Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/43

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
The Sabbath of Renewal
39

masses; he feels that he must endeavour, at all cost to himself, to make what he knows accessible to whoever desires to learn it. In other words a man is not, in the fullest sense, a Prophet, unless he is both an inspired Seer, and also an actual Re-former. At all risk of over-balancing himself, such a man holds out a helping hand to whomsoever he sees falling into an abyss. And perhaps few forms of human conceit are more cruel or more blind than the lack of sympathy shown by too many abstractly wise men towards mistakes into which practical reformers may temporarily fall.

Boulanger paid the natural penalty of his somewhat insincere optimism, and his lack of sympathy with the impassioned Prophets. He committed himself to the prediction that tyranny and bigotry, and therefore the need for vehement resistance, were almost among the things of the past! Thirty years after his death, the French Revolution exploded; proving that such Prophets as Jeremiah were not yet out of date. To return to our author. The Sabbath, he says, was originally a festival of renewal, the permanent memorial of a re-created world. The Law of Moses means The Law adopted by a People saved from flood. When a great misfortune has overtaken a country and destroyed most of the population, the remnant who escape become, he says, for a time, serious and reverent; they try to express their gratitude for their preservation by re-organizing society in accordance with the will of the divine Law-giver as revealed in the laws of Nature. But as the knowledge of Nature is, at any given epoch, incomplete, the compilers of human law supplement their lack of knowledge by framing provisional working-