The Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany (Volume 57) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: vout, and experienced the solace and the elevation of Christian faith. There have been critics who pretend to see in this perfectly natural result only a proof of weakness, or an indication of despair. The candid utterance of pious feeling in his Prigioni was regarded, by the cynical, as evidence of a broken spirit; and when he persevered in retirement and the offices of his faith, after emancipation, it was said that the wiles of Jesuitism had made him a victim and induced his political abdication. But no one can examine the writings of Pellico without feeling that he was evidently a man of sentiment. It was this quality, as contrasted with the severity of Alfieri, that first gained him popularity as a dramatic writer, that endeared him to family and friends, and that made him a patriot and a poet. Solitude, by the very laws of nature, where such a being is concerned, developed his religious sentiment; and to "the predominance of this, united with physical disability, is to be ascribed his passive and hermit life. It should be a cause of praise, and not of reproach. He was true to himself; and in view alone of the sincerity and the consolation he obviously derived from religion, we are not disposed to quarrel with his Catholicism. The errors of that creed had no power over his generous and simple nature; it was hallowed to him by early association, and by parental sanctions; and there is no evidence that he accepted its ministrations with superstitious imbecility, but rather in a spirit above and beyond forms, and deeply cognizant of essential truth. H. T. T. Art. III.?THE MINISTRANT. A Gentle guide came to me in the Spring, Thus, I will tell thee: ? 'T was a sunny morn, And glad birds were the May-time heralding, And sang for joy that Spring and flowers were born;...