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world afford at any time sources of comfort under suffering; yet these, as sad experience tells us, are often shut up by innumerable and unexpected events, against which human ingenuity or force cannot struggle. If in such circumstance of remediless misfortunes, we have no resource in a common Father of Spirits, and gracious giver of all good, who can repair our losses, or bestow on us other blessings that may compensate for them? We must be left exposed to the extremity of sorrow, and to the most intolerable of all human agonies, despair. And in general, human life becomes without God, a melancholy existence. The thoughts, that we have innumerable wants that we cannot supply; and are exposed to infinate dangers, which we cannot avoid ; that our wisest schemes may be disconcerted in an instant, and our best enjoyments blasted; that we have no superior wisdom to guide us, and no superior power to assist and protect us :—these thoughts must, I say, spread the gloomiest darkness over our souls, and infuse the bitter gall into all our pleasures
Such is the fruit of Atheism. But we observe further that it is the parent of the most fatal errors. Where the existence of a Deity is not acknowledged, universal error in points of the utmost importance, respecting the improvement, exaltation, and happiness of man, must spread darkness over the mind, as thick mists spread darkness over the face of the sky. If God exists, the farmer, preserver, and governor of the universe, and we know him not, it is impossible that we should know ourselves, or the true design of the human constitution. We, ourselves, become a mystery which we cannot
