, according to our best ability, the welfare of our fellow
creatures, the first and [216] most urgent call of human duty? Can the
urgency of such responsibility ever cease but with the capacity, on our
own or on our brother's part, to do or be done by respectively?
Contemptuously ignoring his share of this solemn
responsibility--solemn, whether regarded from a religious or a purely
secular point of view--to observe at least the negative obligation
never to wantonly do or even devise any harm to his fellows, or indeed
any sentient creature, our new apostle affords, in his light-hearted
reversal of the prescriptive methods of civilized ethics, a woful
foretaste of the moral results of the "new, not as yet crystallized"
belief, whose trusted instruments of spiritual investigation are the
telescope and mental analysis, in order to satisfy the carpings of
those who so impress the world with their superhuman strong-mindedness.

The following is a profound reflection presenting, doubtless, quite a
new revelation to an unsophisticated world, which had so long submitted
in reverential tameness to the self-evident impossibility of exploring
the Infinite:--

"The tendency of popular thought is against [217] the supernatural in
any shape. Far into space as the telescope can search, deep as
analysis can penetrate into mind and consciousness or the forces which
govern natural things, popular thought finds only uniformity and
connection of cause and effect; no sign anywhere of a personal will
which is influenced by prayer or moral motives."

How much to be pitied are the gifted esoterics who, in such a quest,
vainly point their telescopes into the star-thronged firmament, and
plunge their reasoning powers into the abyss of consciousness and
such-like mysteries! The commonplace intellect of the author of "Night
Thoughts" was, if we may so speak, awed into an adoring rapture which
forced from him the exclamation (may believers hail it as a dogma!)--

"An undevout astronomer is mad!"

Most probably it was in weak submission to some such sentiment as this
that Isaac Newton nowhere in his writings suggests even the ghost of a
doubt of there being a Great Architect of the Universe as the outcome
of his telescopic explorations into the illimitable heavens.

[218] It is quite possible, too, that he was, "on insufficient
grounds," perhaps, perfectly satisfied, as a host of other intellectual
mediocrities like himself have been, and ev