English Prose | Page 8

things find their common origin. For the sense of
being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the soul, is not
diverse from things, from space, from light, from time, from man, but
one with them and proceedeth obviously from the same source whence
their life and being also proceedeth. We first share the life by which
things exist and afterward see them as appearances in nature and forget
that we have shared their cause. Here is the fountain of action and the
fountain of thought. Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth
man wisdom, of that inspiration of man which cannot be denied
without impiety and atheism. We lie in the lap of immense intelligence,
which makes us organs of its activity and receivers of its truth. When
we discern justice, when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves,
but allow a passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we
seek to pry into the soul that causes--all metaphysics, all philosophy is
at fault. Its presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man
discerns between the voluntary acts of his mind and his involuntary
perceptions. And to his involuntary perceptions: he knows a perfect
respect is due. He may err in the expression of them, but he knows that
these things are so, like day and night, not to be disputed. All my wilful
actions and acquisitions are but roving;--the most trivial reverie, the
faintest native emotion, are domestic and divine. Thoughtless people
contradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or
rather much more readily; for they do not distinguish between
perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or that thing.
But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I see a trait, my children
will see it after me, and in course of time all mankind,--although it may
chance that no one has seen it before me. For my perception of it is as
much a fact as the sun.

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane
to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaketh he should
communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with
his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center
of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole.
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, then old
things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and
absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it,--one thing as much as another. All things are
dissolved to their center by their cause, and in the universal miracle
petty and particular miracles disappear. This is and must be. If therefore
a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to
the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in
another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is
its fulness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into
whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the
past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and majesty of
the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye
maketh, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night;
and history is an impertinence and an injury if it be any thing more than
a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say "I
think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the
blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make
no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are;
they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply
the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a
leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is
no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied and it
satisfies nature in all moments alike. There is no time to it. But man
postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with
reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround
him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and
strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.
This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet
hear God himself unless