led into the grossest and most childish
absurdities, all progress in the knowledge of the ways of Providence
must necessarily be at an end, and the study will even cease to be an
improving exercise of the human mind. Infinite power is so vast and
incomprehensible an idea that the mind of man must necessarily be
bewildered in the contemplation of it. With the crude and puerile
conceptions which we sometimes form of this attribute of the Deity, we
might imagine that God could call into being myriads and myriads of
existences, all free from pain and imperfection, all eminent in
goodness and wisdom, all capable of the highest enjoyments, and
unnumbered as the points throughout infinite space. But when from these
vain and extravagant dreams of fancy, we turn our eyes to the book of
nature, where alone we can read God as he is, we see a constant
succession of sentient beings, rising apparently from so many specks of
matter, going through a long and sometimes painful process in this
world, but many of them attaining, ere the termination of it, such high
qualities and powers as seem to indicate their fitness for some
superior state. Ought we not then to correct our crude and puerile
ideas of infinite Power from the contemplation of what we actually see
existing? Can we judge of the Creator but from his creation? And,
unless we wish to exalt the power of God at the expense of his
goodness, ought we not to conclude that even to the great Creator,
almighty as he is, a certain process may be necessary, a certain time
(or at least what appears to us as time) may be requisite, in order to
form beings with those exalted qualities of mind which will fit them
for his high purposes?

A state of trial seems to imply a previously formed existence that does
not agree with the appearance of man in infancy and indicates something
like suspicion and want of foreknowledge, inconsistent with those ideas
which we wish to cherish of the Supreme Being. I should be inclined,
therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life
as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation
and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic
matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to
elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the
subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives
through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creat