HPB-SB-3-118: Difference between revisions

{{Style P-No indent|in his prayer, as the reason which chiefly weighed with him to reject the offer, that it was far beyond his forces, and chiefly because he was too young, and had no assistant. He goes on thus: “As soon as ever this address” (meaning the prayer) “was ended, I passed through a room of the house in which I lodged, where a child was reading to his mother, and the only words I heard distinctly were these. ''And as thy days'', ''so shall thy strength be.''” This singular coincidence between his own difficulty and a scriptural line, caught at random in passing hastily through a room (but observe, a line insulated from the context, and placed in high relief to his ear), shook his resolution. Accident co-operated: a promise to be fulfilled at Northampton, in a certain contingency, fell due at the instant; the doctor was detained—this detention gave time for further representations; new motives arose, old difficulties were removed, and finally the doctor saw, in all this succession of steps, the first of which, however, lay in the ''Sortes Biblicce, ''clear indications of a providential guidance. With that conviction he took up his abode at Northampton, and remained there for the next thirty one years, until he left it for his grave at Lisbon: in fact, he passed the whole of his public life at Northampton. It must be allowed, therefore, to stand upon the records of Sortilegy, that in the main direction of his life—not, indeed, as to its spirit, but as to its form and local connections—a Protestant divine of much merit, and chiefly in what regards practice, and of the class most opposed to superstition, took his determining impulse from a variety of the ''Sortes Virgiliance.''}}

Now between this time, or during this interval—that is to say, between death and the funeral pile—they admitted the disembodied souls of men might appear, and visit their friends or harass their enemies.

Luther, in his “Colloquia Mensalia,” says, “When I lived at Turica, in Franconia, a child that could hardly speak or walk was got into a wood near the house. An unexpected snow covering and altering the surface of the ground, the child could not find the way back again to the house. The snow continuing to fall in great abundance, he remained there covered over with it two days and three nights. During that time an unknown man brought him meat and drink; but at the beginning of the third day, he led the child near his father's house, and there left him. I was present when he came in, and I protest he told all that had happened to him as clearly and in as good terms as I could have done myself; notwithstanding, from that time for three whole years he was not capable of putting any words together that any one could easily understand. I am, therefore, persuaded,” adds Luther, “that the man that preserved him was a good angel.”

The Americans (Indians, of course) believe that all creatures have souls, not only men and women, but brutes, vegetables, nay, even the most inanimate things, as stocks and stones. They believe the same of all the works of art, as of knives, boats, looking-glasses; and that as any of these things perish their souls go into another world, which is inhabits by the ghosts of men and women. For this reason they always place by the corpse of their dead friend a bow and arrows, that he may make use of the souls of them in the other world, as he did of their wooden bodies in this. How absurd soever such an opinion as this may appear, our European philosophers have maintained several notions altogether as improbable. Some of Plato’s followers, in particular, when they talk of the world of ideas, entertain us with substances and beings no less extravagant and chimerical. Many Aristotelians have likewise spoken as unintelligibly of their substantial forms. I shall only instance Albertus Magnus, who, in his dissertation upon the load stone, observing that the fire would destroy its magnetic virtue, tells us that he took particular notice of one as it lay glowing amidst a heap of burning coals, and that he perceived a certain blue vapor to arise from it, which he believed might be the substantial form, that is, in our West-Indian phrase, the soul of the load-stone.