Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: RELIGION, 37 outgrown, and in the free atmosphere one can not understand the terrors it once awakened. The arbitrary heaven is also passing away, and a more natural conception of the future life is gaining precedent. Yet the words of teachers of religion are cold and soulless, and even the poets, touched by the finger of a decaying faith, voice the incredulity of the age in lines which speak only in despair. Oh ! poet of immortal song, how chilling to the heart the words that yet too often find response in its doubts and fears: And the stately ships go on To their haven under the hill; But oh ! for the touch of a vanished hand, And the sound of a voice that is still. Break, break, break, At the foot of thy crags, O sea 1 But the tender grace of a day that is dead, Will never come back to me. There is little consolation to be found in these directions. Let us turn back to first principles; let us for a time forget the claims of scientists and take up the book of nature at her plain alphabet and ascertain whether these claims of material science have a sure foundation. What is the Sensitive State ? A Race Without Sight.?If the human race were born without organs of vision, man could form no idea of the beautiful and splendid phenomena revealed to the eye. The normal state would be blindness. Day and night would be marked by intervals of repose and activity, but the cloudy midnight and the radiance of the sun, the glories of morning, the splendors of sunset, the star-gemmed canopy of the cloudless night, the infinite changes, the phantasmagoria of heaven and earth, would be unknown. The flowers might bloom in beauty, their fragrance would delight, but their form and color would be unrecognized. The mind, deprived of the infinite series of sensation…
