ions, on whom all His Divine words were thrown away,
wretches deaf and blind and besotted, to whom it was said in vain: 'He
that looketh upon a woman,' and what follows, creating by a rod of
divinity in man's heart a far superior ideal of the moral; who heard
with indifference His 'Bless those who persecute you;' yes, listened
unmoved to His 'Suffer little children to come unto Me;' who heard with
anger His 'In heaven there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage;'
who abhorred His great doctrine that the counsels of God were not read
in the events of things[31]; who slighted as trivial that prayer which a
wise man might study with profit for a thousand years; beasts, wretches,
that turned away deaf and blind, even as their sons turn away, from
these arguments of a truth far transcending all that yet had come
amongst men; but whilst trampling with their brutal hoofs upon such
flowers of Paradise, turned in stupid wonderment to some mere
legerdemain or jugglery.

_The Truth._--But what tongue can express, what scale can measure, the
awful change in man's relations to the unseen world? Where there had
been a blank not filled by anything, not by any smoke or dusky tarnish
of suspicion, not filled by so much as any shadowy outline or vague
phantom of possibility, _there_ was now seen rising, 'like Teneriffe or
Atlas'--say rather, by symbolizing the greatest of human interests by
the greatest of human visual objects, like the snowy peaks of the
Himalaya, peaks that by men's feelings are referred to the heavens
rather than to the earth; to the beings 'whose dwelling is no thick
flesh,' rather than to men who have in no age succeeded in scaling them;
and who in their steps to those mighty thrones have heard nothing but
dread crashes of sound--again to fade or vanish, the colossal form,
never the mighty idea of 'The Truth.'[32] Where there had been nothing,
a blank, a chasm, there stood in solemn proportions a new object for
man, called The Truth. Why was it called _The_ Truth? How could such an
idea arise? Many persons will be weak enough to fancy that, as [Greek:
hopoetes] was sometimes an artifice of rhetoric for expressing the
exclusive supremacy of Homer, and as by a pure affectation and movement
of dissimulation a man was called by the title of _The Orator_, his own
favourite Greek or Roman thus affecting for the moment to know of no
other (for all such emphatic and exclusive uses of _the_ imply a
momentary annihilat