He will recover out of that persuasion one day,or be ground to powder,Ibelieve!--To such a pass,by our beaverisms and our mammonisms;by canting of "prevenient grace"everywhere,and so boarding and lodging our poor souls upon supervenient moonshine everywhere,for centuries long;by our sordid stupidities and our idle babblings;through faith in the divine Stump-orator,and Constitutional Palaver,or august Sanhedrim of Orators,--have men and Nations been reduced,in this sad epoch!I can call them happy Nations;I must call them Nations like to perish;Nations that will either begin to recover,or else soon die.Recovery is to be hoped;--yes,since there is in Nature an Almighty Beneficence,and His voice,divinely terrible,can be heard in the world-whirlwind ,even as from of old and forevermore.Recovery,or else destruction and annihilation,is very certain;and the crisis,too,comes rapidly on:but by Stump-Orator and Constitutional Palaver,however perfected,my hopes of recovery have long vanished.
By them,I should imagine,but by something far the reverse of them,shall we return to truth and God!--I tell you,the igle intellect can think the truth ,even within its own limits,and when it seriously tries!And of the igle intellect that does seriously try,and has even reached the "igleness"of seriously trying the reverse,and of lying with its very tongue,what are we to expect?It is frightful to consider.Sincere wise speech is but an imperfect corollary,and insignificant outer manifestation,of sincere wise thought.He whose very tongue utters falsities,what has his heart long been doing?The thought of his heart is its wisest,even its wisest;it is its foolishest;--and even of that we have a false and foolish copy.And it is Nature's Fact,or the Thought of the Eternal,which we want to arrive at in regard to the matter,--which if we do arrive at,we shall save the matter,we shall drive the matter into shipwreck!
The practice of modern Parliaments,with reporters sitting among them,and twenty-seven millions mostly fools listening to them,fills me with amazement.In regard to thing ,or fact as God and Nature have made it,can you get so much as the real thought of any hoable head,--even so far as it ,the said hoable head,still has capacity of thought.What the hoable gentleman's wisest thought is or would have been,had he led from birth a life of piety and earnest veracity and heroic virtue,you,and he himself poor deep-sunk creature,vainly conjecture as from immense dim distances far in the rear of what he is led to say .And again,far in the rear of what his thought is,--surely long infinitudes beyond all he could ever think,--lies the Thought of God Almighty,the Image itself of the Fact,the thing you are in quest of,and must find or do worse!
Even his,the hoable gentleman's,actual bewildered,falsified,vague surmise or quasi-thought,even this is given you;but only some falsified copy of this,such as he fancies may suit the reporters and twenty-seven millions mostly fools.And upon that latter you are to act;--with what success,do you expect?That is the thought you are to take for the Thought of the Eternal Mind,--that double-distilled falsity of a blockheadism from one who is false even as a blockhead!
Do I make myself plain to Mr.Peter's understanding?Perhaps it will surprise him less that parliamentary eloquence excites more wonder than admiration in me;that the fate of countries governed by that sublime alchemy does appear the hopefulest just .
By that method,I should apprehend,will the Heavens be scaled and the Earth vanquished;by that,but by aher.
A benevolent man once proposed to me,but without pointing out the methods how,this plan of reform for our benighted world:To cut from one generation,whether the current one or the next,all the tongues away,prohibiting Literature too;and appoint at least one generation to pass its life in silence."There,thou one blessed generation,from the vain jargon of babble thou art beneficently freed.Whatsoever of truth,traditionary or original,thy own god-given intellect shall point out to thee as true,that thou wilt go and do.In doing of it there will be a verdict for thee;if a verdict of True,thou wilt hold by it,and ever again do it;if of Untrue,thou wilt never try it more,but be eternally delivered from it.To do aught because the vain hearsays order thee,and the big clamors of the sanhedrim of fools,is thy lot,--what worlds of misery are spared thee!
