left
one stone of that meeting-house upon another."

It may be objected that these are what are called "hard sayings"; and
that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although
it leave some of these sayings upon one side. But this is a very gross
delusion. Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and
agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be
done. The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain,
patent, and staringly comprehensible. In itself, it is a great and
travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man;
or, let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of
which, and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with
these mortal eyes. But what any man can say of it, even in his highest
utterance, must have relation to this little and plain corner, which is
no less visible to us than to him. We are looking on the same map; it
will go hard if we cannot follow the demonstration. The longest and most
abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash
of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his
intention. The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our
own finger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it
be a new star or an old street-lamp. And briefly, if a saying is hard to
understand, it is because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our
prophet, and to think of different things in the same order. To be of
the same mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective;
it is not to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not
much debated; it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the
force of his hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision
that whatever he may express, your eyes will light at once on the
original, that whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once
accept. You do not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you
agree with him that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the
sun is overhead at noon. It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is
tested. We are all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of
knowledge and morality; even the most soaring spirits too often take
them tamely upon trust. But the man, the philosopher or the moralist,
does not stand upon