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Untitled Article
leading me . But . yet , infantine as is such a state , how much has been achieved , and how intense is roy joy in the achievement , and my gratitude for the discipline under which it has been accomplished ! Bear witness to this , all ye records of the feelings of my darker time , —of the time when the order and beauty was yours , and the desolation mine ! While nature
is drawing a veil over the ruins of art , and plying her work the more diligently the longer man is absent , take from me another record of the things of the spirit . I now see no vanity , though there is much decay . Though the urn is overthrown , the spring welleth up to feed the life which flourishes around , and the foxglove and the bindweed grow where nothing blossomed before . The cistern is broken , so that the waters escape to diffuse themselves in the grass ; but a new region of life is opened among the mosses on its brink , and in the damp nook whence yonder blue dragon-fly came forth . I see not that there is less beauty in these alleys , because the periwinkle has strewed the way with blossomed shoots , or because the hollyhock has fallen from its support , or because the decaying leaves are not , like other mementos of mortality , removed from sight . The fruit-trees drop their degenerate produce , to be carried away by the field-mouse or devoured by birds , and the vine trails its clusters among the rank grass ; but in all this there is no vanity , —no failure of purpose , —no breach of a tacit promise . According to our present conceptions , there may be less beauty , —though even this is doubtful , —but there is more life , and an allsufficient end in the influences at work on the human spirit . I come not here for analogies from which I might derive a presumptive belief in the
truths which I could not formerly admit . Those truths I have learned elsewhere on far superior evidence , and by a large variety of means . This is the place in which to rejoice in the comparison of what is now given with what was then withheld : in the conviction that the Father has nowhere
declared his children guilty , because they have not truly known him while struggling to obtain the knowledge and mourning their own ignorance . This is the place in which to retrace the progress from despair through the various degrees of doubt to hope , to belief , to assurance , to perpetual rejoicing and devout thanksgiving . Here , where I once doubted whether I had a Maker , and whether , if there were such an one , men did any thing but mock themselves in calling him Father , are the best witnesses of my avowal that I have found these doubts to be the result of human creeds as far
as they are impious , and that I have reached , through the very severity of the discipline , a refuge whence I can never again be driven forth into the chaos of the elements out of which my new life has been framed . Human life has passed away from this one of its abodes , and the regrets which linger serve but to confirm my faith in Him who led its dwellers to a far distaut and better habitation . And if I could behold the entire earth made into one bright , beautiful garden for the whole race of men to dwell in , and
Untitled Article
Sabbath Musings . 689
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1831, page 689, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2602/page/37/
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