V.

ON THE IMPERFECTION OF ALL HUMAN THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE IN THE VIEW OF THE CREATOR.

A VAST mountain, a range of perpendicular cliffs, are objects that powerfully excite in us the idea of grandeur. They are among the sublimest objects within the near scope and measurement of our senses; and it seems to be chiefly from comparing them with those less things to which our near view is usually directed, and particularly with the minuteness and feebleness of our own bodily structure, that we gain this impression of their stability and greatness. For we know, on reflection, that the grandeur, even of the Himalayan mountains, is merely relative; and that all the different inequalities of our earth's surface are, propor

tionally to its magnitude, but as the greater and smaller grains of sand or dust, differing a little in size and aggregation, which might be strewn and cemented on the surface of our artificial globes.

So there is, to us, a grandeur in human eloquence. To hear or read the expression of thoughts, which (in our figurative way of describing them) are eminently clear, solid, lofty, and comprehensive, which are well combined, and conveyed to us by the most distinct and appropriate signs that language yields, is highly gratifying and elevating to the enlightened mind. And to minds which are at all spiritually, as well as intellectually, enlightened, there is no way in which true eloquence can appear more nobly exercised, than in prayer to God. False or affected eloquence indeed, is in no other use of it so deeply disgusting, because in this it is not only puerile but profane: the true eloquence of prayer is that simple greatness of thought and reverential fervour of desire in which lowliness and sublimity meet. With this a devout and well-ordered mind is elevated and charmed; charmed perhaps too much: that is, as far as the charm results from an admiration of superior thought and expression. For we know, or should know, on reflection, that the loftiness and compass of human eloquence are as merely

relative as the mass and height of mountains; and that in the view of the infinite Mind of Him who "taketh up the isles as an atom,"* the differences between the most expansive and the narrowest, the most exalted and the humblest modes of human thought and speech, are as utterly inconsiderable. The disproportion between the conceptions and communications of Lord Bacon and those of a peasant, is to us immense; but to the All-comprehending Intellect it is only a difference in degrees of littleness: it is as the difference between Caucasus and a hillock unto Him "who meted out heaven with a span." To us the thoughts of some few among our fellow-men, and the medium through which they are conveyed to us, appear splendidly distinguished from those of the multitude: the difference is real; and is, relatively, great but it is a difference between "very little things," and therefore, in itself, a very little difference.

The full and finished strain of the parent nightingale enchants us; the chirp of her brood has no power to please. Both however are but the feeble and limited notes of birds. The eloquence of Cicero and Chatham transported their hearers;

*Isaiah xl. 15. Lowth's Translation.

while a child or an uninstructed person can scarcely give distinct utterance to one interesting thought or emotion. Yet both classes speak only "with the tongues of men;" and thought conceived and expressed by means of so earthly and frail an organization as ours, is probably, even in its strongest conception and best enunciation, exceedingly weak and circumscribed, not only in the view of the Deity, but of some created minds. Even to Newton, the difference between the acquirements of a child who knew the first rudiments of numbers, and of a student who could demonstrate the theorems of Euclid, must have appeared, comparatively, trifling; because he himself is said to have comprehended the latter intuitively. We cannot, therefore, doubt that intelligences of a higher order must look on the highest reach of human science as infantine, and the ablest use of language as a very indirect and defective method of signifying thought. Even we feel its inadequacy. How much more must they! and if, therefore, the differences of human thought and speech appear little, when absolutely considered, to superior finite minds, how little to Him that "fashioneth our hearts alike!"

These reflections may counteract the shock which imagination sometimes gives to faith, when

we witness a peculiar limitation and feebleness of mental powers; especially when this intellectual feebleness augments in correspondence to the decay of bodily health and life, so that all sensible indications oppose the idea of capacity for a separate spiritual being, and of the near approach to such a state.

Paley, when combating that scepticism as to a future life which grounds itself on the general contractedness of the human faculties, very pertinently asks, "whether any one who saw a child two hours after its birth, could suppose that it would ever come to understand fluxions." But with regard also to what is sometimes termed second childhood, or to a comparative childhood of the mind through life; the thought which has now been dwelt on, (that is, the small absolute distance between the lowest and highest points of our intellectual scale,) tends to correct false and painful impressions.

"This is the bud of being," says Dr. Young. -If a very young florist were taken, at early spring, into a nursery of rose-plants, and saw but a few, of which the large buds began to show their crimson, seeming ready, though but just unfolding, to burst into bloom on the next genial day, while many of equal age scarcely gave signs