Page:History of Joseph and his brethren.pdf/24

24 great apostle of the Gentiles, superior in learning and natural parts, and not inferior in zeal to any of the rest of the apostles.

We cannot close more fitly, perhaps, than by extracting a few lines from the powerful summing up by the poet Young.

" What am I ? and from whence ?-I nothing know,

But what I am : and since I am, conclude

Something eternal : had there e'er been nought,

Nought still had been : eternal there must be.

But what eternal ?-Why not human race ?

And Adam's ancestors without an end ?

That's hard to be conceiv'd. Yet grant it true,

Whence earth and these bright orbs ?-Eternal too ?

Grant matter was eternal, still these orbs

Would want some other father ;—much design

Is seen in all their motions, all their makes :

Design implies intelligence, and art ;

That can't be from themselves, or man ; that art

Man scarce can comprehend, could man bestow ?

Who motion, foreign to the smallest grain,

Shot through vast masses of enormous weight ?

Who bade brute matter's restive lump assume

Such various forms, and gave it wings to fly ?

Has matter innate motion ? then each atom,

Asserting its indisputable right

To dance, would form an nniverse of dust :

Has matter none ? Then whence these glorious forms

And boundless flights, from shapeless, and repos'd ?

Has matter more than motion ?-as it thought,

Judgment, and genius ?-is it deeply learn'd

In mathematics ? Has it fram'd such laws,

Which but to guess a Newton made immortal ?-

If so, how each sage atom laughs at me,

Who thinks a clod inferior to a man !

If art to form, and counsel to conduct,

And that with greater far than human skill,

Resides not in each block-a Godhead reigns-

And if a God there is, that God how great !"

THE END.