[68] The full t.i.tle-page of Anderdon"s book is as follows: _One Blow at Babel_. In those of the Pepole called Behemnites, whose Foundation is not upon that of the Prophets and Apostles, which shall stand sure and firm forever; but upon their own carnal conceptions, begotten in their Imaginations upon Jacob Behmen"s writings: They not knowing the better part, the Teachings of that Spirit that sometime opened some Mysteries of G.o.d"s Kingdom in Jacob, have chosen the worser part in Esau, according to the predominancy of that Spirit which ruled in them when they made choice of their Religion, as it doth in others the hearts of the children of disobedience.--By John Anderdon. (London, printed in the year 1662, written in 1661).
[69] _One Blow at Babel_, p. 3.
[70] _Ibid._ pp. 1 and 6.
[71] _One Blow at Babel_, pp. 1-2.
[72] Jane Leade"s writings give great importance to the outward sacraments.
[73] The use of the phrase "its own Centre," which became an important Quaker term, is an interesting relic of Boehme"s influence.
[74] _Minutes of the Morning Meeting_, i. George Fox apparently asked to see Frattwell"s MS., for in a Letter under date of eighth mo. 1st, 1674, Alexander Parker writes to George Fox: "I likewise spoke to Edw.
Man [Edward Mann] to send down Ralph ffrettwells Book, I suppose he intends to see thee shortly and if he can find ye Book to bring itt with him."--_Journal_ (Cambridge edition), ii. p. 305.
[75] Walton"s _Notes and Materials_, pp. 227 and 231.
[76] See Walton"s _Notes and Materials_, pp. 3, 46, 72, and 404.
[77] William Law lies beyond the period to which this volume is devoted. It is customary to call the edition of Behmen"s _Works_, published 1764-1781, "William Law"s Edition." This is quite incorrect.
This edition is in the main a reprint of the earlier Translations by Sparrow and Ellistone. It was edited by George Ward, a.s.sisted by Thomas Langcake, and printed at the expense of Mrs. Hutcheson, an intimate friend of William Law.
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CHAPTER XIII
EARLY ENGLISH INTERPRETERS OF SPIRITUAL RELIGION: JOHN EVERARD, GILES RANDALL, AND OTHERS
I
The ideas developed by spiritual Reformers on the Continent were brought into England by a great variety of carriers and over many routes. Some of the routes were devious and are difficult to trace, but some of them, on the other hand, are obvious and easily found. One of the potent and pervasive intellectual influences for the formation of the "spiritual" type of thought in England was the Platonic influence which came to England through the Humanists. This strand of thought, inherited from the remote past, is woven into the inner structure of all these interpreters of the divine Life. The English revival of Greek philosophy is closely connected with the work of the early Italian Humanists, especially with that of the Florentine scholar, Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), who was selected and educated by Cosimo de Medici to be the head of the new Academy in Florence. It was a fixed idea of Ficino that Philosophy and Religion are identical, and therefore that Religion, if it is true Religion, is rooted and grounded in Reason, since G.o.d is the source of all Truth and all that is rational. Plato, in Ficino"s eyes, is Philosophy. He was the divine forerunner of Christ in the realm of intellect as John the Baptist was in the realm of the law. In his mind Plato"s Philosophy is the greatest possible preparation for an adequate understanding of the world of Truth which Christ has unveiled and of the way {236} of Life which He has revealed. Ficino translated Plato"s Dialogues into Latin, and gave his own interpretation of the great philosopher in a Treatise on _Plato"s Doctrine of Immortality of Souls_. He also translated Plotinus and the writings falsely attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, and put them anew into spiritual circulation.
Ficino, though living in an age of corruption and debauchery, and though closely a.s.sociated with Humanists who had hardly a thin veneer of Christianity, and who were bent on reviving paganism, yet himself maintained a positive Christian faith and a pure and simple life. He found it possible to be a priest in the Christian Church and at the same time to be a high-priest in the temple of Plato, because he found faith and reason to be indivisible and indissoluble. His influence was marked upon the early English Humanists, Linacre, Grocyn, Colet, and More, and he was a vital influence in the new revival, which occurred in the seventeenth century, of Plato and Plotinus as contributors to a virile religion based upon an inherent divine and human relationship.
Still another influence, of a very different sort, came to England by way of Italy--the intense interpretation of Faith as the way of salvation, expressed in the writings of the Spanish reformer, Juan de Valdes, and in the powerful sermons of his two Italian disciples, Bernardino Ochino (1487-1564) and Pietro Martire Vermigli (1500-1562), generally known as Peter Martyr. Juan de Valdes, twin brother of the Humanist, Alfonso de Valdes, the friend of the Emperor Charles V., was born of a distinguished Castilian family toward the end of the fifteenth century. He was splendidly prepared in his youth, both mentally and religiously, for the great work of his life, which was to be a spiritual mover of other souls. As his views of the needed transformation of Christianity broadened and intensified he concluded that he would be safer in Italy than in Spain, and he thus took up his residence in Naples in 1529. Here he became the centre of a remarkable circle of spiritual men and women who were dedicating themselves to the reform of the Church and to the {237} propagation of a more vital religion. Ochino, the most powerful Italian preacher of the age; the fervent scholar, Vermigli; the papal secretary, Carnesecchi, later a martyr to the new faith; Vittoria Colonna, the friend of Michael Angelo Buonarotti, and the beautiful Giulia Gonzaga, were among those who kindled their torches from his burning flame. For the instruction of his friends--especially for Giulia Gonzaga--de Valdes translated St.
Paul"s Epistles to the Romans and Galatians and wrote commentaries on them, and contributed the penetrating original works, _The Christian Alphabet_ and _The Hundred and Ten Divine Considerations_.[1]
These writings present in vivid and powerful style the way of salvation through Faith. The primary insight is Lutheran, but it is everywhere coloured and tempered by the author"s Humanistic outlook. He insists, in all his interpretations of salvation, upon the vital interior work of the Holy Spirit and upon the necessity of re-living the Christ-life in all its heights and depths. All the truths of religion, he constantly urges, must be known and verified in experience, and those who are to be effective ministers of the Gospel in any age must know that they are divinely sent and must be taught by the inward Word of G.o.d rather than by human science. The attractive power of the Cross is rediscovered in his profound experience and makes itself felt as the dynamic principle of his entire moral activity.
The _Divine Considerations_ was put into English by Nicholas Ferrar (1592-1637) of Little Gidding, and published at Oxford in 1638, together with the Introduction to the _Commentary on Romans_, under the name of "John Valdesso." The English translation was submitted by Ferrar to his friend, George Herbert, who wrote some interesting critical notes which were printed with the original edition. George Herbert expresses his great love for "Valdesso," whose eyes, he says, G.o.d has opened, even in the midst of Popery, "to understand and expresse so clearly {238} and excellently the intent of the Gospell in the acceptation of Christ"s righteousness," but he "likes not" his slighting of Scripture and his use of the Word of G.o.d for inward revelation. He believed, though wrongly, that de Valdes was a "mystic," and that he was advocating a religion of "private enthusiasms and revelations." The fact was rather that de Valdes was presenting or was aiming to present a religion of universal validity, brought to birth by the discovery of G.o.d in Christ as revealed in the Gospel, and made continuously effective anew by personal experience of the same Christ as Divine Revealer in the lives of men.
There is no question of the far-reaching influence of Ferrar"s translation of this vital message of de Valdes, especially among scholars and literary men. It must also have had a popular influence, for Samuel Rutherford in 1648 declared it to be one of the "poysonable"
sources of "Familisme, Antinomianisme, and Enthusiasme."[2] He charges that "Waldesso," as he calls him, teaches men that the Scriptures have been supplanted by the inner Light, in fact that "Scripture shines only as a light in a dark place until the Day-star arises in the heart, and that then man hath no more need to seeke that of the holy Scripture which departs of it selfe, as the light of a candle departs when the Sunne-beames enter, even as Moses departed at the presence of Christ and the Law at the presence of the Gospel."[3]
Ochino and Vermigli spent six important years in England from 1547 to 1553, when persecution under Mary forced them to flee. They were far more under the influence of Calvin at this period than under that of their former friend de Valdes, but they both with the fire and intensity of their Italian nature--especially Ochino in his sermons--drove home to the hearts and consciences of their hearers the way of salvation by faith and the absolute necessity of inner experience and interior religion.
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II. JOHN EVERARD
Dr. John Everard of Clare College, Cambridge, was clearly one of the earliest and one of the most interesting carriers of these ideas, and in his case it is not difficult to discover the influences which shaped the course of his thought and suggested the general lines of his message. He was born about 1575--the birth year of Jacob Boehme--though all early biographical details are lacking. He had a long student period at Clare College, receiving his degree of B.A. in 1600, M.A. in 1607, and D.D. in 1619. He was deeply versed in the great mystics, and always reveals in his sermons the influence of Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite, and no less the influence of Eckhart, Tauler, and the _Theologia Germanica_. But at some period of his life he tapped a new source and came into possession of a fresh group of live and suggestive ideas which influenced all the thinking of his later stage. His translations, some of which are in MS. and some in printed form, furnish a clue to the main sources of his ideas, which present a striking parallelism with those held by the continental spiritual Reformers of the sixteenth century. He was possessed of original power and of penetrating insight, with "eyes of his own," but no one can fail to see that he had read and pondered the writings of these submerged Reformers, and that in a country remote from theirs he has become a reincarnation of their ideas and a new voice for their message.
His public career, in the England of the first two Stuarts, was a stormy one. He was Rector of St. Martin-in-the-Field. In the early stage of his preaching he felt called upon to oppose the "Spanish Marriage" as "the great sin of matching with idolaters," and he underwent a series of imprisonments for his attacks upon this precious scheme of King James, who wittily suggested changing his name from Dr.
Everard ["Ever-out"] to "Dr. Never-out." Some time before his fiftieth year--the date cannot be exactly fixed--he reached {240} his new and deeper insight, and henceforth became the bearer of a message which seemed to him and to his friends like the reopening of the treasury of the Gospels, and in this new light he felt ashamed of the barren period of his life when he walked in "the ignorance of litteral knowledge,"
when he was "a bare, literal, University preacher," as he himself says, and had not found "the marrow and the true Word of G.o.d."[4] The great change which cleaves his public career into two well-defined parts is impressively indicated by his friend and disciple, Rapha Harford, in his "Dedicatory Epistle" to the Sermons and in his preface "to the Reader," though he nowhere gives any light upon the events and influences which initiated the transformation. "In a special and extraordinary manner G.o.d appeared to him in his latter days," Harford says, "and after that, he desired nothing more than to bring others to see what he saw and to enjoy what he enjoyed."[5] He was, we are told, "a man of presence and of princely behaviour" and was known "as a good philosopher, few or none exceeding him," "endowed with skill and depth of learning," but after his new experience, when he "came to know himself," and to "know Jesus Christ and the Scriptures _experimentally_ rather than grammatically, literally or academically," he came to esteem lightly "notions and speculation," "letter-learning" and "University-knowledge," and he "_centred his spirit_ on union and communion with G.o.d" and turned his supreme interest from "forms, externals and generals" to the cultivation of "the inner man," and to "acting more than talking."[6]
His new way of preaching--vivid, concrete, touched with subtle humour, grounded in experience and filling old texts with new meaning--appealed powerfully to the common people and to an elect few of the more highly privileged who had won a large enough freedom of spirit to go with him into new paths.[7] Like his Master, he loved {241} the common people, "thinking it no disparagement to accompany with the lowest of men,"
"tinkers, coblers, weavers and poor beggarly fellows who came running"
to hear him, and he poured out the best he had in his treasury to any, even the simplest and most ordinary, who cared to hear of this "spiritual, practical experiment of life." His preaching naturally brought him suffering and persecution. He was "often fetched into the High Commission," was forced to give "attendance from Court to Court and from Term to Term," was on one occasion fined a thousand pounds for his "heresies," and had many interviews with Archbishop Laud, but he always held that "Truth is strongest," and he declared that G.o.d had called him to be "a Sampson against Philistines and a David against the huge and mighty Goliath of his times,"[8] and he was ready to pay the cost of obedience to the Light. His friend, Harford, who had "much ado" to keep the ma.n.u.script of his sermons "out of the Bishop"s fingers," declares that though Everard clearly "distinguished the outward and killing letter from the Life and Spirit of the Holy Word,"
he was not an antinomian or in sympathy with ranterism. "Our author,"
the Dedicatory Epistle says, and says truly, "missed both rocks against which many have split their vessels. He carries Truth amain with Topsail set. He cuts his way clear between the meer Rationalist who will square out G.o.d according to his Reason, and the Familist who lives above all ordinances and by degrees hath turned licencious Ranter."
Thomas Brooks added to Harford"s Testimony a brief "Approbation" to the Volume, on Behalf of the Publishers, recommending all readers to receive its "heaven-born truths" into their homes and into their hearts, a.s.suring them that as they read and open their inner eyes they will find their own hearts in the book and the book in their own hearts, _i.e._ the book will "find them."
Before turning to Everard"s message, as it finds expression in the rare volume of his sermons--_The Gospel Treasures Opened_--we must consider the Translations {242} which he left unpublished. They are preserved in clearly written ma.n.u.scripts in Cambridge University Library, under the t.i.tle "Three Bookes Translated out of their Originall."[9] The first "Book" bears the following t.i.tle-page: "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, And the Tree of Life in the Midst of the Paradise of G.o.d: Taken out of a Book called The Letter and the Life, or The Flesh and the Spirit. Translated by Dr. Everard." An interesting article on Dr. Everard in _Notes and Queries_[10] concludes that this first "Book"
of Everard"s is a free translation of the Second Part of Tentzel"s _Medicina diastica_. This guess, however, proves to be incorrect, though there is a slight likeness between Tentzel"s book and the English MS. Everard"s book is, in reality, a translation of Sebastian Franck"s _Von dem Baum des Wissens Gutes und Boses_ ("Of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil"). The translation is made from a Latin edition of Franck"s little book, which was published in 1561. The entire message of this treatise, written by the wandering chronicler and spiritual prophet of Germany, and here reproduced in English, is the _inwardness_ of everything that concerns the religious life. The Tree of Life was in Adam"s heart, and in that same inner region of the soul was the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The story of Paradise is a graphic parable of the soul"s experience. "That Tree which tested Adam was and is nothing else in truth but the Nature, Will, Knowledge, and Life of Adam, and every man is as much forbidden to eat of this Tree as Adam was." Franck"s significant book contained pa.s.sages from Hans Denck"s _Widerruf_ ("Confession"), and Everard translated them as an appendix to his first ma.n.u.script book.[11] They hold the very heart of Denck"s message and deal, with Denck"s usual sincerity and boldness, with the fundamental nature of spiritual religion. He here declares the primacy of the Word of G.o.d in the soul over everything else that ministers to man"s life: "I prefer the Holy Scriptures before all Humane {243} Treasure; yet I do not so much esteem them as I do the Word of G.o.d which is living, potent, and eternal, and which is free from all elements of this world: For that is G.o.d Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or ink, so that it can never be obliterated. True Salvation is in the Word of G.o.d; it is not tied up to the Scriptures. They alone cannot make a bad heart good, though they may supply it with information. But a heart illumined with the Light of G.o.d is made better by everything." Franck declares, in comment on Denck"s words: "I myself know at least twenty Christian Religions all of which claim to rest on the Holy Scriptures which they apply to themselves by far-fetched expositions and allegories, or from the dead letter of the text. . . . They can be understood rightly, however, only by the divine new-man, who is G.o.d-born, and who brings to them the Light of the Holy Spirit." There can be no doubt, I think, that Dr. Everard found in the writings of these two sixteenth-century prophets the body and filling of his own new conceptions of Christianity, and it was through his vigorous interpretations that this stream of thought first flowed into England.
It will not be necessary to make extended comment on Everard"s other translations. The second one was "The Golden Book of German Divinitie," rendered into English in 1628 from the Latin edition of "John Theophilus," who is Sebastian Castellio, and the third is a translation of Nicholas of Cusa"s _De visione Dei_ ("The Vision of G.o.d"), which is a profound and impressive piece of mystical literature and deserves to be much better known than it is. Everard, further, translated the "Mystical Divinity" of Dionysius the Areopagite, selections from John Tauler and Meister Eckhart, and "The Divine Pymander [Poemander] of Hermes Trismegistus"--a book which nearly all the spiritual Humanists ranked in the very first list of religious literature.[12]
We must now turn to Everard"s message as it is {244} presented in his Sermons, and endeavour to discover what he told the throngs of people who came gladly to hear him in the Kensington Meetings and the gatherings at Islington. The central emphasis in every sermon is on personal experience, or, as we should phrase it to-day, on a religion of life and reality. He has had his own "scholastic" period, but he looks back on it as a pa.s.sage across an arid desert, and he feels a mission laid upon him to call men everywhere away from a religion of "notions and words"[13] to a religion of first-hand experience and inwardly felt realities. Unless we know Christ, he says, experimentally so that "He lives within us spiritually, and so that all which is known of Him in the Letter and Historically is truly done and acted in our own souls--until we experimentally verify all we read of Him--the Gospel is a meer tale to us." It is not saving knowledge to know that Christ was born in Bethlehem but to know that He is born in us. It is vastly more important to know experimentally that we are crucified with Christ than to know historically that He died in Jerusalem many years ago, and to feel Jesus Christ risen again within you is far more operative than to have "a notional knowledge" that He rose on the third day. "When thou begins to finde and know not merely that He was conceived in the womb of a virgin, but that _thou_ art that virgin and that He is more truly and spiritually, and yet as really, conceived in thy heart so that thou feelest the Babe beginning to be conceived in thee by the power of the Holy Ghost and the Most High overshadowing thee; when thou feelest Jesus Christ stirring to be born and brought forth in thee; when thou beginnest to see and feel all those mighty, powerful actions done in thee which thou readest that He did in the flesh--here is a Christ indeed, a real Christ who will do thee some good."[14]
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To have Christ born in the soul means also to "do the deeds of Christ,"
to grow and increase toward perfection as His life is more fully manifested in us, to be able to say as we read of divine events, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in me," and to see Christ work all His miracles before our eyes to-day. It is the "key of experience" which unlocks all the drawers and cabinets and hidden and secret doors of Scripture.[15] We can discover, as we read, that there are whole armies of Philistines in us to be overcome, that there are Goliaths to be slain, and that there are Promised Lands to be won.[16] "When thou hast seen G.o.d and found Him for thyself; then thou mayest say: Now I believe, not only because it is written in Genesis, but because I have felt it and seen it written and fulfilled in mine own soul."[17] "Men should not so much trouble themselves," he says to those who are expecting a "Fifth Monarchy," "about a personal reign of Christ here upon earth, if they saw that the chief and real fulfilling of the Scriptures were _in them_; and that, whatever is externally done in the world or expressed in the Scriptures, is but typical and representative, and points out a more spiritual _saving_, and a more divine fulfilling of them."[18]
In almost the same figures used by Sebastian Franck he contrasts the letter and the Spirit, the outward and the inward, the word of the written Book and the living Word of G.o.d. This contrast is carefully worked out in four sermons, preached at Kensington, on "The Dead and Killing Letter, and the Spirit and the Life." Here he insists, often in quaint and curious phrases, that the Old Testament, "from the first of Genesis to the last of the Prophets," is an allegory, "woven like a beautiful tapestry" to picture forth to the eye a history whose real meaning is to be found within the soul; if you dwell upon it only as picture, only as history, it is a letter that kills; if you see your own selves in it and by it, then it gives life.[19] You may learn the whole Bible by heart and speak to any point in divinity according to text and letter, and yet know {246} nothing of G.o.d or of spiritual life.[20] "If you be always handling the letter of the Word, always licking the letter, always chewing upon that, what great thing do you?
No marvel you are such starvelings!"[21] The letter is the husk; the Word, the Spirit, is the kernel; the letter is the earthen jar, the Spirit is the hidden manna; the letter is the outer court, the Spirit is the inner sanctuary; the letter is the shadow, the Spirit is the substance; the letter is the sheath, the Spirit is the sharp two-edged sword; the letter is the hard encasing bone that must be broken, the Spirit is inward marrow which nourishes the soul; the letter is temporal, the Word is eternal[22]--"if ye once know the truth experimentally after the Spirit ye will no longer make such a stir about Forms, Disciplines, and Externals as if that were the great and only Reformation!"[23] The real difficulty, the true cause of spiritual dryness, is that "men strive and contend so much for the letter and the external part of G.o.d"s worship, that they neglect the inward and internal altogether; for where is the man who is so zealous and hot for the internal as he is for the external. If we press men to the inward before the outward, or do as I do, lift up that; either how cold and heartless they are, or else how quarrelsome and malicious they are!"[24] When once the inward core of things has been grasped and the transforming experience has occurred, making a new man--freed, illuminated, sin-delivered, with "G.o.d the Life of the life and the Soul of the soul"[25]--the outward forms and the external things will fall into the right perspective and will receive their proper emphasis.
Imitating St. Augustine"s great saying: "Love G.o.d absolutely and then you may do as you please," Everard says, "Turn the man loose who has found the living Guide within him, and then let him neglect the outward if he can; just as you would say to a man who loves his wife with all tenderness, "you may beat her, hurt her or kill her, if you want to!""[26]
The conception of G.o.d which forms the foreground of {247} all Everard"s teaching is one perfectly familiar to those that have studied the great mystics who have formed their ideas under the direct or indirect influence of Plotinus. The conception is, of course, not necessarily mystical--it is rather a recurring type of metaphysics--but it has peculiarly suited the mystical mind and is often regarded by Christian historians as synonymous with mysticism. G.o.d, for Everard as for Dionysius and for Eckhart, Tauler, and Franck, is unknowable, unspeakable, unnamable, abstracted from all that is created and visible, an absolute One, alone of all beings in the universe able to say "I am," since He alone is Perfect Reality; but just for that reason He is unrevealable in His inmost nature to finite beings and incapable of manifestation through anything that is finite.[27]
He is a permanent and unchanging Substance; all things that are visible are but shadow and appearance, are like bubbles in the water which are now here and now gone.[28] Every created and finite thing, however--from a grain of sand to a radiant sun and from a blade of gra.s.s to the Seraph that is nearest G.o.d--is a beam or a ray or expression of that eternal Reality, is an angel or messenger that in some minute, or in some glorious fashion, reveals G.o.d in s.p.a.ce and time; and all created things together, from the lowest to the highest, from the treble of the heavenly beings to the base of earthly things, form "one mighty sweet-tuned instrument," sending forth one harmonious hallelujah to the Creator and revealing a single organic universe, "acted and guided by one Spirit"--the Soul of all that is.[29] "Ask the craggy mountains what part they sing, and they will tell you that they sing the praise of the immutableness and unchangeableness of G.o.d; ask the flowers of the field what part they sing, and they will tell you they sing the wisdom and liberality of G.o.d who cloathes them beyond Solomon in all his glory; ask the sun, moon and stars what part they sing, and they will say the constancy of G.o.d"s promises, that they hold their course and do not alter it; ask the poor received sinner {248} what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the infinite free mercy of a most gracious Father; and ask the wicked, obstinate sinner what part he sings, and he will tell you he sings the praise of the patience and justice of G.o.d."[30]
In a very striking pa.s.sage, Everard points out how the beings nearest in order to G.o.d are most free of matter and imperfection, while those lower in hierarchical scale are increasingly more material: "G.o.d is a pure Spirit, only Form without any manner of matter; and all the Creatures, the further off from Him, the more matter [they have] and the nearer the less. For example, Angels are pictured with complete _bodies_; yet to show they are further off from matter than men, therefore they have always wings. And Arch-angels, they being nearer the Nature of G.o.d than Angels, are pictured _with bodies cut off by the middle with wings_. But Cherubims, having less matter and nearer G.o.d Himself than either, are pictured _only with heads and wings, without bodies_. But Seraphims, being farthest off from man and nearest of all to G.o.d, _have no bodies nor heads nor wings at all_ but [are] only represented _by a certain yellowish or fiery Colour_."[31]
We ourselves, we men, are both finite and infinite. We have come from an infinite source, and even in our apparent finiteness and independence we still remain inwardly joined to that central Reality.
He tells this in his parable of the water-drops: "Suppose two water-drops reasoning together, and one says to the other,
"Whence are we? Canst thou conceive whence we are? Dost thou know either whence we come or to whom we belong, or whither we shall go?
Something we are, but what will in a short time become of us, canst thou tell?" And the other drop might answer, "Alas, poor fellow-drop, be a.s.sured we are nothing, for the sun may arise and draw us up and scatter us and so bring us to nothing." Says the other again, "Suppose it do, for all that, yet we are, we have a being, we are something."
"Why, what are we?" saith the other.
{249}
"Why, brother drop, dost thou not know? We, even we, as small and as contemptible as we are in ourselves, yet we are members of the Sea; poor drops though we be, yet let us not be discouraged: _We belong to the vast Ocean_.""[32]