Recapitulation

“ The case of the opposition will be strong and carry a fair measure of conviction; the argument will be advanced, that while the principles thus advanced carry some measure of support from biology, the use to which said principles are put far transcends the warrant of the evidence, and in certain of the deductions seems indeed in contradiction to it. The biological status of recapitulation leaves no such definite provision, not even in the earliest stages of infancy, for such complex appearance of prehuman traits as Dr. ”

“ But I would not press the matter upon you too severely; the reparation shall be left to your own discretion; but you must decide upon what it is to be, before the Court break up.
LATITIA.
⁠Decide so soon! Will not to-morrow do, or the day after to-morrow, or the day after that?
BRIGHTLY.
⁠No, neither to-morrow nor any following morrow will do; you must pronounce your own sentence before the Court break up.
LATITIA (going about in a bewildered manner) .
⁠O, dear! what can I do? what can I say? how shall I decide? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The succession of living forms has been uninterrupted, although, from errors of observation, as well as from the fragmentary nature of the evidence, it appears to be broken. Each break may be likened to places from which pages, or chapters, or whole volumes, as the case may be, have been torn out from the record by the hand of time, or not yet discovered by man. ”

“ Shameless as I am, it would be inconceivable, absurd, for me to ask you to do this while I am yet living and I have, therefore, put my request into a formal clause in my will. After I am dead, you may search your memory, which I know to be very good, for such examples of our conversations as will best be fitted to illuminate your subject, which I must insist—you, yourself, will understand this, too, sooner or later—is not me at all. ”

“ There is an account kept, whether we keep one or not. There are a good many revelations which show us that this is the case. Your history goes before you. All of you will find it when you get [to] the other side of the vail. Every man's history—his acts—are written, whether he has kept a record here or not. ”

“ But if we begin by omitting or mutilating a document which sheds so broad a light upon one part of his life and one phase of his character, why may we not do the like as fast and as often as the temptation arises? ”

“ The long strain of three bouts of three days each has often been found sufficient to unhinge the reason, with a variety of distressing consequences, the least perhaps of which may be seen in a regular percentage of blank papers handed in. On one occasion, a man handed in a copy of his last will and testament ”

“ Here, in a greater degree than in most places, the work of reconstruction involves the handling of countless bits of evidence, which, when viewed by themselves, often seem too minute to be of importance ”

“ Revelation has thus been progressive up to the period of its fulness or up to the cycle of its completion, with an expansive capacity for all future time. Progressive capacity is essential to the conception of a revelation that is universal and final. ”

“ You appear, in a moment of weakness, to have been led away by that stronger intelligence from the paths of rectitude. But you have displayed so clear a sense of the enormity of your conduct, and have, by your complete disclosures of the crime committed by you and your companion, and, by your evidence in Court to-day, shown so complete a repentance for it, that I do not think that it would be politic or just to lay a severe term of imprisonment upon you. ”

“ Orme. 'You have much to bear, but no evil lasts for ever.'
'Will not sin last for ever;—sin such as mine?'
'Not if you repent;—repent and make such restitution as is possible. Lady Mason, say that you have repented. ”

“ If, by the exercise of prophesy, he can forecast that, as a result of a chain of causation, following his proposed action a group may arise at some future date which will resort to force, he is bound to make the prophesy and abstain, under pain of punishment, possibly of execution. ”

“ Who knows how many links we may have to ascend in the vast cycle of worlds around, ere we arrive at the one which is knowledge—where we may look before, and after, and judge of the whole? How many stages of probation may we yet have to pass! ”

“ Every tragedy falls into two parts,—Complication and Unravelling or Denouement. Incidents extraneous to the action are frequently combined with a portion of the action proper, to form the Complication; the rest is the Unravelling. By the Complication I mean all that extends from the beginning of the action to the part which marks the turning-point to good or bad fortune. The Unravelling is that which extends from the beginning of the change to the end. ”

“ Even in our own much-lettered age, how many a pregnant thought is there that is not caught and fixed in writing! And what sort of record should we have of the thought, say, of America or England for some fifteen years, if the chronicle of it were compressed into a single document of the length of the first twelve chapters of the Acts? ”

“ 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? ”

“ Examination followed examination before the judges, with a rapidity unexampled in the annals of the Inquisition. Alas! that they should be annals,—that they should be more than records of one day of abuse, oppression, falsehood, and torture. At my next examination before the judges, I was interrogated according to the usual forms, and afterwards was led, by questions as artfully constructed, as if there was any necessity for art to lead me, to speak to the question on which I longed to disburden myself. ”

“ Revelations of any value from those who cannot, and from those who will not, reveal the ambitious schemes communicated to a very few, are alike hopeless. In default of these, let us examine if any one incident, or class of incidents, in the course of these horrors, may not have made a self-revelation—a silent but significant revelation, pointing the attention of men to the true authors, and simultaneously to the final purposes, of this mysterious conspiracy. ”

“ If, after an interval, when reflection has had ample time to operate, the offence seems great as at first, or the insult appears unmitigated by any circumstances on which memory can dwell,—if it is then brought forward, the immediate answer is, The affair is out of date—the thing is gone by—it is too late to call in question a transaction so long past. ”

“ How did this come to me in a moment—or, rather, what was that dream buzzing in my brain of 'proof' and 'copy' and all the tame stagnation of a long delirium of order? I had nothing in common with the latter. ”

“ In spite of all the efforts, often successful, that have been made to throw light on it, to bring forward a fresh document, or some obscure mention in a forgotten book, to add some little fact, to fix a date more precisely, it remains nevertheless full of uncertainty and of gaps. ”

“ And if the end were attained, if at last you emerged from the trial ever beautiful and ever young, defying time and evil, and lifted above the natural decay of flesh and intellect, who shall say that the awesome change would prove a happy one? ”

“ The safest conclusion, if conclusions are to be drawn at all, is that what has hitherto been, will, in the nature of things, continue,—that whatever separations exist will be marked by zones of latitude. For other evidence we must search in vain. ”

“ And so now I venture to let the season preach to us, and to confine myself simply to suggesting for you one or two very plain and obvious thoughts which may help to make our retrospect wise and useful. And there are two main considerations which I wish to submit. The first is—what we ought to be chiefly occupied with as we look back; and secondly, what the issue of such a retrospect ought to be.
I. With what we should be mainly occupied as we look back. Memory, like all other faculties, may either help us or hinder us. As is the man, so will be his remembrance. ”

“ It is your own thoughts that take bodily shape to haunt you. But this sad accident calls loudly for reparation and repentance. Confess your sins to God, Henry. Ask Him to forgive them—tell Him everything—your unhallowed wishes and desires, your hasty temper and revenge, your disregard of advice and entreaty. ”

“ What Rapture Is. The Blessing It Is to the Soul. The Effects of It.
1. I wish I could explain, with the help of God, wherein union differs from rapture, or from transport, or from flight of the spirit, as they speak, or from a trance, which are all one. [1] I mean, that all these are only different names for that one and the same thing, which is also called ecstasy. [2] It is more excellent than union, the fruits of it are much greater, and its other operations more manifold; for union is uniform in the beginning, the middle, and the end, and is so also interiorly. ”

“ There is another idea in the word reprobation, which is also contained in scripture, or deducible from it, and that respects the purpose of God to punish those for their iniquities, whom he will not save. Not to be saved, is the same as to be punished with everlasting destruction, from the presence of the Lord, and the glory of his power. And God’s purpose, relating hereunto, is expressed in scripture by his appointing them to wrath, 1 Thess. ”

“ Those of us who were to confess at a particular time, took our places on our knees near the confession-box, and after having repeated a number of prayers, etc., prescribed in our book, came up one at a time and kneeled beside a fine wooden lattice work, which entirely separated the confessor from us, yet permitted us to place our faces almost to his ear, and nearly concealed his countenance from our view. ”

“ The real question is how significant a jump is the new disclosure from the old knowledge. Reconstruction by hindsight, making obvious something that was not at all obvious to superior minds until someone pointed it out,-this is too often a tempting exercise for astute minds. ”

“ The term reprobation, or reprobated, is no where to be found in the Bible. The word reprobate occurs once in the Old Testament, and six times in the New, and not once in reference to pre-damnation. But, though the term does not, yet the thing itself is clearly revealled. The awful characters p. 219of God, as a sovereign and a judge, is set almost entirely out of the view of man, by preachers and writers; and when they occur to the mind, it stirs up all the hatred and infernal enmity of the human heart. ”

“ To suppose a deception will not do. Such is possible, but there are twenty other suppositions more probable. They must all be set aside before we reach that point." "What are these twenty suppositions?" "It is needless to mention them. They are only less improbable than Pleyel's. Time may convert one of them into certainty. ”

“ The phenomenon of repentance is simply the operation of a natural law, by which the last impressions made upon the mind are generally cancelled from the memory first, by the progress of fever and disease, thus leaving the earlier impressions to rule the judgment. ”

“ A gentleman of the court of Charles XI., when leaving court, being asked by the emperor for what reason he was leaving, answered, that in order to be saved it is necessary that some interval should elapse between the time of repentance from a sinful life and the hour of death, so that a period of repentance may be passed through. ”

“ I did think that he had found the will shut up in a volume of sermons, in a volume which his uncle had been reading during his illness, and that he had left the book in its place upon the shelf. That, you will say, is a conclusion too exact for man to reach without anything in the shape of absolute evidence. ”

“ The term 'confirmation,' implies proprio vigore, an existing title or claim on which it is to operate-it can have no effect whatever on an inhabitation, cultivation, or possession, which existed in the indefinite past, but which had been abandoned and was as if it had never existed at the time of the confirmation. ”

“ If any deception be practiced towards each other the culpable party will incur, sooner or later, the rarely failing punishment—disappointment in their pleasures, their domestic anticipations, and their hopes of hereditary succession. ”

“ As the giving of a revelation would, as already shewn, be conformed in a great degree to the usual conditions under which knowledge is imparted, so also, it seems reasonable to expect that the record of a revelation would as far as possible be conformed to the usual conditions under which knowledge is recorded. ”

“ The idea of Revelation in the mind describes exactly the state of affairs—that suddenly, with unspeakable certainty and fineness, something became visible and audible, something that shakes and pervades one to the depths. ”