he ministries of judgment; and that,
besides the fearfulness of these immediately dangerous phenomena, there
is an occult and subtle horror belonging to many aspects of the creation
around us, calculated often to fill us with serious thought, even in our
times of quietness and peace. I understand not the most dangerous,
because most attractive form of modern infidelity, which, pretending to
exalt the beneficence of the Deity, degrades it into a reckless
infinitude of mercy, and blind obliteration of the work of sin; and
which does this chiefly by dwelling on the manifold appearances of God's
kindness on the face of creation. Such kindness is indeed everywhere and
always visible; but not alone. Wrath and threatening are invariably
mingled with the love; and in the utmost solitudes of nature, the
existence of Hell seems to me as legibly declared by a thousand
spiritual utterances, as that of Heaven. It is well for us to dwell with
thankfulness on the unfolding of the flower, and the falling of the dew,
and the sleep of the green fields in the sunshine; but the blasted
trunk, the barren rock, the moaning of the bleak winds, the roar of the
black, perilous, merciless whirlpools of the mountain streams, the
solemn solitudes of moors and seas, the continual fading of all beauty
into darkness, and of all strength into dust, have these no language for
us? We may seek to escape their teaching by reasonings touching the good
which is wrought out of all evil; but it is vain sophistry. The good
succeeds to the evil as day succeeds the night, but so also the evil to
the good. Gerizim and Ebal, birth and death, light and darkness, heaven
and hell, divide the existence of man, and his Futurity.[39]

Sec. XLIII. And because the thoughts of the choice we have to make between
these two, ought to rule us continually, not so much in our own actions
(for these should, for the most part, be governed by settled habit and
principle) as in our manner of regarding the lives of other men, and our
own responsibilities with respect to them; therefore, it seems to me
that the healthiest state into which the human mind can be brought is
that which is capable of the greatest love, and the greatest awe: and
this we are taught even in our times of rest; for when our minds are
rightly in tone, the merely pleasurable excitement which they seek with
most avidity is that which rises out of the contemplation of beauty or
of terribleness. We thirst for both, a