him not.  Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?  Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?[212] Whence, then, this worship of the past?[213] The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul.  Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light; where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury, if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.

Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say “I think,” “I am,” but quotes some saint or sage.  He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.  These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.  There is no time to them.  There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.  Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less.  Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike.  But man postpones, or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with a reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future.  He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.

This should be plain enough.  Yet see what strong intellects dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul.  We shall not always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives.[214] We are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men and talents and characters they chance to see,—­painfully recollecting the exact words they spoke; afterwards, when they come into the point of view which those had who uttered those saying, they understand them, and are willing to let the words go; for, at any time, they can use words as good when occasion comes.  If we live truly, we shall see truly.  It is as easy for the strong man to be strong, as it is for the weak to be weak.  When we have new perception, we shall gladly disburden the memory of its hoarded treasures as old rubbish.  When a man lives with God, his voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the rustle of the corn.

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains unsaid; probably cannot be said; for all that we say is the far-off remembering of the intuition.  That thought, by what I can now nearest approach to say it, is this.  When good is near you, when you have life in yourself, it is not by any known or accustomed way; you shall not discern the footprints of any other; you shall not see the face of man; you shall not hear any name;—­the way, the thought, the good, shall be wholly strange and new.  It shall exclude