ngs are
made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things are
dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal miracle
petty and particular miracles disappear. If therefore a man claims to
know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of
some old mouldered 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 authority of the soul. Time and
space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, 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. 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 he speak the phraseology of I know not what
David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a price on
a few texts, on a few lives. We are like children who repeat by rote the
sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men
of talents and character they chance to see,--painfully recollecting
the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of
view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand them and
are willing to let the words go; for at any time they can use words as
good when occasion