which inventions carried somewhat of an authority stolen from the grand
truths they had superseded. And thus, if we except so much instruction as
we may conceive that the extraordinary and sometimes dreadful
interpositions of the Governor of the world might convey, unaccompanied
with declarations in language, (and it was in but an extremely limited
degree that these had actually the effect of illumination,) the human
tribes were surrendered to their own understanding for all that they were
to know and think. Melancholy predicament! The understanding, the
intellect, the reason, which had not sufficed for preserving the true
light from heaven, was to be competent to give light in its absence. Under
the disadvantage of this loss--after the setting of the sun--it was to
exercise itself on an unlimited diversity of important things, inquiring,
comparing, and deciding. All those things, if examined far, extended into
mystery. All genuine thinking was a hard repellent labor. Casual
impressions had a mighty force of perversion. The senses were not a medium
through which the intellect could receive ideas foreign to material
existence. The appetites and passions would infallibly occupy and actuate
the whole man. When by these his imagination was put in activity, its
gleams and meteors would be anything rather than lights of truth. His
interest, according to his gross apprehension of it, would in numberless
instances require, and therefore would gain, false judgments for
justification of the wrong manner of pursuing that interest. And all this
while, there was no grand standard and test to which the notions of things
could be brought. If there were some spirits of larger and purer thought,
that went out in the honest search of truth, they must have felt an
oppression of utter hopelessness in looking round on a world of doubtful
things, on no one of which they could obtain the dictate of a supreme
intelligence. There was no sovereign demonstrator in communication with
the earth, to tell benighted man what to think in any of a thousand
questions which arose to confound him. There were, instead, impostors,