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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: of God is health, and life, and peace to them, as the air of heaven
is to the flocks on the hills; but man's breath--the word which HE
calls spiritual,--is disease and contagion to them, as the fog of
the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are puffed up by it, as a
dead body by the vapours of its own decomposition. This is
literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and last,
and fatalest sign of it, is that "puffing up." Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who
teach honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in
cretinous stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awaking to the
fact of there being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar
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