The Unitarian Review Volume 13 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1880 edition. Excerpt: ...and peace; and that, of all the arguments for the validity of prayer, the prayer, when it comes, is chief. Why demonstrate the sun save by sunshine? Our own capacity for our Lord's faith and virtue has come to be his voucher and witness. Primogeniture in heaven is passing away with primogeniture on earth. God has a family immensely numerous, inconceivably old, which we cannot count or rank. We have made sad work with the infernal regions too. The everlasting hell vanishes from this midnight apparition of sparkling orbs. There is no under-world All is upper and above-board, and we canuot fatally slump Science, surveying this border of the creation, and catching the great Author's style in his boundless domain, denies any foundation in nature for the representations in which Milton, Dante, Eschylus, and the writer of the Apocalypse deal. What an architecture superstitious fancy reared Politicians talk of " the machine," which must have its construction and working looked to, lest, in the slang of the caucus, it be "bolted " from or "smashed." To the vast alteration in ecclesiastical and theological machinery among us, who can be blind? How we have chased the devil away, --in another vulgar expression, can no longer "place" him or tell his shape, --and have reduced to narrow, scarce discernible quarters his old measureless habitation of hell A lake of water has-been poured into the lake of fire. As the Yankee traveller told the Italian we had a cataract that would quench Vesuvius, or as the smith, with copious sprinklings, slackens the flame at his forge, so we have, instead of the boundless gulf and bottomless pit, only so much of hell as we can make useful to fashion and sharpen the tools of a virtuous...