May 15

As a root out of a dry ground, he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him there is no beauty that we should desire him. - Isaiah 53:2.

THIS is most culpable ignorance. If we found a man who was entirely insensible to Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” or Cowper’s “Task,” dead to Raffael’s pencil, to all the beautiful and sublime scenery of nature, to all that is illustrious and inspiring in human disposition and action, we should be ready to say, Why this senselessness is enough to make a stone speak. Men may be undeserving of the praise they obtain, or if the praise be deserved in the reality, it may be excessive in the degree. But it is impossible to ascribe titles too magnificent, attributes too exalted, adoration too intense, to him who “is fairer than the children of men;” who is “the chief among ten thousand, and the altogether lovely;” for “how great is his beauty!”

“All human beauties, all divine,

In our beloved meet and shine.”

Oh! there have been individuals whom it would have been a sin not to have admired and applauded. We have heard of a Pearce, a Wilberforce, a Winter, and a Newton, who seemed to be “the Spirits of just men made perfect.” We have heard of a Howard, and have melted at the recollection before his image in St. Paul’s; of a Fenelon, who seemed to possess the meekness of wisdom and the wisdom of meekness; and as to Archbishop Usher, Bishop Burnet says, “In free and frequent conversation I had with him for twenty-five years, I never heard him utter a word which had not a tendency to edification; and I never saw him in any other frame than that in which I wish to be found when I come to die.” But He made all these fine beings- all their excellencies were derived from Him; and if all these excellencies, and all other excellencies that could be extracted from men on earth or from angels in heaven, were assembled together, the aggregate could be no more compared with his glory, than a drop to the ocean or a beam to the sun.

Now to be insensible to such a Being as this, argues not merely a want of intellectual, but of moral taste; and evinces not only ignorance, but depravity. The man is dead; but, as the Apostle says, “he is dead in trespasses and sins”-that is, morally and guiltily dead. He can “walk according to the course of this world,” though he cannot take a step in the way everlasting. He can feel a veneration before an earthly judge, but he can constantly trifle in the presence of the Judge of all. He can admire an earthly friend, but never extols that “Friend who sticketh closer than a brother:”

“Whose heart is made of tenderness,

Whose bowels melt with love.”

He can idolize the hero that falls in defence of his country; he can applaud all that the chisel, all that the pen, all that the pencil can produce, and aid in rolling along his fellow-creature’s fame to the end of the earth; but he who died not for a country, but for a world, and for a world of crime, He awakens no emotion, no respect.

“Brightness of thy Father’s glory,

Shall thy praise unheeded he?

Fly, my soul, such guilty silence,

Sing the Lord who came to die.”