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. 

 J5B 3 



