Religious Thoughts (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: CHAPTER II. ON NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION. " Ye worship ye know not what; we know what we worship." John iv. 22. To a contemplative mind, there is no subject so stupendous, or so sublime, as the study of the wonderful works of creation. The calm and beautiful constancy with which they are carried on, the unerring certainty which accompanies their operations, and the unvarying steadiness with which they proceed by the simplest means to the most iniportant end, bespeak a Power at work around us?a Power, from which, indeed, " no speech or language" comes; but yet such marks of deep intelligence,?such traces of visible design and contrivance,?such infallible tokens of unceasingwatchfulness, that in the very silence which accompanies this testimony, the thoughtful mind acknowledges that " a voice is heard." But, vast as is the multitude of human beings whom God has endowed with senses to delight in, and faculties to meditate upon "His handy work," how few there are amongst us who pause to think, or whose giddy race through life is ever arrested by serious meditations upon the miracles amidst which we live, and move, and have our being. We are clothed?we are fed?the functions of existence proceed in their course, and but little solicitude prevails to inquire who it is that guards and maintains our interests so faithfully, and so well; it seems but of small import to the greater part of rational beings, who regulates the ceaseless motion of each throbbing pulse, and makes the vital breath they draw, so easy and so unperceived. Yet there are, here and there, speculators, and observers, who turn upon the wonders of creation a more attentive, and a more inquiring survey; and who fail not, from such observation, to declare the certainty that there is a powerful, mysterio...