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Man placed in fitting Circumstances.

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by inspiration in the image of his Maker, we should expect to find in him a fuller revelation of the divine character. Nor are we disappointed. Not only do we see the principles of conduct controlling the previous manifestations of the wisdom and power of God more fully illustrated here, but we recognize the influence of other moral attributes whose existence could not have been inferred from aught we behold in the lower orders of the animal creation. Of these, however, we do not propose now to speak. They may perhaps form the subject of a subsequent essay, but at present we shall confine our attention to the additional proofs of the divine benevolence afforded in the peculiar endowments of man. These will be found not so much in his superior bodily organization as in the higher faculties of his soulmore especially in his power of apprehending the beautiful, the true and the good and in his capacity of deriving pleasure from them. The various forms of happiness immediately dependent upon the ministry of the senses would seem to be very widely enjoyed and constitute it is probable the common heritage of all the higher classes and orders of animals. They affect in our case, it is true, a more exalted spiritual nature and derive greater dignity and importance from this circumstance. Many of the affections also, which with them are but instinctive and temporary, ennobled by association with a loftier intellect and sustained and strengthened by moral reflection, become with us elevated and permanent sentiments, clothing with joy and beauty all the relations of life, and spreading a mantle of perpetual freshness and verdure over even the waste places of existence. Still, however, it is undoubtedly in the higher powers and sensibilities of the soul, to which no bodily organs directly minister, that we must look for the distinguishing characteristics and true glory of man. It is these that raise him so incomparably above the brute creation. It is the possession of these that allies him to spiritual intelligences—makes him but a little lower than the angels and fits him for becoming their companion.

Nor has the Creator confined his beneficence to the endowment of our race with these high capacities. He has placed us in circumstances every way suited to them in a world adapted not only to supply our more gross and material wants, but to minister to the finer sensibilities of the spirit—a world robed in beauty, pervaded by harmony and radiant in every part with his own glorious perfections. There is, perhaps, no part of our nature, for the exercise and gratification of which, more universal provision has been made than the faculty of taste. Everything around us addresses it, and there are few objects which do not minister to our happiness through it. The

green earth, and the blue o'er-arching sky; the vast expanse of the ocean, forever heaving and tossing, and beating with ceaseless wave the rocky barriers that confine it; the mountain lifting its giant sides laden with forest and glacier, up through the region of clouds and tempests to bathe its snow-clad summit in perpetual sunshine; the mighty cataract, poured as from the hand of the Almighty, and in its ceaseless flow notching in the solid rock the cycles of ages; the glorious orb of day, when first he shoots his orient beams "aslant the dew-bright earth and colored air," or having climbed the high arch of heaven pours rom its azure vault his noonday heat, or declining to the western horizon gilds with his setting rays cloud and hill-top, woods and meadow; the starry canopy of night veiling with darkness the narrow circle of the terrestrial scenery, but uncovering the celestial - opening to mortal vision the universal realm of space blazing through all its measureless depths with unnumbered suns equal in splendor to our own — these awaken in the mind of the beholder varied indeed, but still pleasurable emotions. Equally in harmony with this endowment of the spirit are the minor objects with which the Creator has adorned the scene of our earthly existence. The tinkling rill threading its way through copse and meadow, the noisy brook urging its impetuous course along the plain or down the hill-side, and the majestic river, rolling onward its mass of waters, laden with the commerce of nations, towards that ocean with which they are soon to mingle; the swelling bud, the expanding leaf, the opening flower, the waving harvest and the golden fruit; the tender plant bending its delicate and graceful form before the summer breeze, and the moss-grown oak whose sturdy trunk and outspread branches have braved the storms of a hundred winters; the swallow cutting with pliant wing the liquid air, the lark rising from the dewy lawn and "singing up to heaven's gate,” the little humming-bird as, poised in air and gleaming in satin and gold, he sips from the painted flower-cup its nectared sweets, and the lordly eagle stooping from his aerial flight to bear away in his powerful talons the unwary hare or the defenceless lambkin; the graceful deer, the fleet gazelle, the stately elephant, the majestic lion, the human form and face divine, all kindle in the soul a like sense of joy and gladness. Whichever way we turn, the eye is greeted by beauty and the ear drinks in melody. Aside from the adaptedness of the objects with which the Creator has surrounded us to their several uses, a mysterious and indescribable attraction is spread over the entire face of nature, and breathes instinctive from all her forms. It is the benignant expression of goodness the smile of the father's love added to the rich provisions he has made for the welfare of his children.

Nor is the divine benevolence less conspicuous in the sensibility of

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Desire of Knowledge.

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the human soul to the forms of truth revealed around and within it. The desire to know is one of the strongest and most operative principles of our nature. It is not confined to any age, character or condition. It manifests itself equally in the simple why' and 'what makes it' of the untaught child, and in the laborious researches and profound investigations of the natural philosopher; in the busy cu riosity of the unoccupied citizen who spends his time "in nothing else, but either to tell or to hear some new thing," and in the untiring devotion of the scholar, poring with bended form over the classic pages of ancient or modern lore. It is continually prompting to action under all the varied conditions and circumstances of life, and the pleasures arising from its gratification constitute no inconsiderable portion of the entire sum of human happiness. This is true of it regarded in its ordinary manifestations and as directed to the more usual objects. But, when it is associated with high intellectual endowments, and raised above the petty interests of vulgar curiosity to the sublime truths pertaining to God, man, and the universe, it becomes a source of enjoyment the purest and most exalted of which we can have any experience in the present state. And how ample are the materials provided for ministering to it in this divinest of all its forms, how glorious are the vistas opened on every side into the infinity of being around us, how rich a beneficent Creator has thus made the heritage of mind, it is scarcely necessary to say. Whether we regard the displays of the Divine wisdom and power directly about us and within our immediate view, this ponderous globe with its mighty burden of oceans and continents teeming throughout with myriads of living organized beings, as hung in its orbit, it plunges through space with a velocity of more than a thousand miles to the minute; the material atoms composing it, indestructible, unalterable, connected with one another by the most mysterious relationships and endowed with exhaustless energies, varying in their outward manifestations with every new condition, but in essence remaining always the same, the source of all physical causation, evolving by their ceaseless action the entire assemblage of the terrestrial phenomena; the subtle principle of heat, invisible, intangible, without form or weight, or any of the sensible attributes of materiality, like the Being who created it ever present and ever active, and like Him revealing itself only through its effects, surrounding all things, pervading all things, and quickening all things, dissolving by its subtle force the strong bands of coliesion and as with spear of Ithuriel exciting the liberated atoms to either their gentlest or their fiercest play; light shooting through space like the glance of the Omnipotent One, or at the magic touch of the prism

untwisting its braided and parti-colored beams into threads of as varied hues as his own benevolence—or going back through the untold ages of the past to that remote epoch in the history of our planet when it first assumed a habitable condition, trace the successive changes which it has undergone, the different forms of vegetable and animal life which have one after another appeared upon it, the mighty series of physical and organic developments of which it has been the theatreor retiring from this scene of sublunary changes, back into the depths of immensity, until the world we inhabit is lost in the distance and the entire planetary system of which it forms so insignificant a part has dwindled to a mere point, there amid the splendors of a new heavens behold the wonders of creative power which still surround us-or turning from the various forms of material grandeur, gaze in upon the human soul, which besides containing in itself a world of unexplored mystery and transcendant beauty, reflects so purely from its serene depths the whole outward creation; or with awe and trembling lift our rapt vision to the great Being of whose boundless perfections this glorious universe is but the bright emanation, and in whose nearer presence angelic beings veil their faces, we behold all around, within, beneath and above us radiant with unimaginable splendors and our hearts swell with emotions of joy and gratitude unutterable as we thus survey the grandeur and glory of the spiritual birth-right which our Heavenly Father has bestowed upon us even while here clothed in the habiliments of mortality and dwelling in tabernacles of flesh.

But, however pure or exhaustless the sources of happiness thus opened in the forms of being around us, these alone are not sufficient to satisfy the demands of our whole nature. Back of the taste and intellect, the faculties immediately addressed by them, there is a profounder sensibility which they do not reach a deeper capacity for enjoyment which they cannot fill. Nay, were there nothing beyond these, the external universe with all its magnificence and glory would be but a vast wilderness, from whose solitary depths not a single voice would come to quicken into life the moral and social elements of our being. These diviner endowments of the spirit respond only to spiritual qualities or affections to the pure in thought, the beautiful in sentiment, the god-like in virtue and the sublime in devotion and love. They hold no relationship whatever with the outward form or character of either material or immaterial existences. Heart only can answer to heart, and mind to mind, and soul to soul. It is the identity of spiritual nature that constitutes the electric chain of sympathy running through the whole human family and uniting them into one common brotherhood-along which the orator and bard send their

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Moral Feeling and outward Nature.

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breathing thoughts and burning words and become immortal. It is the golden links of fellowship that bind to the heart of the Christian scholar the inspired verse of David and Isaiah, and that hold the student in classic lore to the glowing pages of Homer and Demosthenes, of Horace, Virgil and Cicero. It is the deep chords of moral feeling pervading and underlying the whole mental structure which breathe through the soul its most exquisite harmonies, and which once struck by the master spirits of our race continue to vibrate through all succeeding time. Indeed, it is through this part of our nature that the sublime and beautiful in the outward world have their chief power over us. Detach from these the spiritual associations which we instinctively connect with them and they no longer move us. Extinguish the light of the indwelling soul and the human form and face would lose all their divinity and the most perfect work of the Creator become a mere piece of colored and figured matter. The sweetest melodies of woodland songsters, but for the joy that animates them and inspires their rapturous notes, would quickly cease to please us. We should look with comparative indifference upon the beautifully-formed leaf or the graceful and delicately-chiselled spray did we know that no mind had conceived it and no hand formed it, and that no eyes but our own had ever gazed upon its trembling loveliness. The surpassing glories of a winter's night, apart from all idea of the great Being, who created the innumerable worlds disclosed to our view, framed their vast orbits and by his powerful arm sped them on their endless career of revolution, and who is each moment accomplishing by these mighty instrumentalities wise and beneficent purposes, would scarcely awaken a single emotion of sublimity or kindle one aspiration to become acquainted with the laws which govern the celestial mechanism. In all the deeper feelings inspired by the objects of external nature, there is a latent and unconscious it may be, but still actual recognition of the conceiving mind and forming hand; and it is this recognition which chiefly stirs us. The poet is thus conducted through his mere sensibilities to the same sublime doctrines of theism at which the philosopher arrives by the more circuitous processes of the reason and the understanding. Had the author of the beautiful lines to Mount Blanc been made acquainted with its entire history from the time when it first emerged from the waters of a primeval ocean to the present hour, the wonders thus revealed could not have impressed upon him more deeply the great truth which he so eloquently utters, than did that silent and awful form as it rose majestically before him.

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