The seer's wonderful gifts are usually bestowed upon those who are
described by the epithets rough and uneducated. The rough and
uneducated are the chosen vessels into which God pours the elixirs at
which we marvel. From among the rough and uneducated, prophets arise
--an Apostle Peter, or St. Peter the Hermit. Wherever mental power is
imprisoned, and remains intact and entire for want of an outlet in
conversation, in politics, in literature, in the imaginings of the
scholar, in the efforts of the statesman, in the conceptions of the
inventor, or the soldier's toils of war; the fire within is apt to
flash out in gleams of marvelously vivid light, like the sparks hidden
in an unpolished diamond. Let the occasion come, and the spirit within
kindles and glows, finds wings to traverse space, and the god-like
power of beholding all things. The coal of yesterday under the play of
some mysterious influence becomes a radiant diamond. Better educated
people, many-sided and highly polished, continually giving out all
that is in them, can never exhibit this supreme power, save by one of
the miracles which God sometimes vouchsafes to work. For this reason
the soothsayer is almost always a beggar, whose mind is virgin soil, a
creature coarse to all appearance, a pebble borne along the torrent of
misery and left in the ruts of life, where it spends nothing of itself
save in mere physical suffering.
The prophet, the seer, in short, is some _Martin le Laboureur_ making
a Louis XVIII.
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