Spiritual Awakening: Selections From “Orphic Sayings” by Amos Bronson Alcott (vegan), Part 2 of 2

CHARACTER. “Character is the only legitimate institution; the only regal influence. Its power is infinite. Safe in the citadel of his own integrity, principalities, powers, hierarchies, states, capitulate to the man of character at last. It is the temple which the soul builds to herself, within whose fanes genius and sanctity worship, while the kneeling ages bend around them in admiration and love.”

PROPHET. “The prophet, by disciplines of meditation and valor, faithful to the spirit of the heart, his eye purified of the motes of tradition, his life of the vestiges of usage, ascends to the heights of immediate intuition: he rends the veil of sense; he bridges the distance between faith and sight, and beholds spiritual verities without scripture or mediator. In the presence of God, he communes with Him face to face.”

EACH AND ALL. “Life eludes all scientific analysis. Each organ and function is modified in substance and varied in effect, by the subtile energy which pulsates throughout the whole economy of things, spiritual and corporeal. The each is instinct with the all; the all unfolds and reappears in each. Spirit is all in all. God, man, nature, are a divine synthesis, whose parts it is impiety to sunder. Genius must preside devoutly over all investigations, or analysis, with her probing instrument, will seek impiously to probe the vitals of being.”

GOD. “God organizes never His attributes fully in single structures. He is instant, but never extant wholly, in His works. Nature does not contain, but is contained in Him; she is the memoir of His life; man is a nobler scripture, yet fails to outwrite the godhead. The universe does not reveal, eternities do not publish the mysteries of His being. He subjects His noblest works to minute and constant revision; His idea ever transcends its form; He molds anew His own idols; both nature and man are ever making, never made.”