thought; and new date and new create
the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom,
old things pass away,--means, teachers, texts, temples, fall; it lives
now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour. All things are
made sacred by relation to it,--one as much as another. All things
are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal
miracle, petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a man
claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the
phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its
fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom
he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the
past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and
authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors
which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where
it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it
be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and
becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say
"I think," "I am," but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before
the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window
make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what
they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There
is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown
flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its
nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.
But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but
with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that
surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be
happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above
time.

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects dare not
yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not
what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not always set so great a
price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who
repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they
grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chan