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SECTION XVIII.

PRIDE, LABOR, EXPERIENCE, AND LATENT PLEASURE.

What better are all these truths which we have mentioned than subjects of consoling thought? Is not the infinite a hopeless study?—Then that is the greatest of all consolations which drives it out of thought altogether, and sets it at a convenient distance. Even though we think correctly, we may think too much. If this theology be the truth of God, there will be many minds incompetent to it: and it will be well if they have something to do, whereby they shall worry neither themselves nor the theologian with their incompetence. The infinite is a truth; the calculations of the almanac are truth; and this theology may be truth; and the conclusions of the latter may be useful, although many minds should be presently as incompetent to its processes as they are to the reason of infinity, or to the bases of astronomical calculation. It will be well if any thing shall generally preserve them from fretting over what they do not comprehend.

And as we examine man's position, in correlation with his limited faculties, we must be sensible of a divine charity which makes him for the most part careless of that which he cannot understand. Wavering between a thoughtless animal nature which exults in the pleasant sunshine and an intellectuality which at will (and at will only) glances off into the bottomless infinite which only the boundless God may

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