believe
that which they cannot comprehend. This pride of reason is one of the most
insinuating of our foibles, and is to be watched as a most potent enemy.

How completely and philosophically does the venerable Christian creed
embrace and modify all these workings of the heart! We say
philosophically, for it were not possible for mind to give a juster
analysis of the whole subject than St. Paul's most comprehensive but brief
definition of Faith. It is this Faith which forms the mighty feature of
the church on earth. It equalizes capacities, conditions, means, and ends,
holding out the same encouragement and hope to the least, as to the most
gifted of the race; counting gifts in their ordinary and more secular
points of view.

It is when health, or the usual means of success abandon us, that we are
made to feel how totally we are insufficient for the achievement of even
our own purposes, much less to qualify us to reason on the deep mysteries
that conceal the beginning and the end. It has often been said that the
most successful leaders of their fellow men have had the clearest views of
their own insufficiency to attain their own objects. If Napoleon ever
said, as has been attributed to him, "_Je propose et je dispose_," it must
have been in one of those fleeting moments in which success blinded him to
the fact of his own insufficiency. No man had a deeper reliance on
fortune, cast the result of great events on the decrees of fate, or more
anxiously watched the rising and setting of what he called his "star."
This was a faith that could lead to no good; but it clearly denoted how
far the boldest designs, the most ample means, and the most vaulting
ambition, fall short of giving that sublime consciousness of power and its
fruits that distinguish the reign of Omnipotence.

In this book the design has been to pourtray man on a novel field of
action, and to exhibit his dependence on the hand that does not suffer a
sparrow to fall unheeded. The recent attempts of science, which employed
the seamen of the four greatest maritime states of Christendom, made
discoveries that have rendered the polar circles much more familiar to
this age, than to any that has preceded it, so far as existing records
show. We say "existing records;" for there is much reason for believing
that the ancients had a knowledge of our hemisphere, though less for
supposing that they ever braved the dangers of the high latitudes. Many
are, just at this mom