Preface - Page 2

particulars, with Him who produced them.
Then, indeed, the utter insignificance of our means becomes too apparent
to admit of a cavil. We know that we are born, and that we die; science
has been able to grapple with all the phenomena of these two great
physical facts, with the exception of the most material of all--those
which should tell us what is life, and what is death. Something that we
cannot comprehend lies at the root of every distinct division of natural
phenomena. Thus far shalt thou go and no farther, seems to be imprinted
on every great fact of creation. There is a point attained in each and all
of our acquisitions, where a mystery that no human mind can scan takes the
place of demonstration and conjecture. This point may lie more remote with
some intellects than with others; but it exists for all, arrests the
inductions of all, conceals all.

We are aware that the more learned among those who disbelieve in the
divinity of Christ suppose themselves to be sustained by written
authority, contending for errors of translation, mistakes and
misapprehensions in the ancient texts. Nevertheless, we are inclined to
think that nine-tenths of those who refuse the old and accept the new
opinion, do so for a motive no better than a disinclination to believe
that which they cannot comprehend. This pride of reason is one of the most
insinuating of our foibles, and is to be watched as a most potent enemy.

How completely and philosophically does the venerable Christian creed
embrace and modify all these workings of the heart! We say
philosophically, for it were not possible for mind to give a juster
analysis of the whole subject than St. Paul's most comprehensive but brief
definition of Faith. It is this Faith which forms the mighty feature of
the church on earth. It equalizes capacities, conditions, means, and ends,
holding out the same encouragement and hope to the least, as to the most
gifted of the race; counting gifts in their ordinary and more secular
points of view.

It is when health, or the usual means of success abandon us, that we are
made to feel how totally we are insufficient for the achievement of even
our own purposes, much less to qualify us to reason on the deep mysteries
that conceal the beginning and the end. It has often been said that the
most successful leaders of their fellow men have had the clearest views of
their own insufficiency to attain their own objects. If Napoleon ever
said, as has been attributed to him, "_Je propose et je dispose_," it must
have been in one of those fleeting moments in which success blinded him to
the fact of his own insufficiency. No man had a deeper reliance on
fortune, cast the result of great events on the decrees of fate, or more
anxiously