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Do we contemplate the very simplest causes manifested in the sphere of nature· or make our way through all the combinations of a complicated work, or ascend from one step to another, through a long series of results, till we arrive at general or apparently ultimate laws? still, in the centre of all this complication, and as the law of these laws, the devout man ever recognizes GOD.

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Or do we turn to the manifold, perplexed events of human life, the fortunes of individuals, the revolutions of society, the rise and fall of king. doms, the whole mysterious story of the world? Here equally does piety behold a present God. Not merely in single, strange events, where only one immediate step is traceable from the visible effect to the invisible cause, but in every circumstance and every long and twisted chain of circumstances, where the instruments are more numerous and evident, and from being able to account for much, men cheat themselves with the assumption that they have accounted for everything. For the pious man knows that to God nothing is little, because nothing is great, nothing is ordinary because nothing is strange; and he therefore recognizes His hand as quickly, and adores it as profoundly, in the most usual occurrences of life, as the ignorant and earthly-minded in the most miraculous.

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And not less in the workings of the human mind, the conclusions of the understanding, the discoveries of the reason, the determinations of the will, the whole formation of the spirit from earliest infancy to any given moment of its being the devout man recognizes God. Be his thoughts and their connection traceable, or be they not; can he refer to the source of his conceptions and the ground of his decisions, or can he not; this, at least, he can refer to as the source of all that bears the stamp of good within him, GOD. God, by whose he was power made and is sustained, in whose world he lives, by whose creatures he is acted on, by whose Spirit he is illuminated, comforted, and strengthened, and who "worketh in him both to will and to do of his own good pleasure." O the wondrous presence of God in all things, and of all things to God! O the mysterious breathing of his Spirit through the universe, quickening, sustaining, informing, actuating the stupendous whole !

"Surrounded by His power we stand,
On every side we feel his hand;
O skill for human reach too high,
Too dazzling bright for mortal eye!"

O thou Father of our spirits, by whose inspiration only we can know and love thee, draw us by these

meditations to thyself; wake up the diviner particle within our souls, arouse the slumbering chords of piety in our hearts, and sweep across them by thy powerful yet gentle Spirit, till they thrill in trembling sympathy, responsive to thy touch, and vocal in thy praise!

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CHAPTER II.

CHRISTIAN PIETY.

PIETY is the sense of God; the feeling of the absolute dependance of ourselves and of the universe upon unseen Power and Authority;

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"A sense o'er all the soul imprest
That we are weak but not unblest,
Since in us, round us, every where,

Eternal strength, and wisdom are.

And in calling this experience a "sense," and a feeling," it must be remembered that we mean thereby a state of mind essentially different from the impulses of sensation, and the passing humours and emotions of sensibility; a state analogous to that which we experience in contemplating the true, the noble, the beautiful, and the good, wherein the soul is elevated above itself, absorbed in the objects which attract its gaze, and roused from the cool indifference of mere observation into the earnestness of personal interest.

* Coleridge.

But this very feeling of personal interest in the idea of God, this very sense of a relation of that God to us and our well-being, which constitutes the life of Piety, must bring with it an awe, a shrinking of the mind before superior might, in proportion as we feel the greatness of the Being with whom we have to do. The same works and ways which excite in us veneration of a supreme Creator and Ordainer, humble us at the same time with the painful sense of our own exceeding littleness. As our conception of God expands, our conception of man contracts. The higher we lift our eyes towards heaven the lower we sink in our own esteem. And veneration therefore, by itself alone, takes the form of dread. Piety manifests itself as superstition. The sense of God lies like a heavy weight upon the soul, and crushes it down into abjectness. If we regard ourselves as only parts, and most insignificant parts of the vast creation which he grasps within the hollow of his hand; as portions of that endless chain of which each link is reciprocally cause and effect,effect and cause; as fleeting beings of a day, tossed for a few short moments to the surface of a troubled ocean, and then absorbed again into its bosom; the creatures of necessity, the sport of fate; then the more we recognize the might which compresses us, the impulse which sweeps us on

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