All fine and delicate thought in which the soul truly takes part recalls us to God and to piety. The soul cannot stir, awaken, open its eyes without feeling God. God is felt by the soul as air is felt by the body.
Earth is only comprehensible to those who have known heaven. Without the world of religion, the world of sense offers nothing but a desolating enigma.
Would God have made human life merely to contemplate the flow of it, merely to watch the tossing, and tumbling, the play, and the variety—or merely to have the sight of ever-moving hands passing a torch from one to another? No; God does nothing but for eternity.
For a translation of the Bible you want largeness of phrase; constructions where the joins are not too close, nor the surface too polished; and in the words and expressions a touch of the archaic.
We need all the leisure of idleness, some spare time, and some study, to enjoy the beauties of Homer, and to understand him we must dream over him. We need but a moment, I will not say of attention, but of listening, to understand and receive into our being the beauties of the Bible, beauties that proportion themselves to the different disposition and capacity of different minds; so that they can enter into the smallest, or entirely fill the greatest, and are available in all their fulness for the intelligence of any man, according as he is more or less well disposed, and as soon as he is ready to admit them.
The Old Testament teaches good and evil; the Gospel on the contrary seems written for the elect; it is the book of innocence. The first is made for earth, the other seems made for Heaven. According as the one or the other of these books is the more familiar to a nation, different religious tempers come into being.
Page 12
