s_, the case in which they had covenanted
themselves to desist from idolatry, were no longer the men who had made
that covenant. They had changed profoundly and imperceptibly. So that
the very vision of truth was overcast with carnal doubts; the truth
itself had retired to a vast distance and shone but feebly for them, and
the very will was palsied in its motions of recovery.

In such a state, suppose it confirmed and now threatening towards a
total alienation from the truth once delivered, what could avail to save
them? Nothing but affliction in the heaviest form. Vain it was now to
hope for a cheaper restoration, since the very first lightening of their
judicial punishment would seem to them a reason for relapsing, by
seeming to argue that there had been two principles. It was but a false
alarm, they would say, after all. Affliction, therefore, was past all
substitution or remedy. Yet even this case, this prostration to the
ground, had been met for a thousand years by God's servants.

If I have shown that quickening spirit which, diffusing itself through
all thoughts, schemata, possible principles, motives of sensibility, and
forms of taste, has differenced the pre-Christian man from the
post-Christian; if I have detected that secret word which God subtly
introduced into this world, kept in a state of incubation for two
millennia, then with the flames and visible agency of a volcanic
explosion forced into infinite disruption, caused to kindle into a
general fire--that word by which sadness is spread over the face of
things, but also infinite grandeur--then may I rightly lay this as one
chapter of my Emendation of Human Knowledge.

The same thing precisely takes place in literature as in spiritual
things. When a man is entangled and suffocated in business, all relating
to that which shrinks up to a point--and observe, I do not mean that
being conceived as a tent above his head it contracts, but that, viewed
as a body at a distance, it shrinks up to a point, and really vanishes
as a real thing--when this happens, having no subjective existence at
all, but purely and intensely objective, he misconceives it just in the
same way as a poor ignorant man misconceives learning or knowledge;
fancying, _e.g._, like Heylius senior, that he ought to know the road
out of the wood in which they were then entangled.

It is probable that Adam meant only the unity of man as to his nature,
which also is meant by making all men