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"blessed Are Ye That Sow Beside All Waters!"
blessed Are Ye That Sow Beside All Waters Author:Samuel Taylor Coleridge Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: the Nation, and in the following verse, magogues that cause the people to err, affords to the intelligent believer of all ages and countries the means of detecti... more »ng them, and of undeceiving all whose own malignant passions have not rendered them blind and deaf and brutish. For these noisy and calumnious zealots, whom (with an especial reference indeed to the factious leaders of the populace who under this name exercised a tumultuary despotism in Jerulsalem, at once a sign and a cause of its approaching downfall) St. John beheld in the Apocalyptic vision as a compound of Locust and Scorpion, are not of one place or of one season. They are the perennials of history: and though they may disappear for a time, they exist always in the egg and need only a distempered atmosphere and an accidental ferment to start up into life and activity. It is worth our while therefore, or rather it is our duty, to examine with a more attentive eye this representative portrait drawn for us by an infallible master, and to distinguish its component parts, each by itself, so that we may combine without confusing them in our memory; till they blend atlength into one physiognomic expression, which Avhenever the counterpart is obtruded on our notice in the sphere of our own experience, may be at once recognized, and enable us to convince ourselves of the identity by a comparison of feature with feature. The passage commences with a fact, which to the inexperienced might well seem strange and improbable; but which being a truth nevertheless of our own knowledge, is the more striking and charateristic. Worthless persons of little or no estimation for rank, learning, or integrity, not seldom profligates, with whom debauchery has outwrestled repacity, easy because unprincipled and generous because dishonest...« less