On this page
-
Text (1)
-
Untitled Article
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
-
-
Transcript
-
Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
Additionally, when viewing full transcripts, extracted text may not be in the same order as the original document.
Untitled Article
sagacity could foresee , we must be prepared to surrender our purposes , to relinquish our desires , and submit to disappointment , when our calculations , however reasonable , are defeated . Calculable events are , in a manner , our own ; and we should make use of them as the materials with which to build up our moral constitution . Fortuitous events belong to God alone , and to attempt to establish any dominion over them , is enthusiasm and impiety . Such enthusiasm leads to a delusive and fatal expectation of special boons in reward of services , and it is evident that under human controul events would
tend constantly to our moral deterioration , while , " In the divine management of the fortuities of life , there may be very plainly perceived a dispensation of moral exercise , specifically adapted to the temper and powers of the individual . No one can look back upon his own history without meeting unquestionable instances of this sort of educational adjustment of his lot , effected by means that were wholly independent of his own choice or agency . The casual meeting * with a stranger , or an unexpected interview with a friend ; the accidental postponement of affairs ; the loss of a
letter , a shower , a trivial indisposition , the caprice of an associate—these , or similar fortuities , have been the determining causes of events , not only important in themselves , but of peculiar significance and use in that process of discipline which the character of the individual was to undergo . These new currents in the course of life proved , in the issue , specifically proper for putting in action the latent faculties of the mind , or for holding in check its dangerous propensities . Whoever is quite unconscious of this sort of overruling * of his affairs by means of apparent accidents , must be very little addicted to habits of intelligent reflection . " —Pp . 133 , 134 .
In pointing out the incongruity ( according to these principles ) of speaking of any dispensations of Providence as mysterious , the writer attributes the error , in part , to the popular misunderstanding of the language of Scripture , by which Heaven is believed to be an abode of quiescent bliss , exempt from the necessity of action . While all the arrangements of the present state manifestly tend to generate habits of strenuous exertion , while the Scriptures describe the mortal life as a life of warfare , a scene of labour , a toilsome pilgrimage , and at the same time declare that as we now sow we shall hereafter reap , and that the deeds done in the body will be the grounds of our future happiness or misery , it is absurd in the extreme to imagine that we are to spend an eternity in what we now call repose . Action may be unattended with difficulty , exertion with weariness , and the pursuit of intellectual objects with perplexity ; but that there will be exertion , strenuous and perpetual , there is no reason to doubt :
" A man eminently gifted by nature for important and peculiar services , and trained to perform them by a long and arduous discipline , and now just entering upon the course of successful beneficence , and perhaps actually holding in his band the welfare of a family , or a province , or an empire , is suddenly smitten to the earth by disease or accident . Sad ruin of a rare machinery of intellectual and moral power ! But while the thoughtless may deplore for an hour their irreparable loss , the thoughtful few muse rather
than weep ; and in order to conceal from themselves the irreverence of their own repinings , exclaim , ' How mysterious are the ways of Heaven ! ' Yes ; but in the present instance , what is mysterious ? Not that human life should at all periods be liable to disease , or the human frame always vulnerable . "P . 148 . " Still , " we continue in the words of-Dr . Channing , * " the question
* Memoir of Gallison .
Untitled Article
476 Natural History of &nthusia&m .
-
-
Citation
-
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), July 2, 1829, page 476, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2574/page/28/
-