from the very depths of man's understanding the
real sense of the word fall, which occurs in every language. He appealed
to the most widely-spread traditions in evidence of this one true
origin, explaining, with much lucidity, the passion all men have for
rising, mounting--an instinctive ambition, the perennial revelations of
our destiny.

He displayed the whole universe at a glance, and described the nature
of God Himself circulating in a full tide from the centre to the
extremities, and from the extremities to the centre again. Nature was
one and homogeneous. In the most seemingly trivial, as in the most
stupendous work, everything obeyed that law; each created object
reproduced in little an exact image of that nature--the sap in the
plant, the blood in man, the orbits of the planets. He piled proof on
proof, always completing his idea by a picture musical with poetry.

And he boldly anticipated every objection. He thundered forth an
eloquent challenge to the monumental works of science and human
excrescences of knowledge, such as those which societies use the
elements of the earthly globe to produce. He asked whether our wars, our
disasters, our depravity could hinder the great movement given by God to
all the globes; and he laughed human impotence to scorn by pointing
to their efforts everywhere in ruins. He cried upon the manes of Tyre,
Carthage, and Babylon; he called upon Babel and Jerusalem to appear;
and sought, without finding them, the transient furrows made by the
ploughshare of civilization. Humanity floated on the surface of the
earth as a ship whose wake is lost in the calm level of ocean.

These were the fundamental notions set forth in Doctor Sigier's address,
all wrapped in the mystical language and strange school Latin of the
time. He had made a special study of the Scriptures, and they supplied
him with the weapons with which he came before his contemporaries to
hasten their progress. He hid his boldness under his immense learning,
as with a cloak, and his philosophical bent under a saintly life. At
this moment, after bringing his hearers face to face with God, after
packing the universe into an idea, and almost unveiling the idea of the
world, he gazed down on the silent, throbbing mass, and scrutinized the
stranger with a look. Then, spurred on, no doubt, by the presence of
this remarkable personage, he added these words, from which I have
eliminated the corrupt Latinity of the Middle Ages:--