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SELF-RELIANCE

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so
pure, that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must
be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not
one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his
voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from
the centre of the present thought; and new date and new
create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple, and receives
a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — means,
teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past
and future into the present hour. All things are made
sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All
things are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and, in
the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles
disappear. If, therefore, a man claims to know and speak
of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of
some old mouldered nation in another country, in another
world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak
which is its fulness and completion? Is the parent better
than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being?
Whence, then, this worship of the past? 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 any thing 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,

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