Once in a while there is grown a heart so
spacious that Nature finds in it room to chant aloud the word
_God_, and set its echoes rolling billowy through one man's being;
and he, lifting up his voice to repeat it among men from that inward
hearing, invariably astounds, and it may be infuriates his
contemporaries. The simple proposition, GOD IS, could it once be
_wholly_ received, would shake our sphere as no earthquake ever
did, and would leave not one stone upon another, I say not merely of
some city of Lisbon, but of entire kingdoms and systems of
civilization. The faintest inference from this cannot be vigorously
announced in modern senates without sending throbs of terror over half
a continent, and eliciting shrieks of remonstrance from the very
shrines of worship.
The ancient perpetual truths prove, at each fresh enunciation, not only
surprising, but incredible. The reason is, that they overfill the
vessels of men's credence. If you pour the Atlantic Ocean into a pint
basin, what can the basin do but refuse to contain it, and so spill it
over? Universal truths are as spacious and profound as the universe
itself; and for the cerebral capacity of most of us the universe is
really somewhat large!
But as the major numbers of mankind are too little self-reverent to
dispense with the services of self-conceit, they like to think
themselves equal, and very easily equal, to any truth, and habitually
assume their extempore, off-hand notion of its significance as a
perfect measure of the fact.
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