The metaphor might remain, doubtless,
as a metaphor, in the domain of poetry, whose office was to realize,
in objective symbols, the subjective ideas of the human intellect; but
philosophy, and the pure sentiment of religion, which found all things,
even God himself, in the recesses of its own enthusiastic heart, must
abjure such a notion."
* * * * *
"What!" he asked again, "shall all nature be a harmonious whole,
reflecting, in every drop of dew which gems the footsteps of the morning,
the infinite love and wisdom of its Maker, and man alone be excluded
from his part in that concordant choir? Yet such is the doctrine of the
advocates of free-will, and of sin--its phantom-bantling. Man disobey his
Maker! disarrange and break the golden wheels and springs of the infinite
machine! The thought were blasphemy!--impossibility! All things fulfil
their destiny; and so does man, in a higher or lower sphere of being. Shall
I punish the robber? Shall I curse the profligate? As soon destroy the
toad, because my partial taste may judge him ugly; or doom to hell, for
his carnivorous appetite, the muscanonge of my native lakes! Toad is not
horrible to toad, or thief to thief.
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