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Untitled Article
nity of vanities , ' * thought I . " Other harvest-fields besides the churchyard bear this inscription . Men labour , and gather , and consume , and then labour again till they are themselves consumed . Thus is it with the bee , save that to it labour is thoughtless pleasure , and it has no perception of the
aimlessness of its toil . It knows not , as I know , that the best which can befal it is to consume the golden store which it has taken so much time and labour to collect , and to begin with a new season the same round of activity . The toil of men , in like manner , only produces food ; food only sustains the life ; the life returns to the production of the means of life , till other means are wanted to sustain it which cannot be found : and thus is
toil vanity , the fruits of toil are vanity ; life is vanity , and death is the vanity of vanities . Why then do we live ? " No wonder I then sighed for death , hoping as I did to find by some unknown means a satisfying of my doubts or a refuge from them . No wonder I dreamed of death by night , and strove to realize the conception of it by day . No wonder I hid my face from the light , and closed my ears to the murmuring waters , while I
revolved every imagination I had ever formed of the darkness , and stillness , and immeasurable vastness of death . Yet then was I , perhaps , the most wretched . I could not divest myself of the conviction that my doubts were so many sins . Men told me , and I could not but in part believe , that to want faith was a crime ; that misery like mine was but a qualification for punishment ; and that every evil of which I now complained would be
aggravated hereafter . Alas ! what was to become of me , if I could find no rest even in the grave , if the death I longed for was to be only apparent , if the brightness which I found so oppressive here should prove only like the day-spring , in comparison with the glare of the eternal fires amidst which j ny spirit must stand hereafter ? In such moments , feeling that there was no return to the ignorance of the child , or the apathy of common men , I prayed , to whom I knew not , —for madness .
Blessed be God , I was led by another way out of my torment , —a long , and dark , and rugged way , but one on which are perpetually echoed back the thanksgivings of a spirit now at peace . If it were not for the mementos around me , I could not credit how jyeak had been my reason , how perverted my imagination , or at how low a depth of ignorance it has pleased the Father to fix the starting point whence the interminable career of the spirit
must begin . I daily feel that I am still but beginning ; that realities are only discerned in their faintest outlines , and the language of truth only caught in the most remote of its reverberations . I daily feel that God is yet to me less than the wisest and tenderest parent is to the infant who can barely recognize his presence , —who can rightly refer the voice and the smile , but knows nothing of any nobler attribute . I feel daily that Christ has but opened his mission to me , that Life and Death have only told me whence they come , and that I can but dimly discern whither they are
Untitled Article
688 Sabbath Musings .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 688, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/36/
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