Prophetic
Characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till
it be deciphered and obeyed; till it burn forth, in our conduct, a
visible, acted Gospel of Freedom. And as the clay-given mandate, _Eat
thou and be filled_, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself
through every nerve,--must not there be a confusion, a contest, before
the better Influence can become the upper?

'To me nothing seems more natural than that the Son of Man, when such
God-given mandate first prophetically stirs within him, and the Clay
must now be vanquished, or vanquish,--should be carried of the spirit
into grim Solitudes, and there fronting the Tempter do grimmest battle
with him; defiantly setting him at naught, till he yield and fly. Name
it as we choose: with or without visible Devil, whether in the natural
Desert of rocks and sands, or in the populous moral Desert of
selfishness and baseness,--to such Temptation are we all called.
Unhappy if we are not! Unhappy if we are but Half-men, in whom that
divine handwriting has never blazed forth, all-subduing, in true
sun-splendour; but quivers dubiously amid meaner lights: or smoulders,
in dull pain, in darkness, under earthly vapours!--Our Wilderness is
the wide World in an Atheistic Century; our Forty Days are long years
of suffering and fasting: nevertheless, to these also comes an end.
Yes, to me also was given, if not Victory, yet the consciousness of
Battle, and the resolve to persevere therein while life or faculty is
left. To me also, entangled in the enchanted forests, demon-peopled,
doleful of sight and of sound, it was given, after weariest
wanderings, to work out my way into the higher sunlit slopes--of that
Mountain which has no summit, or whose summit is in Heaven only!'

He says elsewhere, under a less ambitious figure; as figures are, once
for all, natural to him: 'Has not thy Life been that of most
sufficient men (_tuechtigen Maenner_) thou hast known in this
generation? An out-flush of foolish young Enthusiasm, like the first
fallow-crop, wherein are as many weeds as valuable herbs: this all
parched away, under the Droughts of practical and spiritual Unbelief,
as Disappointment, in thought and act, often-repeated gave rise to
Doubt, and Doubt gradually settled into Denial! If I have had a
second-crop, and now see the perennial greensward, and sit under
umbrageous cedars, which defy all Drought (and Doubt); herein too, be
the Heavens praised, I am not wi