The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with. . . the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.
What can we know? What are we all? Poor silly half-brained things peering out at the infinite, with the aspirations of angels and the instinct of beasts.
I think it's very important for the American president to mean what he says. That's why I understand that the enemy could misread what I say. That's why I try to be as clearly as I can.
Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart - one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?