[93]
the soul.
The angel of my youth calls to me through Mr. Sears' preaching.
Ah, would to God he could give me back the undoubting faith, the poetic rapture of spiritual insight, which I then enjoyed!
But it cannot be. That was a state of childhood; and childhood will pass away.
The intellect will call aloud to the Infinite, and it receives no answer but the echo of its own voice.
If the problem of our existence is not solved elsewhere, how cruel must be the Being that placed us here!
Meanwhile, nothing surprises me more than that men should judge so harshly of each other for believing, or not believing, since it is a thing obviously beyond our control.
The man educated at Seville cannot see spiritual things in the same light that they are seen by the man educated in Boston.
At fifty years of age, it is out of our power to believe many things that we believed at twenty.
Our states have changed by slow degrees, as the delicate blossom changes to the dry seed-vessel.
We may weep for the lost blossom, but it avails not. “Violets dead the sweetest showers will ne'er make grow again.”
But, thanks to the Heavenly Father, in the dry seed-vessel lies the embryo of future flowers!
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.