Now the work of God is overlaid.  Every blunder is a rock in our field, and at last the field is a stone-heap of blunders, and our giants have work enough to reach any ground in the unsophisticated facts of life.  We set no limit to the revolutionary power of truth; in happy hour it may sweep away doctrine and usage, supplant systems by songs, and governments by Love.  Yet the first men were able to cleave the world to its centre, and predict the last results.  We only enlarge their openings.  Schools follow schools, Eclecticism comes with its band into the field to gather every ear; but Plato stands smiling behind, and holds in his hands that simple divided line, the image of all we know.

Who can wonder at the authority of the ancients, unbowed by an antiquity behind?  Freedom from authority gave their directness, their simplicity, their superiority to misgiving and second thought, their confident “Thus saith the Lord.”

We boast our enlightenment, but now the best minds are in question whether we have not lost as much by the ancients as we have gained.  Plainly, they have not yet done their own work, have not given us to ourselves and to God.  They should have been less or greater; they did not quite liberate, but became oppressors of the mind.  To this misfortune we begin to find a single exception.  Jesus, with his primal doctrine of a divine humanity, will now at last avail to be understood, will deliver us from every teacher to a Father in the heavens, and put us in direct communication with Him through the moral sense.  After so many blind centuries, his truth breaks out, draws us to him from the misunderstanding of his followers, and refers from himself to the sources of his incomparable life.

Two men of our time are the primitive Christians,—­not known for such, because their springs open, with those of the Master, not in any character, but in the Cause.  They share his reliance, and accept in simplicity those brotherly words in which he extends his privilege to every child.

He will open to us Nature, for his habit is the only natural.  He has no anxiety for immediate results, is never guarded in expression, does never explain; he makes no record of thought, calls no scholar to be scribe; he knows no labors, no studies; he walks on the hills, and frankly interprets the waving grain, the seed in the furrow, the lily, and the weed.  Here is power which takes no thought for the morrow, an attitude which works endless revolutions without means or care or cost.

We must not dwell on this supreme example, lest we leave the hope of every reader far behind.  Let us rather keep the level of common experience, and disclose the incursions of spirit which light a humble life.  Love and Providence will appear in every breast; nothing more than Love and Providence appears to us above.