I say he has studied, meditated to no profit,
whatever may be his mere erudition, who has not absorbed this simple
consciousness and faith. It is not entirely new--but it is for
Democracy to elaborate it, and look to build upon and expand from
it, with uncompromising reliance. Above the doors of teaching the
inscription is to appear, Though little or nothing can be absolutely
known, perceiv'd, except from a point of view which is evanescent, yet
we know at least one permanency, that Time and Space, in the will of
God, furnish successive chains, completions of material births and
beginnings, solve all discrepancies, fears and doubts, and eventually
fulfil happiness--and that the prophecy of those births, namely
spiritual results, throws the true arch over all teaching, all
science. The local considerations of sin, disease, deformity,
ignorance, death, &c., and their measurement by the superficial mind,
and ordinary legislation and theology, are to be met by science,
boldly accepting, promulging this faith, and planting the seeds of
superber laws--of the explication of the physical universe through the
spiritual--and clearing the way for a religion, sweet and unimpugnable
alike to little child or great savan.
ORIGINS OF ATTEMPTED SECESSION
_Not the whole matter, but some side facts worth conning to-day and
any day_.
I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860-'65, not as a struggle
of two distinct and separate peoples, but a conflict (often happening,
and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the
same identity--perhaps the only terms on which that identity could
really become fused, homogeneous and lasting.
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