Decipherment

“ Who shall read the Divine countenance when a wretched creature stands before Him, lifts its head with its racked brain, extinguished eyes, and trembling voice, and pressing its empty stomach with cracked and bony hands, prays without a voice, without a language ”

“ To every philosopher upon the earth, I say, your eye can be deceived, so can mine; your ear can be deceived, so can mine; the touch of your hand can be deceived, so can mine; but the Spirit of God filling the creature with revelation and the light of eternity, cannot be mistaken—the revelation which comes from God is never mistaken. ”

“ What is revelation at first-hand, said Paine, is only hearsay at second-hand. Real inspiration, therefore, eventuates in mysticism. The inner light shines, the inner voice speaks; God holds personal communication with the individual soul. ”

“ Perhaps I may point out that this Transcendental Feeling—the ultimate material alike of prayer and of poetry—has, like the mystic consciousness, a dual perception of Reality: static being and dynamic life. ”

“ I would to God that they all had revelation! When they receive revelation from heaven the story is told, they know for themselves.
Now, my friends, brethren and sisters, ladies and gentlemen, how do you know anything? Can you be deceived by the eye? You can; you have proved this; you all know that there are men who can deceive the sight of the eye, no matter how closely you observe their movements. Can you be deceived in hearing? Yes; you may hear sounds but not understand their import or whence they come. Can you be deceived by the touch of the finger? ”

“ Darkness hath enveloped the whole earth, and Thy tokens are ready to be blotted out throughout Thy realm.
Forgive me, O my God, for what I have spoken, for Thou art the One that knoweth all things, and in Thee are wrapped up the secrets that are hid from all else except Thyself. When Thy promise shall come to pass, Thou wilt manifest what Thou wilt, and subdue as Thou pleasest. We should wish only what Thou hast wished for us. In Thee is the knowledge of all things, and with Thee is the issue of all things. ”

“ The temper even of our fallen spirits may be too divine for any words. Then the creature kneels mute before his Maker. But are there not other states of mind in which we feel ourselves drawn near to God, when there is no such awful speechlessness laid upon us—but when, on the contrary, our tongues are loosened, and the heart that burns within will speak? Will speak, perhaps, in song—in the inspiration of our piety breathing forth hymns and psalms—poetry indeed—if there be poetry on this earth? ”

“ Unless you have loved the singing of the doxology, as I did, and have, like me, in your sixth or seventh year, been without the knowledge of the latter half of that third line, how would it be possible to make you understand what its lack meant to me! How make you know the vanishings and fallings from me; the shame and longing, troubled pride, doubt, and uncertainty! ”

“ When both thy intellect and will are quiet and passive to the expressions of the eternal Word and Spirit, and when thy soul is winged up above that which is temporal, the outward senses and the imagination being locked up by holy abstraction, then the eternal Hearing, Seeing, and Speaking will be revealed in thee. ”

“ And this I have done, not to lower the witling and the worldling in their own esteem, but with a wish to bring the ingenuous into still closer communion with those primary sensations of the human heart, which are the vital springs of sublime and pathetic composition, in this and in every other kind. And as from these primary sensations such composition speaks, so, unless correspondent ones listen promptly and submissively in the inner cell of the mind to whom it is addressed, the voice cannot be heard; its highest powers are wasted. ”

“ As the touch of the air is felt in the sense of touch, and the whisper of it heard in the ear, so also the contact of the perfections of the Beloved is felt and enjoyed in the touch of the soul — that is, in the substance thereof, through the instrumentality of the will; and the knowledge of the attributes of God felt in the hearing of the soul — that is, in the understanding. ”

“ Deny me not, O my Lord, the fragrances of Thy raiment in Thy days, and deprive me not of the breathings of Thy Revelation at the appearance of the splendors of the light of Thy face. Powerful art Thou to do what pleaseth Thee. Naught can resist Thy will, nor frustrate what Thou hast purposed by Thy power. ”

“ O, if we had spiritual organs, to see and hear things now invisible and inaudible to us, we should behold the whole air filled with the departing souls of that vast multitude which every moment dies,--should behold them streaming up like thin vapors heaven-ward, and hear the startling blast of the archangel's trump sounding incessant through the universe and proclaiming the awful judgment day. ”

“ The reason is that the speech of an angel, or of a spirit, finds entrance first into a man's thoughts, and reaches his organs of hearing from within." It is necessary only to read his literal statements to perceive the subjective character of the visions. ”

“ Those who listen will hear the Holy Spirit saying to them, in direct application, the same things that lie on the open pages as the record of what was once said to men of old. Meditation or the devotional use of Scripture renders conscience, that organ of the soul by which God's voice is received by man, increasingly sensitive. ”

“ Hold Thou me with the hands of Thy power, and grant that I may be so carried away by the sweet melodies of the Dove of Thy oneness, that I will cease to regard in all creation any face except Thy face, O Thou the Goal of my desire, and will recognize in the visible world naught else save the evidences of Thy might, O Thou Who art the God of mercy! ”

“ Wherefore, sinner, say not thou, 'I shall not see Him; for judgment is before Him,' and He will make thee see Him (Job 35:14) .
Of hearing.
2. Can the body hear? hath it ears? so hath the soul (Job 4:12,13) . It is the soul, not the body, that hears the language of things invisible. It is the soul that hears God when He speaks in and by His Word and Spirit; and it is the soul that hears the devil when he speaks by his illusions and temptations. ”

“ I. The question which stands as basic to all others which I wish to [90] ask is, What is the nature of this power, intelligence, and will that communicates with us in this mysterious manner?
P. It is the reduplication of your own mental state; it is a spirit; it is the whole spiritual world; it is God—one or all, according to your condition and the form and aspect in which you are able to receive the communication. ”

“ Taking their source and their element from the soul itself, the vibrations of the air, charged with passion, put our hearts so powerfully into communion, carrying thought between them so lucidly, and being, above all, so incapable of falsehood, that a single inflection of a voice is often a revelation. ”

“ In a general way, I may say of poets that there are two classes:—the introspective, or those whose souls, ever standing in the presence of the Divinity within them, hear the calls of other souls and the mighty voice of God; and hearing, obey;—the extrospective, or those whose souls, not less divine, but less conscious, perhaps, of that Divinity, unconsciously perceive the manifold relations in external nature, and through the universal spirit of nature none the less distinctly hear that same Almighty Voice. ”

“ As this proverb has reference to men’s failing to see the Divine presences, so let me observe by the way, there is a very grand French one which expresses the same truth, under the image of a failing to hear the divine voices, those voices being drowned by the deafening hubbub of the world: The noise is so great, one cannot hear God thunder. ”

“ The divine word in the secondary sense is the outward word—the word of Scripture. "The other word which serves the inner Word with voice, sound, and expression is the external word, and is heard by the external man with his ears of sense, and is written and read in letters. He who has read and heard only that, and not the inner Word, has not heard the Gospel of Christ, the Gospel of Grace, nor has he received or understood it." ”

“ And as body and soul are united by correspondence, the one being filled, pervaded, and animated by the other, so the literal and spiritual senses of the Word are united in like manner,—the former being the appropriate receptacle or Divine medium of the latter. ”

“ People are not all ossified—brain, sense and heart, because God's Commentary on his written Revelation was given first—was handed down from a thousand Sinais, and strewed in green, and golden shadowy lines through all the ages. ”

“ The forms of feeling, of sense-perception, and of idea or mental representation, as they necessarily proceed one out of the other, are now forced of themselves into that sphere in which the inward mediation of their moments proves itself to be necessary, that is to say, into the sphere of thought in which religious consciousness will get a grasp of itself in its notion. ”

“ For the letters of negation, no matter how far they may be removed from the holy fragrances of Thy knowledge, and however forgetful they may become of the wondrous splendors of the dawning light of Thy beauty, which are shed from the heaven of Thy majesty, must needs exist in Thy realm, so that the words which affirm Thee may thereby be exalted. ”

“ But if voice and expression are given us, for the sake of understanding, how can God not hear the soul itself, and the mind, since assuredly soul hears soul, and mind, mind? Whence God does not wait for loquacious tongues, as interpreters among men, but knows absolutely the thoughts of all; and what the voice intimates to us, that our thought, which even before the creation He knew would come into our mind, speaks to God. Prayer, then, may be uttered without the voice, by concentrating the whole spiritual nature within on expression by the mind, in undistracted turning towards God. ”

“ On the contrary, he teaches that the spiritual meaning of many parts of the Word—and these the most essential parts—is sufficiently obvious to all minds. The cloud of the letter in many places is so thin, that the light of the spiritual sense shines through. ”

“ Or, if I say that the Deity causes the sensation to arise in my mind immediately after he has caused the particles of the sensorium to move in a certain way, is anything gained? In truth, a sensation, as we have already seen, is an intuition—a part of immediate knowledge. ”

“ Or a small portion of a book, or an epistle, or a gospel, through which we go regularly for meditation, may be considered every day, without, however, suffering oneself to be brought into bondage by this plan.
Learned commentaries I have found to store the head with many notions, and often also with the truth of God; but when the Spirit teaches, through the instrumentality of prayer and meditation, the heart is affected. ”

“ By means of this process, the features of natural objects are thrown upon a sensitive sheet, through a lens, and leave their impression upon the sheet. So when the character of God is, by means of prayer, brought to bear upon the mind of the believer—that mind being rendered sensitive by the Holy Spirit—it impresses there the Divine image. ”

“ Hence the Scripture, “They shall speak with new tongues.” We are addressing metaphysics to a physical age. When referring to matter, we understand that we refer to nothingness, while our reader is thinking of matter as something, and almost the only thing, and of the things that pertain to Spirit as nothing, or something afar off. Again, we are speaking of the spiritual while acting on a material plane. When Soul is contradicting sense, we must employ the terms for material things to express the immaterial and spiritual idea. ”

“ All those things which can be conceived in the heart, or expressed by the tongue, or seen with the eyes, or touched with the hands — all these are nothing in respect of the things which cannot be conceived, or seen, or touched. ”

“ A confession, which they intend should include all mortal sin, and a few vocal prayers, comprise the whole of their preparation for the most solemn of all duties. The God of all sanctity is then introduced into a soul defiled with innumerable stains. ”

“ Thou beholdest, O my God, how every bone in my body soundeth like a pipe with the music of Thine inspiration, revealing the signs of Thy oneness and the clear tokens of Thy unity. I entreat Thee, O my God, by Thy Name which irradiateth all things, to raise up such servants as shall incline their ears to the voice of the melodies that hath ascended from the right hand of the throne of Thy glory. ”

“ Sound is a mental impression, made on human belief; the ear hears not. In Science sound is communicated through spiritual understanding, through the senses of Soul. Before human knowledge educated mortal thought into a false sense of things, — into belief in material origins, and away from the One Mind and true source, — I have no doubt the impressions of Truth were as distinct as sound, and came thus to the senses of primitive Christians. ”

“ What if through the medium of each separate brain, the theology look different? The heart is greater than the brain; or, in other words, the affections are higher than the intellect. “Out of the heart are the issues of life;” ”