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- 9286
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.921Z
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- 9228
- text
- Sooner or later in this life, the earnest, or enthusiastic youth comes
to know, and more or less appreciate this startling solecism:--That
while, as the grand condition of acceptance to God, Christianity calls
upon all men to renounce this world; yet by all odds the most Mammonish
part of this world--Europe and America--are owned by none but professed
Christian nations, who glory in the owning, and seem to have some reason
therefor.
This solecism once vividly and practically apparent; then comes the
earnest reperusal of the Gospels: the intense self-absorption into that
greatest real miracle of all religions, the Sermon on the Mount. From
that divine mount, to all earnest loving youths, flows an inexhaustible
soul-melting stream of tenderness and loving-kindness; and they leap
exulting to their feet, to think that the founder of their holy religion
gave utterance to sentences so infinitely sweet and soothing as these
sentences which embody all the love of the Past, and all the love which
can be imagined in any conceivable Future. Such emotions as that Sermon
raises in the enthusiastic heart; such emotions all youthful hearts
refuse to ascribe to humanity as their origin. This is of God! cries the
heart, and in that cry ceases all inquisition. Now, with this fresh-read
sermon in his soul, the youth again gazes abroad upon the world.
Instantly, in aggravation of the former solecism, an overpowering sense
of the world's downright positive falsity comes over him; the world
seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies. The sense of this thing is
so overpowering, that at first the youth is apt to refuse the evidence
of his own senses; even as he does that same evidence in the matter of
the movement of the visible sun in the heavens, which with his own eyes
he plainly sees to go round the world, but nevertheless on the authority
of other persons,--the Copernican astronomers, whom he never saw--he
believes it _not_ to go round the world, but the world round it. Just
so, too, he hears good and wise people sincerely say: This world only
_seems_ to be saturated and soaking with lies; but in reality it does
not so lie soaking and saturate; along with some lies, there is much
truth in this world. But again he refers to his Bible, and there he
reads most explicitly, that this world is unconditionally depraved and
accursed; and that at all hazards men must come out of it. But why come
out of it, if it be a True World and not a Lying World? Assuredly, then,
this world is a lie.
Hereupon then in the soul of the enthusiast youth two armies come to the
shock; and unless he prove recreant, or unless he prove gullible, or
unless he can find the talismanic secret, to reconcile this world with
his own soul, then there is no peace for him, no slightest truce for him
in this life. Now without doubt this Talismanic Secret has never yet
been found; and in the nature of human things it seems as though it
never can be. Certain philosophers have time and again pretended to have
found it; but if they do not in the end discover their own delusion,
other people soon discover it for themselves, and so those philosophers
and their vain philosophy are let glide away into practical oblivion.
Plato, and Spinoza, and Goethe, and many more belong to this guild of
self-impostors, with a preposterous rabble of Muggletonian Scots and
Yankees, whose vile brogue still the more bestreaks the stripedness of
their Greek or German Neoplatonical originals. That profound Silence,
that only Voice of our God, which I before spoke of; from that divine
thing without a name, those impostor philosophers pretend somehow to
have got an answer; which is as absurd, as though they should say they
had got water out of stone; for how can a man get a Voice out of
Silence?
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