gence
who called you into being, lit up your fires, marked your orbits, wheels
you in your courses, around whom ye roll, and whose praises ye silently
celebrate? Are ye empty worlds, and desolate, the sport of chance? or,
like our sad earth, are ye peopled with inhabitants, waked up to a brief
existence, and hurried reluctantly, from an almost untested being, back
to nothing? O that there were a God, who made you greater than ye all,
whose being in yours we might see, whose intelligence we might admire,
whose will we might obey, and whose goodness we might adore!" Such,
except where guilt seeks annihilation as the choice of evils, is the
unperverted, universal longing after God and immortality.

[Footnote 8: A Congregational clergyman, prominent, in the early part
of this century, for his zeal and piety, and for the eloquence and
originality of his sermons: father of a numerous family distinguished in
theology and literature.]

* * * * *

=_William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842._= (Manual, p. 480.)

From the Essay on Napoleon Bonaparte.

=_24._= CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON.

With powers which might have made him a glorious representative and
minister of the beneficent Divinity, and with natural sensibilities
which might have been exalted into sublime virtues, he chose to separate
himself from his kind, to forego their love, esteem, and gratitude,
that he might become their gaze, their fear, their wonder; and for this
selfish, solitary good, parted with peace and imperishable renown.

His insolent exaltation of himself above the race to which he belonged,
broke out in the beginning of his career. His first success in Italy
gave him the tone of a master, and he never laid it aside to his last
hour. One can hardly help being struck with the _natural air_ with which
he arrogates supremacy in his conversation and proclamations. We never
feel as if he were putting on a lordly air. In his proudest claims, he
speaks from his own mind, and in native language. His style is swollen,
but never strained, as if he were conscious of playing a part above his
real claims. Even when he was foolish and impious enough to arrogate
miraculous powers and a mission from God, his language showed that he
thought there was something in his character and exploits to give a
color to his--blasphemous pretensions. The empire of the world seemed
to him to be in a measure his due, for nothing short of it corresponded
wit