y are as _less._ Divorced from this, getting half-
divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of
horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear. The most
tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the
Prophet, "Behold, I will shew thee worse things than these:
women weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's
vision,--then as now.

Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder: I know more or less
the history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of
these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated
daily for centuries of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me?
Brother, No. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now; and do not
need the thunder and the terror any longer! Perhaps I am above
being frightened; perhaps it is not Fear, but Reverence alone,
that shall now lead me!--Revelations, Inspirations? Yes: and
thy own god-created Soul; dost thou not call that a
`revelation?' Who made THEE? Where didst Thou come from? The
Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied
mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! _Thou_ art the latest
Birth of Nature; it is 'the Inspiration of the Almighty' that
giveth thee understanding! My brother, my brother!--

Under baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettantisms,
with their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever
scandalous rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of
man,--religion now is; its Laws, written if not on stone tables,
yet on the Azure of Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's
Creation, certain as Life, certain as Death! I say the Laws are
there, and thou shalt not disobey them. It were better for thee
not. Better a hundred deaths than yes. Terrible 'penalties'
withal, if thou still need 'penalties,' are there for disobeying.
Dost thou observe, O redtape Politician, that fiery infernal
Phenomenon, which men name FRENCH REVOLUTION, sailing, unlooked-
for, unbidden; through thy inane Protocol Dominion:--far-seen,
with splendour not of Heaven? Ten centuries will see it. There
were Tanneries at Meudon for human skins. And Hell, very truly
Hell, had power over God's upper Earth for a season. The
cruelest Portent that has risen into created Space these ten
centuries: let us hail it, with awestruck repentant hearts, as
the voice once more of a God, though of one in wrath. Blessed be
the God's-voice; for _it_ is true, and Falsehoods have to cease