Soul is at home in the deep, shaded valleys. Heavy torpid flowers saturated with black grow there. The rivers flow like warm syrup. They empty into huge oceans of soul.
The image of Eternity--the throne Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime The monsters of the deep are made; each zone Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.
One must console oneself with the thought that time has a sieve through which most of these important things run into the ocean of oblivion and what remains after this selection is often still trite and bad.
Such is the remorseless progression of human society, shedding lives and souls as it goes on its way. It is an ocean into which men sink who have been cast out by the law and consigned, with help most cruelly withheld, to moral death. The sea is the pitiless social darkness into which the penal system casts those it has condemned, an unfathomable waste of misery. The human soul, lost in those depths, may become a corpse. Who shall revive it?
Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.
As to the fable that there are Antipodes, that is to say, men on the opposite side of the earth where the sun rises when it sets to us, men who walk with their feet opposite ours, that is on no ground credible. Even if some unknown landmass is there, and not just ocean, there was only one pair of original ancestors, and it is inconceivable that such distant regions should have been peopled by Adam's descendants.
But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
God is one the paths to reach him (religions) are many - just as different rivers, originating in different mountains, traverse different paths, flowing straight or crooked, and at last join the ocean. He is the one Lord of all, the one Soul of all souls.
But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!
It struck me then how much the past - not just the past but history and family - was like the ocean tide. It was always the same ocean, but the waves made it fresh and new each time.
The magnetic needle always points to the north, and hence it is that sailing vessel does not lose her direction. So long as the heart of man is directed towards God, he cannot be lost in the ocean of worldliness.
We (The British) have not journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies, because we are made of sugar candy.