A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the WayBurritt, Elihu
History
A Walk from London to John O'Groat's: With Notes by the Way
Burritt, Elihu
Agriculture -- Great Britain; England -- Description and travel
expansion; through which it has developed all these sciences, arts,
industries and tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of
these bright days of humanity! The figure is weak, and every figure
would be weak when applied to the ratio or the result of this
progression; but, at what future age of time, or of the existence
beyond time, will the mind, that has thus wrought on earth, open its
last petal, put forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under
the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal atom of His
own essence, into the being of man?
Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle, and we see
this law working to finer and sublimer issues in man's moral nature.
We have glanced at what the mind has done for and through his
physical faculties and being; how that being has re-acted upon the
mind, and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new delight
to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that yearned for
enjoyment. We have noticed how the inside and outside world acted
upon his reasoning powers in the dawn of creation; how slowly they
mastered the simplest facts and phenomena of life in and around
them, how slowly they expanded, through the intervening centuries,
to their present development. The mind is the central personage in
the trinity of man's being; linking the mortal and immortal to its
life and action; vitalising the body with intelligence, until every
vein, muscle, and nerve, and function thrills and moves to the
impulse of thought; vitalising the soul with the vigorous activities
of reason, giving hands as well as wings to its hopes, faiths,
loves, and aspirations; giving a faculty of speech, action, and
influence to each, and play to all the tempers and tendencies of its
moral nature. Thus all the influences that the mind could inhale
from the material world through man's physical being, and all it
could draw out of the depths of Divine revelation, were the dew and
the light which it was its mission to bring to the fostering,
growth, and glory of the human soul. These were man's means
wherewith to shape it for its great destiny; these he was to bring
to its training and expansion; with these he was to co-work with the
Infinite Father of Spirits to fit it for His presence and
fellowship, just as he co-works with Nature in developing the latent
life and faculties of the rose. What distillations of spiritual
influence have dropped down out of heaven, through the ages, to help
onward this joint work! What histories of human experience have
come in the other direction to the same end!--fraught with the
emotions of the human heart, from the first sin and sorrow of Adam
to our own griefs, hopes, and joys; and all so many lessons for the
discipline of this high-born nature with us!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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