age of discretion. They who see this Star, have attained to their majority: all other persons are minors. Before the rays of this Star, voudouism and devil-worship, whether in refined

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