Past and Present

Chapter 1

Phenomena

But, it is said, our religion is gone: we no longer believe in

St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the

sky,' minatory or confirmatory! God's absolute Laws, sanctioned

by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral

Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and

Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the

Moral Sublime.

It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have

forgotten God;'--in the most modern dialect and very truth of the

matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it _is

not._ We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance

of things, and opened them only to the Shews and Shams of things.

We quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great

unintelligible PE