ecorates the Temple, now manifests itself in proverb or in parable. The
old saws of nations, the majestic precepts of philosophy, the luminous
maxims of law, the oracles of individual wisdom, the traditionary rules of
truth, justice, and religion, even though imbedded in the corruption, or
alloyed with the pride, of the world, betoken His original agency, and His
long-suffering presence. Even where there is habitual rebellion against
Him, or profound far-spreading social depravity, still the undercurrent,
or the heroic outburst, of natural virtue, as well as the yearnings of the
heart after what it has not, and its presentiment of its true remedies,
are to be ascribed to the Author of all good. Anticipations or
reminiscences of His glory haunt the mind of the self-sufficient sage, and
of the pagan devotee; His writing is upon the wall, whether of the Indian
fane, or of the porticoes of Greece. He introduces Himself, He all but
concurs, according to His good pleasure, and in His selected season, in
the issues of unbelief, superstition, and false worship, and He changes
the character of acts by His overruling operation. He condescends, though
He gives no sanction, to the altars and shrines of imposture, and He makes
His own fiat the substitute for its sorceries. He speaks amid the
incantations of Balaam, raises Samuel's spirit in the witch's cavern,
prophesies of the Messias by the tongue of the Sibyl, forces Python to
recognize His ministers, and baptizes by the hand of the misbeliever. He
is with the heathen dramatist in his denunciations of injustice and
tyranny, and his auguries of divine vengeance upon crime. Even on the
unseemly legends of a popular mythology He casts His shadow, and is dimly
discerned in the ode or the epic, as in troubled water or in fantastic
dreams. All that is good, all that is true, all that is beautiful, all
that is beneficent, be it great or small, be it perfect or fragmentary,
natural as well as supernatural, moral as well as material, comes from
Him.

8.

If this be a sketch, accurate in substance and as far as it goes, of the
doctrines proper to Theology, and especially of the doctrine of a
particular Providence, which is the portion of it most on a level with
human sciences, I cannot understand at all how, supposing it to be true,
it can fail, considered as knowledge, to exert a powerful influence on
philosophy, literature, and every intellectual creation or discovery
whatever. I