The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when God speaks he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice; should scatter forth light, nature, time, souls, from the center of the present thought; and new date and new create the whole. Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom old things pass away ¬– means, teachers, texts and temples fall; it lives now and absorbs past and future in the present hour.
All things are made sacred by relation to it – one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause and in the universal miracle petty and particular miracles disappear.
If therefore a man claims to know and to speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak, which is its fullness and completion? Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his ripened being? Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are the conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye makes, but the soul is light: where it is, is day; where it was, is night; and history is an impertinence and an injury of it be any thing more than a cheerful apologue or parable of my being and becoming.
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
