We feel our littleness in presence of the majestic elements of nature,
our weakness compared with their power, and our loneliness in the vast
universe, unenlightened, unguided, and unblessed, by any intelligence
superior to our own. We behold the flight of time, the passing fashion
of the world, and the gulf of annihilation curtained with the darkness
of an eternal night.

At the side of this vortex, which covers with deep oblivion the past,
and impenetrable darkness the future, nature shudders and draws back,
and the soul, with sinking heart, looks mournfully around upon this fair
creation, and up to these beautiful heavens, and in plaintive accents
demands, "Is there, then, no deliverance from this falling back into
nothing? Must this conscious being cease--this reasoning, thinking power,
and these warm affections, their delightful movements? Must this eye
close in an endless night, and this heart fall back upon everlasting
insensibility? O, thou cloudless sun, and ye far-distant stars, in all
your journeyings in light, have ye discovered no blessed intelligence
who called you into being, lit up your fires, marked your orbits, wheels
you in your courses, around whom ye roll, and whose praises ye silently
celebrate? Are ye empty worlds, and desolate, the sport of chance? or,
like our sad earth, are ye peopled with inhabitants, waked up to a brief
existence, and hurried reluctantly, from an almost untested being, back
to nothing? O that there were a God, who made you greater than ye all,
whose being in yours we might see, whose intelligence we might admire,
whose will we might obey, and whose goodness we might adore!" Such,
except where guilt seeks annihilation as the choice of evils, is the
unperverted, universal longing after God and immortality.

[Footnote 8: A Congregational clergyman, prominent, in the early part