It is probable that the poetry of Moses, Job, David, Solomon, and
Isaiah had produced a great effect upon the mind of Jesus and his
disciples. The scattered fragments preserved to us by the biographers
of this extraordinary person are all instinct with the most vivid
poetry. But his doctrines seem to have been quickly distorted. At a
certain period after the prevalence of a system of opinions founded
upon those promulgated by him, the three forms into which Plato had
distributed the faculties of mind underwent a sort of apotheosis, and
became the object of the worship of the civilized world. Here it is
to be confessed that "Light seems to thicken", and
"The crow makes wing to the rooky wood,
Good things of day begin to droop and drowse,
And night's black agents to their preys do rouse".
But mark how beautiful an order has sprung from the dust and blood of
this fierce chaos! how the world, as from a resurrection, balancing
itself on the golden wings of knowledge and of hope, has reassumed its
yet unwearied flight into the heaven of time.
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