University of Virginia Library

Permanent sensibility

Sight, hearing, all the spiritual senses of man, are eternal. They cannot be lost. Their reality and immor- tality are in Spirit and understanding, not in matter, - hence their permanence. If this were not so, man would be speedily annihilated. If the five corporeal senses were the medium through which to understand God, then palsy, blindness, and deafness would place man in a terrible situation, where he would be like those "having no hope, and without God in the world;" but as a matter of fact, these calamities often

drive mortals to seek and to find a higher sense of happi- ness and existence.