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Untitled Article
poses and means of living . It shews , not what some tell us , that man is disposed to guilt from birth , but that he has energies which are all-powerful for good or for evil ; and thus the more daring the crime , or the more atrocious from the slightness of its motive , the stronger is the presumption , that the perpetrator might have held an exalted rank in the moral hierarchy ,
if all its members had fulfilled their part . As it is , there is to the meditative , a strange mingling of hope and mourning in glancing over the human interests which abide within a region like that before me ;—in perceiving what has been done , and sighing for what might be done , for its inhabitants . How wide their diversity of interests and occupations ! There are aristocratical assemblages in these lordly abodes , and family gatherings in the
farms and cottages . Wearied children are slowly going homewards through the fields ; and in the city , thousands are collected for worship within their own dwellings , whose lights begin to twinkle through the darkness , or in the churches or meeting-houses , in which the gospel is spoken of according to the varying conceptions of various minds , and ever appears to the attentive observer another and yet the same . Again ; there is a
disagreement between the apparent and the real occupation of many . There are idlers in the churches , and worshipers who lie in apparent indolence on the turfy heights . There are worldlings whose souls are vexed with care while they speak of the day as a season of rest ; and there are lovers of their race who find their best repose in toilsome works of charity . These are all pupils of man , and , to some extent , of nature ; but , alas ! how
bounded has been her benignant influence ; and as for the gospel , there is at least one—the murderer—who knows nothing of it ; and thousands who misconceive its objects and pervert its energies . Alas ! how much remains to be done before the tale which my meditation has unfolded shall become the true history of more than a few ! How long must it be before every man may grow wise by other means than imitation , and the mere reception of wisdom from his kind , and may have power to originate !
It is true that all wisdom is but discovery . The sublimest dreams of the loftiest imagination are but the exhibition of relations which existed before . Yet we may speak of origination when the effort to conceive is made from any other impulse than the direct influence of man . The ranger has left off teazing his mastiff , and is employed , as I fancy he was never employed before , gazing at the heavens through the large telescope which he has hitherto probably regarded merely as a machine for
making visible the vessels on the Thames . If his own curiosity had led him to use it by night , as he has seen others use it by day , I should have classed him many degrees higher than I can now do ; but he has not even varied his mode of imitation . There is a friend at his elbow , wiser than himself , who has taught him a new application of a power with which he has long been familiar , and has exhibited to him a vision far more grand than the amplest meeting of the waters on which the moon has ever shone
Untitled Article
Sabbath Musing's . 605
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1831, page 605, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2601/page/29/
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