מי יורש קנייני אלוה ט״וWho is the Heir of Divine Things 15
א׳
1[75] This dedication will be enshrined in the holier of the great sanctuaries. For two such sanctuaries, we feel, exist, one sensible, one mental. This world is the cathedral of the sense-perceived order, the world which the mind discovers of the truly invisible order.
ב׳
2[76] Now that he who has gone forth from us and desires to be God’s attendant is the heir of the glorious wealth that nature has to give is testified by Moses in the words “He led him out outside and said ‘Look up into heaven’ ” (Gen. 15:5). For heaven is the treasury of divine blessings. “May the Lord,” he says, “open to thee His good treasure, the heaven” (Deut. 28:12)—that heaven from which the bountiful Giver rains down continually His most perfect joys. Yes, look up, and thus convict of their errors the multitude of common men, the blind race, which has lost the sight which it thinks it possesses.
ג׳
3[77] How could it be other than blind, when it prefers bad to good, base to honourable, unjust to just, and again lower passions to higher emotions, the mortal to the immortal; when once more it shuns the voice of the warner and the censor, and with them conviction and instruction, while it welcomes flatterers and the words that lead to pleasure, the makers of idleness and ignorance and luxury?
ד׳
4[78] And so it is only the man of worth who sees, and therefore they of old called prophets “seers” (1 Sam. 9:9). He who advances “outside” is called not only the seer, but the seer of God, that is Israel.
ה׳
5But the others even if they do ever open their eyes have bent them earthwards; they pursue the things of earth and their conversation is with the dwellers in Hades.
ו׳
6[79] The one extends his vision to the ether and the revolutions of the heaven; he has been trained also to look stedfastly for the manna, which is the word of God, the heavenly incorruptible food of the soul which delights in the vision. But the others see but the onions and the garlic, which give great pain and trouble to their eyes and make them close, or the other ill-smelling things, the leeks and dead fishes, which are food proper to Egypt;
ז׳
7[80] “we remember,” they say, “the fishes which we used to eat in Egypt freely, the cucumbers and the gourds, the leeks, the onions, the garlic. But now our soul is dried up, our eyes have nothing to look to, save the manna” (Num. 11:5, 6).
