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    learned to guide myself , I was yet in blindness and bondage respecting external things . Then I thought motion was life ; for of the spreading influences of life I knew nothing . Then all things seemed rayless , bare , and insulated . I discerned no relation between the woodbine and the bee , the dawn and the upspringing lark , the stirrings of nature and man's sabbath-hymn . Then the rose was trampled under foot when its fragrance

    had passed away , and the starry cope seemed like a low ceiling under which there was no more than room to breathe . No mystery then floated over the face of things . All was without form , for I dreamed not of proportion ; all was void , for I conceived not of purpose ; and discerned or felt nothing of spirit moving amidst this chaos . Let none say that the work of creation

    had no witnesses of a lower rank than the winged ones who stationed themselves round the abyss of space to gaze . Adam may have stepped fprth into a formed world ; but , save him , every child of humanity has been beckoned by the Creator to come and behold how all things are done , and that all are good .

    But man understands , and therefore may be said to behold this , only long after the Creator ' s voice has called him out of nothing . His bodily eye and ear are fitly framed ; but the light is to him he knows not what , and he hears nothing of the song of the morning stars . When the second great period of his life is come—the opening age of mystery—he becomes sensible that the light must proceed from some source , and turns himself this way and that to look for it . There has till now been utter silence ; but at

    length a wandering breath of music reaches his ear , and rouses him to a new experience . It comes again and again , and wakens answering harmonies . Must he be mute ? He puts forth his voice and finds an answer , and thenceforth knows that there may be communion with what is unseen . He has now begun to prepare for his entrance upon the spiritual world . He is like the young solitary native of a prison . He wakes up and beholds bright reflections on his dungeon walls ; and when he has found the crevice by which they enter , he knows by their perpetual change that there

    is something beyond . He turns an eager ear when melody also comes ; and his response is not the less joyful because he knows not yet that his deliverance is at hand . —This is but the opening of the tale ; but does it not stimulate to know more ? When the young captive comes forth into the living world , he is not left unguarded and untaught . The teachers appointed by his Maker—Man

    and iNature—await him at his prison door . Ihe one seats him at the domestic board , guides him where he may witness the traffic , the strife , the co-operation , ever going on among his brethren ; points out to him the sources of sympathy and the causes of contention ; unveils to him somewhat of the machinery of society ; and , when he is harassed and alarmed at what he beholds , leads him to the sabbath-tern pie . There his spirit is soothed , but not satisfied . He hears harmony , but it is in an unknown

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    602 . Sabbath Musings .

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1831, page 602, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2601/page/26/