and wonderfully made,
and cries out: "O that I had never been born! O that I had never been
created a responsible being! these terrible faculties of reason, and
will, and conscience, are too heavy for me to wield; would that I had
been created a worm, and no man, then, I should not have incurred the
hazards under which I have sinned and ruined myself."

The constitution of the human soul is indeed a wonderful one; and such a
meditation as that which we have just devoted to its functions of
self-examination and memory, brief though it be, is enough to convince us
of it. And remember, that this constitution is not peculiar to you and to
me. It belongs to every human creature on the globe. The imbruted pagan
in the fiery centre of Africa, who never saw a Bible, or heard of the
Redeemer; the equally imbruted man, woman, or child, who dwells in the
slime of our own civilization, not a mile from where we sit, and hear the
tidings of mercy; the filthy savage, and the yet filthier profligate, are
both of them alike with ourselves possessed of these awful powers of
self-knowledge and of memory.

Think of this, ye earnest and faithful laborers in the vineyard of the
Lord. There is not a child that you allure into your Sabbath Schools, and
your Mission Schools, that is not fearfully and wonderfully made; and
whose marvellous powers you are doing much to render to their possessor a
blessing, instead of a curse. When Sir Humphrey Davy, in answer to an
inquiry that had been made of him respecting the number and series of his
discoveries in chemistry, had gone through with the list, he added: "But
the greatest of my discoveries is Michael Faraday." This Michael Faraday
was a poor boy employed in the menial services of the laboratory where
Davy made those wonderful discoveries by which he revolutionized the
science of chemistry, and whose chemical genius he detected, elicited,
and encouraged, until he finally took the place of his teacher and
patron, and acquired a name that is now one of the influences of England.
Well might he say: "My greatest discovery was when I detected the
wonderful powers of Michael Faraday." And never will you make a greater
and more beneficent discovery, than when, under the thick scurf of
pauperism and vice, you detect the human soul that is fearfully and
wonderfully made; than when you elicit its powers of self-consciousness
and of memory, and, instrumentally, dedicate them to the service of
Christ and the