festival, temples and images follow statues,
posterity will turn with deep emotion to the love of the present, as we
enraptured trace the past, only through this mutability, through this
re-echoing of the Eternal Word is the truth made manifest to me,
through this alone am I convinced that it went forth in former times,
by this means, that it apparently changes, as the leaf into the
blossom, the flower into the fruit, and the fruit yields again the seed
of the flower, it is a permanent, an eternal truth; through this
endless, this inexhaustible abundance, resembling an ocean of love, by
anticipating each individual sense, by quenching every desire, by
satisfying the hungry: by this only it becomes something simple,
authentic and independent, and I abhor the interpretations of those
innovators, who would treat these miraculous events as a tale, who
venture to call our mass with its symbols, lights, temples, pomp, and
music idolatry, and by thus warring against the most sacred things,
according to the feelings of my heart, they war against God himself,
and they must be rooted out and destroyed like noxious, venemous
reptiles."

"I understand you, my son, and would willingly believe you in the
right, for in fact you have only been declaring my own sentiments on
this subject. If such are your feelings and this be your faith, there
should be no further strife not only between us, but any one else. If
you feel that Christianity in its various forms, rejects no want, no
desire, that it is permitted to every mind to worship according to its
own light, but in the spirit of truth, the Eternal Being, then those
meek hearts, that shrink affrighted from this parade and song, from
this splendour of the temple and from the artificial culture of
religious mystery, will not be excluded from the community. Those, who
like the disciple John and the apostles of Jesus, visit the wilderness
of Jordan, and there in the dreariness of the mountains and in holy
solitude willingly listen to the Eternal Word, and are anxious to erect
there their church like the hut at Bethlehem, lest their fervid
imaginations might be overwhelmed with the splendour and sculptured
beauty of the statues, and thereby forget their salvation and their
God. These people here are likewise true Christians, my son, whatever
our priests may say to you about it, and the Father will not reject
them. There arose long since in our Cevennes, and in the valleys of the
Albigences