But this kind of solace could not be,--nor any effectual kind,--but for the power of the master idea of our life. But for Him who “stirreth up the nest,” and whose spirit “taketh and beareth them up” sunwards on her wings, the flights of these eagle spirits would utterly fail. But for the ideas inspired by Faith, there could be no enterprise, no true solace, no endurance but of the low, merely submissive kind. Great is the power of all thought, congenial with our nature, over disease of body and morbid tendencies of the mind; but those which connect us with the Maker of our frame and the Ordainer of our lot are absolutely omnipotent. O! let the speculative observer of human nature consider well, and observe that human nature to its extremest limits, before he pronounces that our spirits are not created filial. Let him ponder well the universal aspiration towards a spiritually-discerned parent, before he declares the affection a mere venerable superstition. Let him feel in health and full action,--(or, if he feels it not, let him detect in others,) the pausing horror of a sense of orphanhood, beneath which the moral universe falls in pieces under the hands of its myriad builders. Let him see in the sick-chamber, where the outward and inward world seem alike to the sufferer to be crumbling asunder, how irresistible is the conviction of an upholding power, new-modelling all decaying things, and imbuing them with immortality. If he himself can but learn what protracted sickness is, let him ponder well whether a superstition, however early and solemnly conveyed and cherished, could stand the stress,--not merely of pain, but of the questionings prompted by pain. Let him say if it can be anything but truth,--absolute congeniality with our souls,--which can give such all-conquering power to the idea of our filial relation to the Ruler of all things. No one will venture to say how this power is enhanced by the earliest associations. No one will presume to declare precisely how happy above others are they, now sufferers, whose infant speech was practised in prayer at a mother’s knee, and who can now forget the dreariness of the night and the weight of the day in listening for the echoes of old psalmody, and reviving snatches of youthful hymns and religious reverie. No one will dare to say how far the sweet call to “the weary and heavy laden” is endeared by the voice of the Shepherd having gone before us over all the hills and vales of our life. But the true philosopher must, as it seems to me, be assured that the power of these spiritual appeals would ooze away, in proportion as our faculties are weakened by disease, if they had not in them the divine force of truth to urge them home.