on the sky-in splendid hieroglyphics, the truth is inscribed, that the grandest forms of present being are only GERMS Swelling and bursting with a life to come! And if the universal fabric is thus fixed and constructed, shall aught that it contains be unupheld by the same preserving law: is annihilation a possibility real or virtual-the stoppage of the career of any advancing being, while hospitable infinitude remains? No! let the night fall: it prepares a dawn when man's weariness shall have ceased, and his soul be refreshed and restored. TO COME! To every creature these are words of hope spoken in organ tone: our hearts suggest them, and the stars repeat them, and through the Infinite, aspiration wings its way, rejoicingly as an eagle following the sun. - Verily, it is an astonishing world! Change rising above change, cycle growing out of cycle in majestic procession-each new one ever widening, like the circles that wreathe from a spark of flame, enlarging as they ascend, finally to become lost in the empyrean! And if all that we see if from earth to sun, and from sun to universal star-work-that wherein we best behold images of Eternity, Immortality, and GOD; if that is only a state or phase of a course of being, rolling onward evermore,—what must be the Creator, the Preserver, the Guide of all,-He at whose bidding these phantasms came from nothingness, and shall again disappear,— whose name amid all things alone is, EXISTENCE — I AM IN THAT I AM! The All-Encompasser: the All-Sustainer: He enwraps, he upholds, all those gorgeous heavens! Yea! unassisted, uncounselled, sustains He not-unchanged and unchangeably for evermore-even the fabric of His own Awful BEING! Bending lowly before Him; humbly grateful that in the course of his beneficent arrangements he has permitted such intimations of his glory to reach us,-let us conclude in the rapt language of the PSALMIST,— 'HOW MANIFOLD, O GOD, ARE THY WORKS; |