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Updated: June 19, 2025
They were the reformers of the ancient world, the sages earnest men, advocating the great certitudes of love and friendship and patriotism the lofty spirits of their time, preoccupied and rapt in their noble inquiries into nature and God.
It is not with heaven or hell, or abstract inquiries, or divine certitudes, that we have to do, but the things of earth, things that advance our material and outward condition. To be rich and comfortable is the end of life, not meditations on abstract and eternal truth, such as elevate the soul or prepare it for a future and endless life.
How nobly he recognizes Christianity as the bulwark of national prosperity! How delightfully he presents the endearments of home, the certitudes of friendship, the peace of agricultural life, the repose of all industrial pursuits, however humble and obscure!
The same idea that, before, in parthenogenesis, sacrificed the future of the hive to the unwonted multiplication of males, now sacrifices the male to the future of the hive. This idea is always astounding; and the further we penetrate into it, the fewer do our certitudes become.
They will get the faculty and the use of it back again in far nobler fashion, when death has taken them away from all that is transient, and faith has through death given for their possession and their expectation, the certitudes of eternity. It will be worth while to look forward again, when we are again standing at the beginning of a life.
One of the most comfortable things between the husband and the wife meanwhile one of those easy certitudes they could be merely gay about was that she never admired him so much, or so found him heartbreakingly handsome, clever, irresistible, in the very degree in which he had originally and fatally dawned upon her, as when she saw other women reduced to the same passive pulp that had then begun, once for all, to constitute HER substance.
The sensible is an impenetrable empire; but ideas are certitudes, and upon these he dwells with rapt and mystical enthusiasm, a great poetical rhapsodist, severe dialectician as he is, believing in truth and beauty and goodness.
I deal, then, with these two points God's certainties in Christ, and man's certitudes through Christ. Now these two things do not always go together. We may be very certain, as far as our persuasion is concerned, of a very doubtful fact, or we may be very doubtful, as far as our persuasion is concerned, of a very certain fact.
The spirit in him, the "shadow," devoured his soul, pulverised his will, made of him a Hamlet without a propelling cause, a doubter in a world of cheap certitudes and insolent fatuities, but barred him proffering his pearls to pigs.
And if you have truly resolved these problems, and acquired these certitudes, by the aid of some blind and primitive impulse and not through the intellect, then to what enigma, more insoluble still, are you not urging us on? Little city abounding in faith and mystery and hope, why do your myriad virgins consent to a task that no human slave has ever accepted?
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