r's courtyard; Dorothea pointed after him
as he walked towards the mountain. "In truth, husband," said she, "this
has been a strange morning; everything that has occurred looks as clear
as day, and yet I cannot understand it all. My heart aches when I think
what may happen to the wretched Sirona if her enraged husband overtakes
her. It seems to me that there are two sorts of marriage; one was
instituted by the most loving of the angels, nay, by the All-merciful
Himself, but the other it is not to be thought of! How can those two live
together for the future? And that under our roof! Their closed house
looks to me as though ruined and burnt-out, and we have already seen the
nettles spring up which grow everywhere among the ruins of human
dwellings."
CHAPTER XII.
The path of every star is fixed and limited, every plant bears flowers
and fruit which in form and color exactly resemble their kind, and in all
the fundamental characteristics of their qualities and dispositions, of
their instinctive bent and external impulse, all animals of the same
species resemble each other; thus, the hunter who knows the red-deer in
his father's forest, may know in every forest on earth how the stag will
behave in any given case. The better a genus is fitted for variability in
the conformation of its individuals, the higher is the rank it is
entitled to hold in the graduated series of creatures capable of
development; and it is precisely that wonderful many-sidedness of his
inner life, and of its outward manifestation, which assigns to man his
superiority over all other animated beings.
Some few of our qualities and activities can be fitly symbolized in
allegorical fashion by animals; thus, courage finds an emblem in the
lion, gentleness in the dove, but the perfect human form has satisfied a
thousand generations, and will satisfy a thousand more, when we desire to
reduce the divinity to a sensible image, for, in truth, our heart is as
surely capable of comprehending "God in us,"--that is in our feelings--as
our intellect is capable of comprehending His outward manifestation in
the universe.
Every characteristic of every finite being is to be found again in man,
and no characteristic that we can attribute to the Most High is foreign
to our own soul, which, in like manner, is infinite and immeasurable, for
it can extend its investigating feelers to the very utmost boundary of
space and time. Hence, the roads which are open to t
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