Invisible power

“ If that secret, intangible power closed its toils round her again, if that great invisible hand moved here and there and everywhere, slowly paralyzing her with its mystery and its inconceivable sway over her affairs, then she would know beyond doubt that it was not chance, nor jealousy, nor intimidation, nor ministerial wrath at her revolt, but a cold and calculating policy thought out long before she was born, a dark, immutable will of whose empire she and all that was hers was but an atom. ”

“ We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes. Facts like these excite in me the thought that the rule and governance of this universe are different from what we in our youth supposed them to be — that the inscrutable Power, at once terrible and beneficent, in whom we live and move and have our being and our end, is to be propitiated by means different to those usually resorted to. ”

“ Not so with us, who, pretending by the lines and measures of our reason, to extend the dominion of one invisible power, and contract that of the other, have discovered a gross ignorance in the natures of good and evil, and most horribly confounded the frontiers of both. ”

“ That power is invisible. It is subject to the cognizance of one of my senses. What are the means that will inform me of what nature it is? He has set himself to counterwork the machinations of this man, who had menaced destruction to all that is dear to me, and whose cunning had surmounted every human impediment. There was none to rescue me from his grasp. My rashness even hastened the completion of his scheme, and precluded him from the benefits of deliberation. ”

“ Some leaders in the invisible government are brilliant and power-hungry men who feel that the masses are unable to govern themselves and who want to set up a great dictatorship which will give them power to arrange things for the masses.
The leadership of the invisible government doubtless rests in the hands of a sinister or power-hungry few; but its real strength is in the thousands of Americans who have been drawn into the web for other reasons. ”

“ When we consider how even at the present time, and still [pg 246] more in times gone by, much that is harmful is attributed to the malevolence of invisible powers, we can readily understand why people should resort to measures which they deem effective for the purpose of disarming these malevolent beings. ”

“ "To do such a thing would be to transcend magic. And I beheld, unclouded by doubt, a magnificent vision of all that invisibility might mean to a man,—the mystery, the power, the freedom. Drawbacks I saw none. You have only to think! And I, a shabby, poverty-struck, hemmed-in demonstrator, teaching fools in a provincial college, might suddenly become—this. ”

“ The terror of unseen powers would now be found to be a convenient engine of usurped human authority, and hence an association would be formed between the temporal and invisible powers, the latter being exalted by the former in having its temples enlarged and its priests better provided for. ”

“ Notwithstanding this alone had produced them, it was still imagined, that the menaces of heaven would restrain passions which every thing conspired to rouse in all hearts; fatuity persuaded monarchs that ideal, metaphysical barriers, terrible fables, distant phantoms, would be competent to curb those inordinate desires, to rein in that impetuous propensity to crime, that rendered society incommodious to itself; credulity fancied that invisible powers would be more efficacious, than those visible motives that evidently invited mortals to the commission of mischief. ”

“ Men having admitted invisible forces which were all-powerful over them, they worshipped them to appease them, and further imagined that Nature was a being subordinate to this power, thence they had the idea that it was a great mace that threatened, or a slave that acted only by the order that such power gave him. ”

“ Now, as connected with this subject, it is deserving of consideration, that in all the declarations and allusions of the Eternal Truth this present earthly nature is spoken of as the battle-place of invisible powers, the debatable ground on which the two armies of good and evil spirits and elements are posted in hostile array against each other, and perpetually coming into collision. ”

“ Precisely because they were subjected to the inevitable progression of logics incomprehensible to them we see them as greatly astonished by the events of which they were the heroes as are we ourselves. Never did they suspect the invisible powers which forced them to act. ”

“ A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily taken by the sense of the Invisible in the minds of men who have always been pressed close by primitive wants, and to whom a life of hard toil has never been illuminated by any enthusiastic religious faith. ”

“ Then we can imagine the Younger Power, after a vain protest demanding, as it were, the vice-royalty of the new kingdom, in order that he might shape its polity to high and noble ends, educe from tragic imperfection some approach to perfection, and, in short, make the best of a bad business. ”

“ You are the only man except some of those fools down there, who knows there is such a thing as an invisible man. You have to be my helper. Help me—and I will do great things for you. An invisible man is a man of power. ”

“ But when any one tried to impress upon them the notion of an Unseen Power watching over them, to whom they owed obedience, one entered upon an almost impossible task. They couldn’t understand that any being could exist whom they could not see, much less that he could have power or authority over them. ”

“ It might be said, that, granting the reality of religion, the recognition of superhuman Power, the active presence of the Power must be accepted as simply an awful Fact — inexplicable, incomprehensible, inscrutable, yet unquestionable — before which, terrible and indeed resistless and overwhelming, reason must prostrate itself, keep silence, and slink away into undiscoverable hiding. ”

“ That done, their occult power, vast in action and in intensity, against which the social order would be helpless, would cast down all obstacles, blast all other wills, and give to each the devilish power of all. ”

“ And he who refuses to proceed upon the logically undemonstrable postulate of universal natural order, by ceasing to reason about wholly uninterpretable chaos, is inevitably crushed by the Universal Power that he ignores. ”

“ You have nothing to do with the supposed desires of any men, or the supposed desires of any department, or the supposed desires of any Government, or the supposed desires of any President, or the supposed desires of the public. You have nothing to do with those things. You have to do only with the evidence. Here all power is powerless except your own. ”

“ All that seems so unimportant, and yet in these seemingly unimportant acts, in our aloofness from them, in our readiness to point out, according to our strength, the irrationality of what is obviously irrational,—in this does our great, invincible power consist, the power which composes that insuperable force which forms the real, actual, public opinion, which, moving itself, moves the whole of humanity. ”

“ You assume danger for the King,—but not danger from the knife of the assassin—or from the schemes of revolutionists! You judge him—as I do—to be in the grasp of the greatest Force which exists in the universe! The force against which there is, and can be no opposition!—a force, which if it once binds even a king—makes of him a life-prisoner, and turns mere ‘temporal power’ to nothingness ”

“ The secret is far too vital to lose its power. It is a vast force in the world, and indeed survives its capture in virtue of its truth and beauty. But instead of being the most free, the most independent, the most individualistic force in the world, it has become the most authoritarian, the most traditional, the most rigid of systems. ”

“ Then, on this entirely gratuitous supposition, we proceed to build up a fabric of fears, which, of course, follow logically from it; and so we nourish and give substance to the Negative, or that which has no substantial existence except such as we attribute to it, until we come to regard it as having Affirmative power of its own, and so set up a false idea of Being—the product of our own minds—to dispute the claims of true Being to the sovereignty of the universe. ”

“ But by what power can this be accomplished? There is only one. Physical force will not do it. The system of our government has been compared to that of the heavenly bodies, which move on, orb within orb cycle within cycle, in apparent confusion, but in real, uninterrupted, unalterable harmony. And the harmony of our system can only be maintained by a power, which, like that regulating their movements, is unseen, unfelt, yet irresistible,—Public Opinion. ”

“ That was his idea of politics, and he had another idea—that all power came from the clouds, and that every armed thief that lived upon the honest labor of mankind had had poured out upon his head the divine oil of authority. He didn't believe the power to govern came from the people; he did not believe that the great mass of people had any right whatever, or that the great mass of people could be allowed the liberty of thought—and we have thousands of such today. ”

“ Two boys, one the fool of fear, and the other of temerity, were fit antagonists for that stupendous system, whose roots are in the bowels of the earth, and whose head is among the stars,—you escape from a convent! you defy a power that has defied sovereigns! A power whose influence is unlimited, indefinable, and unknown, even to those who exercise it, as there are mansions so vast, that their inmates, to their last hour, have never visited all the apartments;—a power whose operation is like its motto,—one and indivisible. ”

“ We can keep closed to this divine inflow, to these higher forces and powers, through ignorance, as most of us do, and thus hinder or even prevent their manifesting through us. Or we can intentionally close ourselves to their operations and thus deprive ourselves of the powers to which, by the very nature of our being, we are rightful heirs. ”

“ Without the aggrandizement of self and the abasement of others, without hypocrisies and deceptions, without prisons, fortresses, executions, and murders, no power can come into existence or be maintained.
"If the power of government is suppressed the more wicked will oppress the less wicked," say the champions of state authority. ”

“ Is an act of its own will sufficient for it in order to employ to its own liking under all circumstances, as it shall understand them, the power that has been confided to it? Government must have been thus exercised in early society, and in the infancy of the art of governing. But the power, exercised by men, may go astray in different ways, either through weakness or through excess of force. ”

“ But now, in spite of themselves, they are conscious of being dragged onwards, onwards.... An obscure power of will is set against their will. Then they discover that it is not they who exist in reality, not they, but that unknown Force, whose laws govern the whole ocean of humanity.... ”

“ Is not your power Already vast enough? If the pale slave Whisper of you, he bends his brow to earth, Lifting in awe his trembling hand toward heaven, And mutters " Those above! " A power so boundless, Why would you make but tyranny? ”

“ We also obtain a correct image of the way in which the living entities continually come into being and expire, and we see how eternity cannot belong to the " subject "; we realize that the struggle finds expression in obeying as well as in commanding, and that a fluctuating definition of the limits of power is a factor of life. The comparative ignorance in which the ruler is kept, of the individual performances and even disturbances taking place in the community, also belong to the conditions under which government may be carried on. ”

“ This dark, swelling, muttering mass along the social horizon, gathering strength with education, and ambitious to rise, will grow increasingly restless and sullen under repression, until at length conscious, through numbers, of superior power, it will assert that power destructively, and, bursting forth like an angry, furious cloud, avenge, in tumult and disorder, the social law broken against it. ”

“ There is, however, a confusion worse confounded, wherever an unauthorized power comes in, and usurps the power and authority of that which ought to be recognized—an unseen hand, that breaks in pieces, but yet shields the person who uses it. ”

“ But no such consolations of delusion remain to us, as we stand face to face with the Power which holds our destinies in its hand. None of these blear illusions can cheat our eyes with any such false presentments. No antiquity hallows, no public services consecrate, no gifts of lofty culture adorn, no graces of noble breeding embellish the coarse and sordid oligarchy that gives law to us. ”

“ The secret is that the victims believed in the power of the other person, and feared their power. The greater the belief in, and fear of, the power of the person, the greater the susceptibility to his influence; the greater the sense of power of neutralizing the power, and the disbelief in his power to affect them, the greater the degree of immunity: this is the rule! ”

“ Now, if we have a mind, which is sufficiently firm, sufficiently strengthened by cheerful life, always to recognize this strange hostile operation as such, and calmly to follow the path which belongs to our inclination and calling, then will the dark power fail in its attempt to gain a power, that shall be a reflection of ourselves. ”

“ I mean that the government of the Power Inscrutable is more plainly revealed in the clear-sightedness of old age. It is granted glimpses of the promised land, the pilgrimage to which begins with the death on earth. How clearly do I see at this moment the dark destiny of that house, to which I am knit by firmer ties than blood relationship can weave! Everything lies disclosed to the eyes of my spirit. And yet the things which I now see, in the form in which I see them—the essential substance of them, that is—this I cannot tell you in words; for no man's tongue is able to do so. ”