Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/225

 if it were thrown beyond the boundary of the Creator’s care, and had been excluded from the circle of his presiding goodness and wisdom? But, now, in contradiction to any such supposition, let us only apply the microscope to the minuter objects of the animal or vegetable kingdom, and contemplate the perfect workmanship, the high finish, and the wise and beneficent contrivances that so conspicuously belong to the very smallest, as well as to the most bulky classes of plants or animals. To the eye of reason, the divine attributes are as surely and as plainly indicated in the physiology of an animalcule, or a lichen, as they could be in the counterpoise and magnificence of a hundred thousand neighbouring suns. The proof is precisely of the same sort, in both instances, and the argument is as good in substance, whencesoever it may have been derived. The gnat born to die in a day, in this wintry world of ours, gives evidence of the very same qualities of the creative mind which are or may be evinced, by the undying energies of the beings of a perennial summer world. Whether he bestows more or less, God, the author of life, is present, and is at work, wherever there is lifewherever there is matter, motion, and form.

The purport of the methods I am now recommending is, to get possession of the mind, first on the side of its conceptive powers; and to establish vivifying associations between the sublime and beautiful in nature, before that which is merely technical, or that which 1s abstruse or ratiocinative, is much, if at all, thought of. The difference is greater between minds, equally intelligent, the one of which has come early into correspondence with whatever in the universe may be conceived of, while the other has conversed only, or chiefly, with the arbitrary and artificial aspects of things. Even in relation to technical learning, the terms and the theorems are much more firmly held, and