ON NATURAL AND REVEALED RELIGION. 373 
it would be useless to repeat the same arguments, 
and hopeless to place them in a stronger point of 
view.* If, then, the material world is replete with 
proofs, innumerable and unanswerable, not only of 
the being of a God, but of His infinite power, wisdom, 
and bounty ; and if, above all, these temporal things 
speak to us, as in parables, of those eternal destinies 
with which man is inseparably linked, the study of 
the visible creation is second only in importance to 
that of the spiritual. Ancient literature, whatever 
may be its advantages, however it may, judiciously 
selected, refine the taste, improve the diction, or 
inform the understanding, cannot for a moment be 
brought into equal comparison with the sublimity, 
the pureness, and the exalting nature of natural 
history. The student of the one draws his ma- 
terials of thought from the works and deeds of man ; 
the other studies from the interminable library of 
nature, and from the examples so brought before 
him, learns to exercise towards his fellows, however 
imperfectly, that beneficence and compassion, and 
that unwearied solicitude which he sees is extended 
by his Maker to the meanest insect that crosses 
his path. The Newtonian philosophy, indeed, ex- 
pands the mind to such a painful degree as to make 
it fall back upon itself, as conscious of its inability 
to grasp the full range of the sublime truths it dimly 
unfolds, or even of the effects which those truths 
produce in the visible creation. Yet the wonders 
of the heavens, however awfully magnificent, and 
* A Discourse on the Studies of the University of Cam- 
bridge, by Adam Sedgwick, M. A. Woodwardean Professor. 
BB 3 
