512 
ON MAN AS CONTRADISTINGUISHED 
mighty and all-wise Creator, who made the insect and the philoso¬ 
pher, bestowing reason on the latter and giving the former to work 
without itf to Him all truths are known, from all eternity, with an 
intuition that mocks even the jconceptions of the sages of human 
kind.” 
“ All in exact proportion to their state; 
Nothing to add and nothing to abate— 
Each beast, each insect, happy in its own.” 
But, how narrow is their restricted bound! how unvarying is 
the tenor of their actions and aptitudes! The eagle in his eyrie, 
the lion couchant in his lair, and the monsters of the deep in their 
coral-studded caves, are the same in their habits and qualities as 
when the Pharaohs sat upon the throne of Egypt. And has man, 
“A heir of heaven, and walking thitherward,” 
throughout these successive generations displayed no powers con¬ 
tradistinguished from the brutes 1 O ! yes. Buoyed up by pure 
and lofty aspirations, he has run a glorious course! He has dis¬ 
played his difference to the animal creation by the endurance of 
his social affections, and by the train of his moral duties. He has 
displayed this difference in the power of contriving and executing 
all those diversified processes of skill and ingenuity scattered over 
the world; and by the faculty of attaining a varied and endless 
store of knowledge, and thus rising higher and higher in the mag¬ 
nitude of his conceptions. He has watched long, and read deeply, 
and thought constantly; and verily his reward hath been great! 
In every nation throughout the globe he has progressively ad¬ 
vanced from the barbarity of the savage unto the godlike majesty 
of intellectual man; and although, at last, by the unalterable laws 
of One, who has sent forth the fate of nation after nation, and from 
whose fiat our own highly-favoured country will not be exempt, 
the splendour of such kingdoms are obscured, if they do not wholly 
pass away : then, even then, we are enabled to lay our hands on 
the altars of the past, and seize from the skeleton grasp of ''ages 
gone” the fadeless records of their mighty deeds—the burning im¬ 
press of their quenchless minds! Are there any who have not felt 
the power of that ancient Grecian bard, who, in spite of poesy, 
blind though he was, yet saw into the depths of the material world; 
and rolled his sightless orbs over the star-studded firmament of 
heaven, to elevate and dignify and immortalize his inspirations 
with the painting of such beautiful phenomenal And our own 
Shakspear, too, who 
“Exhausted worlds, and then imagined new,” 
what fearful yet beautiful glimpses has he caught of the workings 
of the human heart! He has unlocked with the golden key of 
