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Chapter V.
These testimonies of the soul are simple as true,
commonplace as simple, universal as commonplace, natural as universal,
divine as natural. I don’t think they can appear frivolous
or feeble to any one, if he reflect on the majesty of nature, from
which the soul derives its authority.1487
1487 [This appeal to the
universal conscience and consciousness of mankind is unanswerable, and
assures us that counter-theories will never prevail. See Bossuet,
De la Connoisance de Dieu et de Soi-même. Œuvres, Tom. V. pp. 86 et. seqq.
Ed. Paris, 1846.] | If
you acknowledge the authority of the mistress, you will own it also in
the disciple. Well, nature is the mistress here, and her disciple
is the soul. But everything the one has taught or the other learned,
has come from God—the Teacher of the teacher. And what the soul
may know from the teachings of its chief instructor, thou canst judge
from that which is within thee. Think of that which enables thee to
think; reflect on that which in forebodings is the prophet, the augur
in omens, the foreseer of coming events. Is it a wonderful thing, if,
being the gift of God to man, it knows how to divine? Is it anything
very strange, if it knows the God by whom it was bestowed? Even fallen
as it is, the victim of the great adversary’s machinations, it
does not forget its Creator, His goodness and law, and the final end
both of itself and of its foe. Is it singular then, if, divine in its
origin, its revelations agree with the knowledge God has given to His
own people? But he who does not regard those outbursts of the soul as
the teaching of a congenital nature and the secret deposit of an inborn
knowledge, will say that the habit and, so to say, the vice of speaking
in this way has been acquired and confirmed from the opinions of
published books widely spread among men. Unquestionably the soul
existed before letters, and speech before books, and ideas before the
writing of them, and man himself before the poet and
philosopher.1488
1488 [Compare the heathen
ideas in Plato: e.g. the story Socrates tells in the Gorgias, (near the
close) about death and Judgment.] | Is it then to be
believed, that before literature and its publication no utterances of
the sort we have pointed out came from the lips of men? Did nobody
speak of God and His goodness, nobody of death, nobody of the dead?
Speech went a-begging, I suppose; nay, (the subjects being still
awanting, without which it cannot even exist at this day, when it is so
much more copious, and rich, and wise), it could not exist at all if
the things which are now so easily suggested, that cling to us so
constantly, that are so very near to us, that are somehow born on our
very lips, had no existence in ancient times, before letters had any
existence in the world—before there was a Mercury, I think, at
all. And whence was it, I pray, that letters themselves came to know,
and to disseminate for the use of speech, what no mind had ever
conceived, or tongue put forth, or ear taken in? But, clearly, since
the Scriptures of God, whether belonging to Christians or to Jews, into
whose olive tree we have been grafted—are much more ancient than
any secular literature, (or, let us only say, are of a somewhat earlier
date, as we have shown in its proper place when proving their
trustworthiness); if the soul have taken these utterances from writings
at all, we must believe it has taken them from ours, and not from
yours, its instruction coming more naturally from the earlier than the
later works. Which latter indeed waited for their own instruction from
the former, and though we grant that light has come from you, still it
has flowed from the first fountainhead originally; and we claim
as entirely ours, all you
may have taken from us and handed down. Since it is thus, it matters
little whether the soul’s knowledge was put into it by God or by
His book. Why, then, O man, wilt thou maintain a view so groundless, as
that those testimonies of the soul have gone forth from the mere human
speculations of your literature, and got hardening of common
use?E.C.F. INDEX & SEARCH
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