"And I encamped, O babbler, against thee;
And I laid siege against thee—a camp,
And I raised up against thee bulwarks,
And thou hast been low.
From the earth thou speakest,
And from the dust thou makest thy saying low,
And thy voice hath been heard from the earth,
As one having a familiar spirit,
And from the dust thy saying whispered."
The prophet Isaiah herein pictures mortal, sensual thought in culmination of belief. It is the present moment, and is described more fully in Revelations, and also in the chapter "The Apocalypse" of Science and Health, as "when nearing its doom the evil power becomes the great red Dragon, swollen with sin, hoary, ripe for destruction." It swells with pride over triumphs of supposed intelligence, developments of "sciences" of matter, and inventions that make its own essence—electricity—more admirable and real to itself, and seem to bring it nearer to the perfection of Spirit. It is ignorant that its glories are reflections of vain imaginings; it is blind, and cannot see that Spirit has "encamped against" it, and encompassed it about; that its boastings are vain babblings. But to spiritual vision, the louder its seeming triumph the lower it is brought, the more it speaks "from the earth," the nearer is its doom. Its intelligence is a familiar spirit (witchcraft of belief), and the seeming voice of triumph "a whispering" from the ground.
The prophet speaks at first as though all took place in the past tense; then he speaks in the present, then returns to the past. And yet he refers to events in consciousness that are only now coming to pass, and closes with, "thy saying whispered,"—the whole that he recounts seemed, it was, it is not, it never was.
