suffers but not perceives. As if on some dark night a pilgrim,
suddenly beholding a bright star moving before him, should stop in
fear and perplexity. But lo! traveller after traveller passes by
him, and each, being questioned whither he is going, makes answer, "I
am following yon guiding star!" The pilgrim quickens his own steps,
and presses onward in confidence. More confident still will he be,
if, by the wayside, he should find, here and there, ancient
monuments, each with its votive lamp, and on each the name of some
former pilgrim, and a record that there he had first seen or begun to
follow the benignant Star!

No otherwise is it with the varied contents of the Sacred Volume.
The hungry have found food, the thirsty a living spring, the feeble a
staff, and the victorious warfarer songs of welcome and strains of
music; and as long as each man asks on account of his wants, and asks
what he wants, no man will discover aught amiss or deficient in the
vast and many-chambered storehouse. But if, instead of this, an
idler or scoffer should wander through the rooms, peering and
peeping, and either detects, or fancies he has detected, here a
rusted sword or pointless shaft, there a tool of rude construction,
and superseded by later improvements (and preserved, perhaps, to make
us more grateful for them);--which of two things will a sober-minded
man,--who, from his childhood upward had been fed, clothed, armed,
and furnished with the means of instruction from this very magazine,-
-think the fitter plan? Will he insist that the rust is not rust, or
that it is a rust sui generis, intentionally formed on the steel for
some mysterious virtue in it, and that the staff and astrolabe of a
shepherd-astronomer are identical with, or equivalent to, the
quadrant and telescope of Newton or Herschel? Or will he not rather
give the curious inquisitor joy of his mighty discoveries, and the