But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it.
Here will I hold. If there's a Power above us,
(And that there is, all nature cries aloud
Through all her works) He must delight in virtue;
And that which He delights in must be happy.
But when? or where?—This world was made for Caesar!
I'm weary of conjectures:—this[1] must end them."
Here we behold depicted the state of mind of even the purest and loftiest spirits of the ancient world. From the want of Revelation, the future was all doubt and uncertainty; and for want of the light of a glorious future shining on the path of life, the present also was wrapped in clouds and gloom; and all the ways and courses of things seemed to them to be "out of joint," and without any guiding, principle, and rushing on hap-hazard to confusion and destruction. Though all the works of nature seemed plainly to proclaim to the reason the existence of a great Creator and "Power above," still there was not that satisfying certainty, that delightful and peaceful assurance of the fact, which a direct and speaking Revelation from that Being Himself alone can give. The light which the men of that day had concerning spiritual things, in comparison with that which we have, was as the evening twilight to the effulgence of noon. Truths, which are as familiar as household words to every child in the land, were the subjects of earnest and anxious inquiry and of doubtful reality, to the first philosophers of Grecian and Roman times. Not more advanced in natural science, is this age of printed books, of steam, of the railway, and of the electric telegraph, beyond the rudimental knowledge of the ancients—than is this age of religious light in advance of the gross ignorance and
- ↑ His sword.
