Page:OptimismBlood.djvu/17

mal truth; yet we might question the sufficient purity of any finite mind to transmit to us that truth unsullied. "There is none good—no, not one," quoted the apostle Paul, to whom moderns attribute an infallibility which he denied to all men. All have strayed, saith he, and gone out of the way. Then from what human lip shall God breathe to us infallible abnormal truth? What John saw in Patmos was to him indisputable: but before what John avers to have seen should guide all other men, we think they may require some assurance that the revelator—going about in fantastic raiment, and eating locusts, was an honest man not only, but a sound man and sane. Many a wild eye has seen superhuman wonders. Many a man in delirium tremens has seen rats and reptiles which were never begotten of their kind: yet we must believe that the fellows of such men were unwise to forsake the judgments wherein they all agreed, to assume the madman infallible, and take him for a guide. His facts ate improbable, impracticable and singular; they are not to be used if common facts shall be found competent.

We learn as we live that men are cut out upon an old pattern; no two are exactly alike perhaps, yet there is an old standard, both of mind and body, which contains the general race, and holds them amenable to the same laws. Most men can add one column of figures mentally, while few can add three columns at once; thus are we near together. So are there standard sympathies and sentiments: a thousand men, while they will agree that black is black, will laugh at the same jest, and be wroth at the same