Wonderfully--really _wonderfully_--like the Tree of
Knowledge in Eden, he said, was that Pole: all the rest of earth lying
open and offered to man--but _That_ persistently veiled and 'forbidden.'
It was as when a father lays a hand upon his son, with: 'Not here, my
child; wheresoever you will--but not here.'
But human beings, he said, were free agents, with power to stop their
ears, and turn a callous consciousness to the whispers and warning
indications of Heaven; and he believed, he said, that the time was now
come when man would find it absolutely in his power to stand on that
90th of latitude, and plant an impious right foot on the head of the
earth--just as it had been given into the absolute power of Adam to
stretch an impious right hand, and pluck of the Fruit of Knowledge; but,
said he--his voice pealing now into one long proclamation of awful
augury--just as the abuse of that power had been followed in the one
case by catastrophe swift and universal, so, in the other, he warned the
entire race to look out thenceforth for nothing from God but a lowering
sky, and thundery weather.
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