mystery of truth is hidden behind them; and when next it shall come
forth, it will bring astonishment, as at first. Every time the grand
old truths are livingly uttered, the world thinks it never heard them
before. The news of the day is hardly spoken before it is antiquated.
For this an hour too late is a century, is forever, too late. But truth
of life and the heart, the world-old imaginations, the root-thoughts of
human consciousness,--these never lose their privilege to surprise, and
at every fresh efflux are wellnigh sure to be persecuted by some as
unlawful impositions upon the credence of mankind. Nay, the same often
happens with the commonest truths of observation. Mr. Ruskin describes
leaves and clouds, objects that are daily before all eyes; and the very
artists cry, "Fie upon him!" as a propounder of childish novelties:
slowly they perceive that it was leaves and clouds which were novel.
Luther thunders in the ears of the Church its own creed; the Pope asks,
"Is it possible that he believes all this?" and the priesthood scream,
"To the stake with the heretic!" A poet prints in the "Atlantic
Monthly" a simple affirmation of the indestructibility of man's true
life; numbers of those who would have been shocked and exasperated to
hear questioned the Church dogma of immortality exclaim against this as
a ridiculous paradox. Once in a while there is grown a heart so
spacious that Nature finds in it room to chant aloud the word
_God_, and set its echoes rolling billowy through one man's being;
and he, lifting up his voice to repeat it among men from that inward
hearing, invariably astounds, and it may be infuriates his
contemporaries. The simple proposition, GOD IS, could it once be
_wholly_ received, would shake our sphere as no earthquake ever
did, and would leave not one stone upon another, I say not merely of
some city of Lisbon, but of entire kingdoms and systems of
civilization. The faintest inference from this cannot be vigorously
announced in modern senates without sending throbs of terror over half