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    recognized in the relations which the practised eye discerns in their attitudes and forms ; but higher is the privilege reserved for him who shall one day recompose the group , and shew how new a beauty arises from the mutual dependence and natural gradation of its parts *

    Our hope for unhappy Ireland will live on through all perplexities , because a pure faith has found a resting-place in the land $ and disproportionate as this hope may be to the magnitude of the political evils which oppose it , it cannot be unreasonable while there is strength in the goodness of a cause . There is an ancient story of a stripling bringing a giant to the ground , and the same deed may be enacted again . Men are ever tempted to suppose a power invulnerable while it is unopposed , and to hear its

    boastings and look on its thickly-wrought panoply with dread ; but only let a champion come forth in the name of the Lord , and however despised he may be by the people he is about to deliver , the earth may yet quake under the fall of the ponderous enemy . —Various as are the woes of Ireland , physical as well as moral , truth must eventually prove an overmatch for them all ; and , strange as it may appear to the short-sighted to propose a pure faith as a remedy for cold and hunger , there is no absurdity in it , while the more direct means of alleviation are out of our reach . The

    discerning will trace the process by which spiritual enlightenment will lead to moral amelioration , thence to political rectification , and thence , by necessary consequence , to an improvement in the physical condition of the community . None have the resources wherewith to clothe a naked and feed a hungry nation ; there is no steward of the granaries of Egypt among

    us . We live in a later age when there is no immediate power to remove the plagues that afflict the land : but we know that such a power is at hand ; and while there is light in the dwellings of the chosen , few though they be , there is . an assurance that the thick darkness shall , sooner or later , flee before it .

    Tew they are at present to whom the light is given ; but they cannot be therefore despised . They are effecting more by the strength of their principles than can ever be effected by strength of numbers merely . They have appropriated , in the manner we have described , the labours of their precursors , and cannot but be successful in their appeal to the people to recognize , where they might have failed in persuading them to investigate . They are forwarding their work , by bringing over helpers from a distance , whose

    powers may support , and whose experience may aid their cause . One of these helpers , having himself gone through the investigating process which seems to belong to the former age of Unitarian ism , so interprets the spirit of the times as to spare others the labour which he has sustained , and to make them partakers of the richest of its fruits . He does not detain them among the elements of the faith he advocates , but , perceiving that the strongest evidences of truth abide in its results , he presents the credentials of his doctrine in a representation of its spiritualizing power and celestial

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    670 Sermons at theAnniversary *> f the frisk Unitarian Society ,

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 670, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/18/