losophy of prudence, self-protection, precaution, specially unfits a
man for receiving what the Father has to reveal: in proportion to our
care about our own well being, is our incapability of understanding and
welcoming the care of the Father. The wise and the prudent, with all
their energy of thought, could never see the things of the Father
sufficiently to recognize them as true. Their sagacity labours in
earthly things, and so fills their minds with their own questions and
conclusions, that they cannot see the eternal foundations God has laid
in man, or the consequent necessities of their own nature. They are
proud of finding out things, but the things they find out are all less
than themselves. Because, however, they have discovered them, they
imagine such things the goal of the human intellect. If they grant there
may be things beyond those, they either count them beyond their reach,
or declare themselves uninterested in them: for the wise and prudent,
they do not exist. They work only to gather by the senses, and deduce
from what they have so gathered, the prudential, the probable, the
expedient, the protective. They never think of the essential, of what in
itself must be. They are cautious, wary, discreet, judicious,
circumspect, provident, temporizing. They have no enthusiasm, and are
shy of all forms of it--a clever, hard, thin people, who take _things_
for the universe, and love of facts for love of truth. They know
nothing deeper in man than mere surface mental facts and their
relations. They do not perceive, or they turn away from any truth which
the intellect cannot formulate. Zeal for God will never eat them up: why
should it? he is not interesting to them: theology may be; to such men
religion means theology. How should the treasure of the Father be open
to such? In their hands his rubies would draw in their fire, and cease
to glow. The roses of paradise in their gardens would blow withered.
They never go beyond the porch of the temple; they are not sure whether
there be any _adytum_, and they do not care to go in and see: why indeed
should they? it would but be to turn and come out again. Even when they
know their duty, they must take it to pieces, and consider the grounds
of its claim before they will render it obedience. All those evil
doctrines about God that work misery and madness, have their origin in
the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of the children.
These wise and prudent, care