ion of a
revelation is that it is a telling of fortunes. In past oracles of the
soul the understanding seeks to find answers to sensual questions, and
undertakes to tell from God how long men shall exist, what their hands
shall do and who shall be their company, adding names and dates and
places. But we must pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An
answer in words is delusive; it is really no answer to the questions
you ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards which you
sail. The description does not describe them to you, and to-morrow you
arrive there and know them by inhabiting them. Men ask concerning the
immortality of the soul, the employments of heaven, the state of the
sinner, and so forth. They even dream that Jesus has left replies to
precisely these interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit
speak in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, living
in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, heeding only
the manifestations of these, never made the separation of the idea of
duration from the essence of these attributes, nor uttered a syllable
concerning the duration of the soul. It was left to his disciples to
sever duration from the moral elements, and to teach the immortality
of the soul as a doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the
doctrine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already fallen.
In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, there is no
question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks this question or
condescends to these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the
man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the present, which is
infinite, to a future which would be finite.

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a confession
of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in words can reply to a
question of things. It is not in an arbitrary "decree of God," but in
the nature of man, that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow; for
the soul will not have us read any other cipher than that of cause and
effect. By this veil which curtains events it instructs the children
of men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer to these
questions of the senses is to forego all low curiosity, and, accepting
the tide of being which floats us into the secret of nature, work and
live, work a