Conjugial Love (Acton) n. 535

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535. After this I heard a hostile murmur from those below, and at the same time the words, "Do miracles and we will believe." To my question, "Are not these things miracles?" they answered, "They are not!" I then asked, "What miracles then?" and the answer came, "Show and reveal the future, and we will have faith." "But" I replied, "such knowledges are not given from heaven, because in so far as man knows the future, his reason and understanding with his prudence and wisdom fall into inactivity, become torpid, and decay." And again I asked, "What other miracles shall I do?" Then came the cry, "Do miracles like those which Moses did in Egypt"; to which I replied, "Perhaps you would harden your hearts at them, as did Pharaoh and the Egyptians." The answer came that they would not; and again I said: "Assure me that you will not dance around a golden calf and adore it, as Jacob's posterity did within a month after they had seen the whole of Mount Sinai on fire and heard Jehovah Himself speaking out of the fire; thus, after a miracle which was the greatest of all." (In the spiritual sense, a golden calf is the pleasure of the flesh.) And from below came the answer, "We will not be like Jacob's posterity." Then I heard it said to them from heaven: "If you believe not Moses and the Prophets, that is, the Word of the Lord, you would no more believe from miracles than did the sons of Jacob in the wilderness, nor, indeed, more than they believed when they saw with their own eyes the miracles done by the Lord when He was in the world."


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