INATTENTION TO PROVIDENCE. 
235 
nature, nor can he be conversant with the multiplicity 
of influences and events, which are requisite to bring 
them to his hand. He who lives in the country knows 
that an omnipotent impulse must be constantly in ac- 
tion ; he may till his land, and scatter his corn, but the 
early and latter rain must soften his furrows ; the snow, 
as wool, must cover the soil ; the hoar-frost, like ashes, 
lighten his glebe ; the sunshine animate the sprouting 
shoot ; and winds evaporate noxious moisture ; insects 
and blights, that hover around, or circulate through the 
air, must be guided away, or our labors become abortive, 
or are consumed : we see the bud, the blossom, leaf, 
and germ, all progressively advance, to afford plenty or 
yield us enjoyment ; we see these things accomplished 
by the influencing interpositions of a beneficent Provi- 
dence, and in no way effected by the machinery or ar- 
tifices of our own hands ; and it should operate more 
powerfully, in disposing those who witness them to par- 
ticular resignation and gratitude, than others who cannot 
behold them, but view the ingenuity of man as the 
agent and means of his prosperity ; yet how it happens 
that this principle is not in more active operation within 
us, I cannot perceive. 
Every age has been the dupe of empiricism ; and the 
greater its darkness, the more impudent appear to have 
been the pretensions of knavery. We may even now, 
perhaps, swallow a few matters, the arcana of the needy 
or the daring, in the various compositions of powders, 
draughts and pills, which are not quite agreeable to our 
palates or our stomachs ; but our forefathers had more 
to encounter, as they had more faith to support them, 
when they were subjected, for the cure of their mala- 
dies, to such medicines as album gr cecum, or the white 
bony excrement of dogs, bleached on the bank, for 
their heart-burns and acidities ; the powder produced 
from burnt mice, as a dentifrice ; millepedes, or wood- 
lice, for nephritic and other complaints ; and the ashes 
of earth-worms, administered in nervous and epileptic 
cases. 
Our apple-trees here are greatly injured, and some 
annually destroyed by the agency of what seems to be 
