Re: Download a Feather
No Fear
everlasting destruction. However unconvinced you may now be of the truth
of what you hear, by and by you will be fully convinced of it. Those
that are gone from being in the like circumstances with you, see that it
was so with them; for destruction came suddenly upon most of them; when
they expected nothing of it, and while they were saying, Peace and
safety: now they see, that those things on which they depended for peace
and safety, were nothing but thin air and empty shadows.
The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider,
or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully
provoked: his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as
worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer
eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times
more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is
in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn
rebel did his prince; and yet it is nothing but his hand that holds you
from falling into the fire every moment. It is to be ascribed to nothing
else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered
to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep. And
ther
No Fear
SECTION XI: THE PROPHECIES
693. When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the
whole silent universe and man without light, left to himself and, as it
were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him
there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and
incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be
carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island and should awake without
knowing where he is and without means of escape. And thereupon I wonder how
people in a condition so wretched do not fall into despair. I see other
persons around me of a like nature. I ask them if they are better informed
than I am. They tell me that they are not. And thereupon these wretched and
lost beings, having looked around them and seen some pleasing objects, have
given and attached themselves to them. For my own part, I have not been able
to attach myself to them, and, considering how strongly it appears that
there is something else than what I see, I have examined whether this God
has not left some sign of Himself.
I see many contradictory religions, and consequently all false save one.
Each wants to be believed on its own authority, and threatens unbelievers. I
do not therefore believe them. Every one can say this; every one can call
himself a prophet. But I see that Christian religion wherein prophecies are
fulfilled; and that is what every one cannot do.
694. And what crowns all this is prediction, so that it should not be said
that it is chance which has done it?
Whosoever, having only a week to live, will not find out that it is
expedient to believe that all this is not a stroke of chance...
Now, if the passions had no hold on us, a week and a hundred years would
amount to the same thing.
695. Prophecies.--Great Pan is dead.
696. Susceperunt verbum cum omni av