Do you know that there is such a thing as certainty in respect to things your bodily eyes have never seen? If you do not, you have missed the enjoyment of the most exquisite sense with which the Creator has endowed the soul. But you do, if you will only step down from, and out of, your sense of self-sufficiency, and consent to believe what you know. Can the poet's sensibility detect a flaw in the rhythmic measure of a line, the artist's eye descry the untrue in the drawing of a picture, the musician's ear discover the slightest deviation from exact harmony in a band of a hundred pieces, and this by the intuition of a moment, and the spiritual nature have no instant intuitions of its own—no ear for the true, no sense for the good, that is as undeviating as the lines of light? But, you say, the intuition of the poet, the artist, or the musician comes by cultivation. And is it true that God has made our natural faculties so wondrously sensitive to cultivation, and left our spiritual faculties, do what we may, dulled and blunted, and inoblivious to the very things for the cultivation of which they were designed? Believe it not. When you do not detect by instantaneous intuition the false sound of error if it strikes upon the ear, nor grasp in its very utterance the truth of God, it is because your spiritual ear is unattuned to the harmonies of heaven; when you do not sense the instant presence of evil
