sentiment with which they must have thought of their own continual
approach toward death; a sentiment not always unaccompanied with certain
intimidating hints and hauntings of possibilities in the darkness beyond
that confine. But the more limited intention in the preceding description
has been to illustrate their unhappiness as inflicted by their depravity,
necessarily consequent on their ignorance. And what words so true, so
irresistibly prompted at the view of such a scene, as those pronounced of
a nation that at once despised the pagans and imitated them,--"The people
are destroyed for lack of knowledge."

* * * * *

Let us not be suspected of having lost sight of the fact, that vice and
misery have, in our nature, a deeper source than ignorance; or of being so
absurd as to imagine that if the inestimable truths unknown to the heathen
world had been, on the contrary, in all men's knowledge, but a slight
portion of the depravity and wretchedness we have described could then
have had an existence. To say, that under long absence of the sun any
tract of terrestrial nature _must infallibly_ be reduced to desolation, is
not to say or imply, that under the benignant influence of that luminary
the same region must, as necessarily and unconditionally, be a scene of
beauty; but the only hope, for the only possibility, is for the field
visited by much of that sweet influence. And it were an absurdity no less
gross in the opposite extreme to the one just mentioned, to assert the
uselessness, for rectifying the moral world, of a diffusion of the
knowledge which shall compel men to see what is wrong; to deny that the
impulses of the corrupt passions and will must suffer some abatement of
their force and daring when encountered, like Balaam meeting the angel, by
a clear manifestation of their bad and ruinous tendency, by a convinced
judgment, a protesting conscience, and the aspect of the Almighty