If the “undevout astronomer is mad,” what shall be thought of the unbelieving observer of God’s dealings with the human race? If evidences of infinite design appear in the material bodies that people space, can we think that God has stamped his creating, ordering hand less distinctly on the affairs connected with the progress of the souls for whom all things exist? The needle pointing to the pole helps on navigation; it is the servant of the seamen: without it, what would commerce do? But how happened it that the principle of the mariner’s compass was discovered just when in the turmoil of events it would be most useful--when it could suitably and most effectively introduce the old to the new world? How providential, too, the time of the invention of the art of printing! Had it been much earlier, the materials for writing were so scarce that it must have come to naught. Had it been deferred, doubtless many works which we prize as among the most valuable and excellent would have been lost. In less than a half-century from the invention of the wonderful art, the continent of America was discovered by Columbus, in 1492. In less then a century, Copernicus discovered the true theory of the planetary motions; and, shortly after, only a few years intervening, he was succeeded by the three great heralds of Newton,--Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo. Man is above nature. The senses only, do not constitute man; for the brutes have some senses like us, and, not seldom, stronger, more delicate, more subtile, quicker to act, more infallible. It is _thought_, then, that gives man the preëminence. But what if thought could never be expressed? What if the members of the human race could never discover thought to each other, never reveal what passed within the mysterious and mighty laboratory of the mind only as the infant seeks to make its wants known, by gestures and moans and “inarticulate cries?” But the Creator gave man speech; God’s first grand interposition for the soul was the gift of speech! “We believe,” says a brilliant French writer, “that speech was not born of itself on the lips of primitive man,” as some affirm, “like a stammering of chance, attaching, from age to age, certain vague significations to certain inarticulated sounds, and giving to others, by the sound and connection of these human cries, lessons which he who uttered them had not himself received. To reach thence from these instinctive cries to speech; from speech to the unanimous agreement of the meaning of words--of the sense of certain words to the verb and phrase--of the verb and phrase to logical syntax--of this syntax to the language of Moses, David, Cicero, Confucius, Racine, it is necessary to suppose more ages of existence to the human race on this earthly globe than there are stars, visible and invisible, in the Milky Way. It is necessary to suppose numberless ages of stupidity during which the human race, essentially moral and