Reversed Optics by Merritt E. Cornell

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Sep 8, 1874

Reversed Optics.

By Merritt E. Cornell

How strange that men cannot see the plainest facts and features of our own times, and yet will reason so correctly in reference to the distant past! The prejudices of the present seem to obscure the vision. Satan’s inverted glasses are before their eyes, and everything is changed.

Hence it requires a great amount of patient labor to open the eyes, even of the honest, to clearly see the light of present truth.

Whately, in his “Errors of Romanism,” describes this principle as follows:—

“Men are apt, not only in what regards religion, but in respect of all human concerns, to contemplate the faults and follies of a distant age or country with barren wonder or in self-congratulating contempt; while they overlook, because they do not search for, perhaps equal, and even corresponding, vices and absurdities in their own conduct. And in this way it is that the religious, and moral, and political lessons which history may be made to furnish, are utterly lost to the generality of mankind. Human nature is always and everywhere in the most important points substantially the same. * In contemplating human transactions, the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us; we view them through the discolored mediums of our own prejudices and passions; the more familiar we are with them, the less truly do we estimate their real colors or dimensions.” M. E. CORNELL.