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Show 201. practical believer had got the Godhead in fellowship with himself all the time, and reigning in his heart all the time. When the son absorbed and turned the Paulist argument against his father, he simply substituted the Spirit of the Wilderness - the Spirit of Nature - for the Spirit of Christ in the Biblical text. References to I Corinthians 2.9 - "But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him" - abound in the early Yosemite journals, and the mystery to which this passage refers is, in Muir's vision, the testimony which comes from the wilderness. Thus his testament was both old and new; though Man might not know the mind of the Lord, yet he could know the mind of the Redeemer through natural history. She was Nature. Just as Paul spoke of "the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory," so Muir appealed to the hidden wisdom being uncovered every day in the flow of Nature. Spirit was but thinly veiled in the mountains. (Heraclitus said, "Nature loves to hide.") Like Paul's, Muir's wisdom was unrecognized by the princes of the world, for if they had recognized it, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory, which is to say they would not destroy Glorious Nature instead of living in her. So the pattern of Paul's thought often informed the structure of Muir's arguments, even while the source of spiritual light was replaced by a living text and testimony. |