Prior

“ Prior is represented by those who knew, and have wrote concerning him, as a gentleman, who united the elegance and politeness of a court, with the scholar, and the man of genius. This representation, in general, may be just, yet it holds almost invariably true, that they who have risen from low life, still retain some traces of their original. No cultivation, no genius, it seems, is able entirely to surmount this: There was one particular in which Mr. ”

“ A still deeper difficulty results from such an effort to evade the double sense in which the facts of succession are known in your experience. If you can have present to you only one event at a time in a series of successive events, how long, or rather how short, must an event be to contain within itself no succession at all, or no difference between former and latter contents? In vain do you suppose that, at any time, you have directly present to your consciousness only one of the successive words that you hear me speak. ”

“ We may also notice the climax “The Word was in the beginning....was with God....was God.”↑ 1 John i. 1.↑ Hurter cites similar passages from the Fathers of the Church, proving the Son’s pre-existence and eternity. “What is the force of those words ‘In the beginning’? Centuries are o’erleaped, ages are swallowed up. Take any beginning you will, yet you cannot include it in time, for that, whence time is reckoned, already was.”—Hilary. ”

“ The present is the commencement of our existence; the endowments requisite for its purpose, and a firm footing in it, have been freely bestowed on us:—the future is the continuation of this existence, and in it we must acquire for ourselves a commencement, and a definite standing-point. ”

“ Nowadays we may see the office of historical research as that of explaining, and therefore lightening, the pressure that the past must exercise upon the present, and the present upon the future. Today we study the day before yesterday, in order that yesterday may not paralyze today, and today may not paralyze tomorrow. ”

“ He who has once undertaken to interpret his own age must make his interpretation keep pace with the progress of that age, if progress there be. It is, therefore, my duty to acknowledge as past what has ceased to be the present, before the same audience to whom I characterized it as the present. ”

“ It is true that what we call the Past, that which is entirely put away, and done with, might seem to be a harmless enough subject of contemplation. So conceivably it might be, were it not for the fact that in following it one is apt to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with the other, and the far more formidable brother; the one whose kingdom lies, not behind us, but ahead. ”

“ Yet succession is an undeniable fact, even in the material world. Though our reasoning on isolated systems may imply that their history, past, present, and future, might be instantaneously unfurled like a fan, this history, in point of fact, unfolds itself gradually, as if it occupied a duration like our own. ”

“ Surely it knows by this time that a good life is of more importance than creeds or beliefs. Surely in this year of our Lord, 1867, the days of the Inquisition are past both for editors and writers, and the watchword of to-day—and, thank God, for to-morrow, and the day after—is progress, not paralysis. ”

“ For if that which has no beginning—is the first of all created things,—its histories also are the firstborn,—for they are elder than all creatures.—Let the histories of Thee, O my Lord, yield place,—that we may tell of Thy ministers! ”

“ The ancients indeed cultivated the study of accidentals, but they did not allow it to precede that of essentials. The prince precedes, the minister follows. The father precedes, the son follows. The elder brother precedes, the younger follows. Seniors precede, juniors follow. Men precede, women follow. Husbands precede, wives follow. Distinctions of rank and precedence are part of the scheme of the universe, and the Sage adopts them accordingly. In point of spirituality, heaven is honourable, earth is lowly. Spring and summer precede autumn and winter: such is the order of the seasons. ”

“ Time, and the labours of his successors, have done for him what the span of one man's life—and span too, we may say, of one man's intellect, capacious as his undoubtedly was—prevented him doing for himself. ”

“ Year has followed year and century has followed century, and through it all, surely, slowly, often torn and twisted out of shape but always growing, evolving, moving onward, the law has followed the safe appeal of truth to time, toward this great goal. ”

“ I endeavoured in the last lecture to bring before you the blessed hope of our Lord’s return, and to show, from the great outlines of prophecy, that there is enough to justify the expectations of those who humbly trust that we shall not have much longer to wait. I purposely avoided any reference to what are called the ‘signs of the times,’ and confined your attention exclusively to what may be called the great backbone of prophecy, i.e., to the prophetic history of the four mighty kingdoms which were foretold as holding the empire of the world. ”

“ We are in a school of experience, brethren and sisters, and it will be well for us if we will wisely use and apply the blessings we receive and the experience that we are passing through, and so govern and control ourselves in the future that the experience of the past may be a light to our feet in time to come. ”

“ One knew that she worshipped the past, and that the instinctive wisdom the past can alone bestow had descended upon her—that wisdom to which we give the clumsy name of aristocracy. High born she might not be. ”

“ The countless generations who have knelt in the same spot, have uttered the same words, have taken the same oaths, have wept the same tears, have rejoiced in the same hope, add the force of example to the power of precept. Time thus transforms the act of reason, which founded legitimacy, into a feeling of affection, gratitude and respect. ”

“ I have ever used to set the last judgment-day before mine eyes, and so to rule as I shall be judged to answer before a higher Judge—to whose judgment-seat I do appeal, that never thought was cherished in my heart that tended not to my people's good. ”

“ If the Past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the Past is the safest and the surest emancipation. And the earnest search for it is one of the signs that distinguish the four centuries of which I speak from those that went before. The Middle Ages, which possessed good writers of contemporary narrative, were careless and impatient of older fact. ”

“ Progression, progression, always progression, has been the history of the centuries since the birth of Christ. Doubtless the century we have now entered on will be yet more fruitful of human advancement than any of its predecessors. ”

“ In this case, where ancient authority is so little decisive, it is but fair to leave the point to be determined by evidence thus connected with the date, and drawn from the internal character of the composition itself,――a sort of evidence, on which the latest moderns are far more capable of deciding than the most ancient, and the sagest of the Fathers. ”

“ If it be true that the long expected Last Judgment has at length been performed,—that the long looked-for time of the Lord's second coming has at last arrived,—in what man pner would it be reasonable to conclude that the important tidings would be conveyed? Are we to behold a multitude of angels in the air, sounding great trumpets, and vocally calling the attention of the world to the crisis which has arrived? ”

“ We must have learned to predict the past, so to speak, before we can predict the future; because the first use of the observed relations among fulfilled facts is to teach us by the anterior succession what the future succession will be. ”

“ The sense of Before and After becomes both intelligible and intellectual when, and only when, we contemplate the succession in the relations of Cause and Effect, which, like the two poles of the magnet manifest the being and unity of the one power by relative opposites, and give, as it were, a substratum of permanence, of identity, and therefore of reality, to the shadowy flux of Time. ”

“ As we reflect, we anxiously look around us for some tradition—some time-stained chronicle—some age-worn record—even the faintest and most unsatisfactory legend, upon which to repose our credulity, and relieve the inquiring solicitude of the mind. ”

“ When considering the past one is inclined to ask the question: “Does the history of mankind represent an unbroken line of progress, or, on the contrary, does it reflect a series of alternating periods of development and decay?” ”

“ All the events concerning us, with the exact time of them, are determined and appointed in the counsel and foreknowledge of God, and all in wisdom: To every purpose there is a time prefixed, and it is the best time, for it is time and judgment, time appointed both in wisdom and righteousness; the appointment is not chargeable with folly or iniquity. 2. We are very much in the dark concerning future events and the time and season of them: Man knows not that which shall be himself ”

“ So arises in era after era an outward and mortal expression of the inward immortal life; and at once the old struggle begins to repeat itself between the flesh and the spirit, the form and the reality. ”

“ Moderns who talk vaguely of them as our hardy ancestors never do justice to the real good they did us, by thus opening our history, as it were, with the fable of an age of innocence, and beginning all our chronicles, as so many chronicles began, with the golden initial of a saint. ”

“ The cause which we have espoused possesses, probably, to-day, a greater degree of prosperity than it has ever done from its commencement. Thus may it ever be from this time henceforth and for ever! From the commencement of this work until the present time we have continually increased in power and numbers, and in blessings from the Lord our God ”

“ My ancestors, with their fingers upon the pulse of time, have ever kept an alert and intelligent lookout upon the promises and threats of the future, and thus have throughout been able to maintain themselves at the head of whatever movement they resolved to embrace and direct. ”

“ Let some one call you, if possible, at the time which you have determined before God that you will rise; or procure, what is still better, an alarum, by which you may regulate almost to a minute the time when you wish to rise. ”

“ These efforts to make the past live again reveal not merely our curiosity, or the lack of power to grapple with great philosophic problems, they are a token of wisdom and modesty; we are beginning to feel that the present has its roots in the past, and that in the fields of politics and religion, as in others, slow, modest, persevering toil is that which has the best results. ”

“ Every thing which has past, is passing, or shall pass, was ordained in His eternal purpose, and actually passed in review before Him, ere ever the worlds were formed, or countless systems commenced their revolutions. ”

“ We are persuaded that it had a Beginning, but we know not when, and all that I can say is, that it was a vast while ago. The first Man has not remark'd it, nor have we any thing like a Register of the Time; all that we know of it is by Tradition. ”

“ The world, then, until modern times has believed too readily, has accepted things too easily. Let us note, for example, what have been called by way of pre-eminence the Ages of Faith, the Middle Ages, the age, say, from the seventh or eighth century until the thirteenth or fourteenth. ”

“ In a succession of events, say of sense-impressions, A B C D E..., the presence of B means the absence of A and C, but the presentation of this succession involves the simultaneous presence in some mode or other of two or more of the presentations A B C D. In reality, past, present, and future are differences in time, but in presentation all that corresponds to these differences is in consciousness simultaneously. ”

“ We have been transplanted, and for us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken. The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence whose force is in its continuity. ”

“ I have spoken of certitude as being assigned a definite and fixed place among our mental acts;—it follows upon examination and proof, as the bell sounds the hour, when the hands reach it,—so that no act or state of the intellect is certitude, however it may resemble it, which does not observe this appointed law. ”

“ If after half a century, and more, the old god is still sitting, chin on hand, revolving this question, it would be as well to give him, say, another fifty years to make up his mind and pronounce a final judgment. ”

“ In the development of time into causation, persistence becomes state and change becomes event. In the development of judgment into conception, consciousness becomes recollection and choice becomes inference. ”

“ This indeed is the proper moment for suggesting a doubt which will press on us with greater force the further we plumb the depths of this subject,—whether wills would ever have come into being at all if it had not been for these remarkable ideas connected with universal succession. ”

“ The present era might be designated as an interrogatory age, for the evident tendency is to question eagerly, to accept nothing on the evidence of tradition, and but little, comparatively, on the merits of faith. ”

“ This truism—or paradox—that all we know of succession is but an interpretation of what is really simultaneous or coexistent, we may then concisely express by saying that we are aware of time only through time-perspective, and experience shows that it is a long step from a succession of presentations to such presentation of succession. ”

“ In our world all particulars of conduct and goodness, as well as deviations from them, are known; nothing on these heads is, or indeed can be concealed. I am now speaking of an advanced period of my reign; for at first, and in what I may call the intermediate or transition period, it was otherwise. Then there were many laws and precepts established which are now all but obsolete,—for since, the occasion for appealing to them scarcely arises. ”