Page:Sarah Sheppard - L. E. L.pdf/143

 occasional introduction of fate, or inevitable necessity, to whose irresistible decrees and uncontrollable influence she often erroneously ascribes the conduct of her characters, and the consequences of that conduct. True, it might be that her mind, enamoured of the poetical and shadowy agency that pervades the poetry, philosophy and mythology of the ancients, borrowed the idea only to give a classical colouring to her works. It must be lamented, however, that any talented author should aid in perpetuating, in a yet more tangible form, a creed of so dangerous a tendency as fatalism. In the dark ages of paganism, men, vainly seeking by their own reason to discover the efficient Cause of things, both in the material and moral world, imagined for themselves superhuman agents in these different departments, and invested them with the attribute of uncontrollable power; to the one they gave the name of Nature, to the other that of Fate; in both cases, with the blindness of unassisted reason, did they mistake the effect for the cause, so that when they traced even the footsteps of God in His visible manifestations, "yet they glorified Him not as God." But shall the more privileged minds of later days, before whose eye the light of revelation has dispersed the darkness of conjecture, still dare to turn reason back to where dimly hovers a blind and imaginary fate, instead of bidding faith look upward, whence shines forth, in all the proceedings and events of this world, a Divine Providence, interfering not with the free will of His creatures, but overruling all things with infinite wisdom and gracious mercy, and even—

While sincerity has thus compelled us to notice with regret that one sentiment of error should leave the