II.7-11. The sun is taken as a test case. Imagine it gone, and the world becomes a dungeon; imagine it fixed in the sky, doubled or made one infinite flame, and each change is for the worse. The real sun is therefore the best of all possible works, and better for being finite. The movement ends with a couplet on the sea within its shore and the lesson that divine wisdom achieves more in bounded things than infinity could, and it adds a praise of limits that balances the book’s love of the infinite.

II.12-18. All creatures and all men serve each one. Land, air and sea are there to be enjoyed as Adam and Eve would have enjoyed them, and each person is alone in the world though millions live in it besides. Hidden common pleasures are preferred to showy ones, which are like Egyptian temples, splendid at the front and absurd within. The movement ends with the promise that one who enjoys the world as God does will come to know Him, and it adds the dignity of the ordinary.

II.19-24. Next comes the question why God is invisible. He is not seen because any visible body would either shut out all other being or fall into contempt by being always present. The world itself is the body He has taken on to show His beauty, and the Greek sages consulted by King Amasis of Egypt were right to call it the most beautiful thing. Motion shows its life better than any picture could. The movement ends by making the human understanding, not an endless wall, the true image of God’s infinity, and it adds a theology of the world as revelation.

II.25-30. God is Love. Nothing is so just as love, which gives each thing its due and to what is lovely its love, so that love and righteousness turn out to be one virtue. Rewards and punishments follow from it, and contempt of an infinite love deserves an infinite anger, yet love can forbear and forgive, hating the sin and loving the sinner. The movement ends with the wonder that the sinner may be restored to greater beauty than before, and it adds the moral seriousness that lies beneath the book’s joy.

II.31-38. The argument turns to the atonement. Sin must be severed from the sinner, and the argument asks who could stand surety, testing the conditions the divines laid down and showing that no angel could meet them. The Socinians, who denied Christ’s divinity, are named and refuted. The movement ends in a strait, since only God could make satisfaction and it seemed unfitting that God should, until love prepares its own offering, one mighty to save, and it adds the book’s one sustained piece of doctrinal argument.

II.39-47. Love is found in the Trinity itself. God by loving begot His Son, and love is at once the lover, the love begotten and the love proceeding, the Producer, the Means and the End. God is pure act and pure love, and loves Himself in loving His creatures. The movement ends with the formula that God does what He does in order to be what He is, and it adds a doctrine of the Trinity drawn from the nature of love rather than from authority alone.

II.48-55. The soul, too, is made by love. By loving the soul begets and enlarges itself, and until it loves it is idle, dark and desolate. Love’s paradoxes follow, excess as its true moderation and activity as its rest. The lover lives more in the beloved than in himself, and becomes supreme and sovereign in every soul he loves. The movement ends with the lover as the end of all things in each of his friends, and it adds the soul’s share in God’s own self-giving.

II.56-61. The soul is a trinity of its own. A loving soul has three subsistences, like the Trinity, and without love it is a sun that never sends out its beams. The end of riches is to be beloved, and giving and receiving make a single circle. The movement ends by blessing the natural wish to be great in the eyes of others, planted in us so that happiness might be enlarged by many spectators, and it adds a defence of honour rightly sought.

II.62-69. Love is the means by which the world is enjoyed. It is the root of nature and the soul of life, and other men are the chief of the soul’s treasures. A man who dotes on one beautiful creature does not love it too much but everything else too little, and a grain of sand, rightly understood, deserves an infinite love. The movement ends with the art of managing love, so as to make it proportionate and holy, and it adds the book’s teaching on ordered love.

II.70-77. The soul’s size is measured next. In each soul there are innumerable infinities, and souls are mirrors in which each sees all the others and all their objects. The understanding is present wherever it reaches, and the multitude of Revelation praises God before His throne. The movement ends by arguing that God, to satisfy His love, must give infinite treasures, and that the soul must therefore seek its riches everywhere, and it adds the soul’s presence in all places.

II.78-83. The soul becomes what it knows. As sunbeams light a looking-glass and are lit by it, the soul is transformed into what it knows. The avaricious and the generous impulse are both satisfied, since every treasure is wholly each person’s own and yet everyone’s too. The soul is an infinite sphere in a centre, and infinity is known before any limit. The movement ends with the soul as an abyss of abysses, followed by four jotted lines of verse, and it adds the doctrine of the soul’s infinite capacity.

II.84-92. Thought is set above things. God is Mind, all eye and all ear, and minds grow like Him by containing all things. The idea of heaven and earth in a soul is dearer to God than heaven and earth, and every thought is another world to Him, while at II.88 the manuscript’s numbering passes from 87 to 89. The movement ends by calling the soul a living temple and telling the reader she is never her true self until she lives by her soul, and it adds the book’s boldest claim for the worth of thought.

II.93-100. The Century ends by asking what the world is for. It obliges the reader to honour every heir, feeds praise, and teaches the price of redemption through the story of Zopyrus and the pomegranate. It is the theatre of God’s justice. The Roman scholar Varro’s two hundred and eighty-eight opinions on happiness are reconciled, and philosophers who define felicity by negatives are rebuked. The movement ends by summing up the mystery of felicity, God the giver and the soul the receiver, and closes the Century’s teaching.

The Third Century

III.1-6. The Third Century turns to a life. It asks whether the reader would see the infancy of greatness, and answers with the author’s first apprehensions, pure, virgin and learned from no book. Everything seemed his, at rest and immortal, and the city seemed to stand in Eden. A poem on the God who walked with him in childhood follows, and then Christ’s call to become as little children. The movement ends with a promise to show by what steps he came to his present joy, and it adds the evidence of experience to the argument of reason.

III.7-14. Then the light goes out. The first light was blown out by custom, buried under worthless things, carried off by others’ desires and left unfed by a bad education. Misery comes more from custom than from inward corruption, though all corruption is traced to Adam, and nurses and parents are warned. The boy learned to prize a drum and a penny, and the Christian world is shown more barbarous than the peoples it despises. The movement ends with him like the prodigal among the husks, and it adds the anatomy of a fall that blames custom and example more than nature.

III.15-21. The return begins with want. Even while he forgot, he felt at times that he wanted something, and at about four he reasoned that a good God must give infinite riches, and asked why he was so poor. Afterwards he wondered where the earth ended, rejoiced to learn that it was round, and asked why bodies were no bigger than they are. The movement ends with a poem on the virtue of bounded power, and it adds the child as philosopher, whose questions are the seed of the book.

III.22-26. Solitude teaches him next. An empty dining room taught him that motion and company make a place glad, and an evening alone in a field filled him with dread until hope came to him from every side. He learned that he was made to be present everywhere, and hungered for news from beyond the seas, as if his treasure lay in some far country. The movement ends with the poem On News, in which the infant never dreams that the treasures of the world lie all around him, and it adds the lesson of solitude.

III.27-35. Scripture enters the story. He longed for a book brought by an angel, and found that God had already sent the Bible, which told him that he was God’s son and heir of all things. Its matter delighted him, and only its manner, without angels or wonders, was for a while the ground of his unbelief. Seven reasons show why the plain way is the better. The movement ends in full satisfaction, a joy greater than all the joys of Eden, and it adds the author’s account of his faith.

III.36-45. The University both helps and fails him. There he learned that every art pertains to felicity, but no tutor taught felicity itself, and study without an end went astray, so he sets out what ought to be studied, humanity, divinity, natural philosophy and ethics, each for its use to happiness. The movement ends with the claim that no miracle can prove religion to one who lacks a clear sight of the truth of things, which proves itself by its own beauty, and it adds a plan of education.

III.46-51. A life is then chosen. In the country he resolved to spend all his time in the search of happiness, choosing ten pounds a year and leather clothes over wealth that would devour his hours, and found himself provided for ever after. Poems on the holy life, on sin and on recovery follow. The movement ends with sin as the only calamity, a long interruption in the enjoyment of every joy, and it adds the cost and the danger of the chosen life.

III.52-60. Now comes the method. Like a traveller who cannot visit every coast and so chooses the most flourishing cities, he needed a rule, and an implicit faith in God’s goodness led him to study the most common things and find them the most valuable. He learned to consider things in their places and relations. The movement ends with the sight of happiness itself, in which all was well except himself, who needed mending, and it adds the discovery that the change required is inward.