Not so those into whose hearts the belief of a future life—of such a future life as Christianity depicts—has entered. They feel that the promised bliss cannot possibly spring from an atheistic satiety of animal or even of intellectual pleasures; but that the substance of it must consist in communion with him who is the source and centre of good. This belief and expectation sheds vigor through the soul while engaged in exercises of devotion; for such employments are known to be the preparatives, and the foretastes, and the earnests, of the expected "fulness of joy." The only idea which the human mind, under its present limitations, can form of a pure and perpetual felicity, free from all elements of decay and corruption, is that which it gathers and compounds from devotional sentiments. In cherishing and expressing these sentiments, it grasps, therefore, the substance of immortal delights, and, by an affinity of the heart, holds fast the unutterable hope set forth in the Scriptures. The Scriptures being admitted as the word of God, this intensity of devotional feelings is exempted from blame or suspicion; nor can it ever be shown that the very highest pitch of such feelings is in itself excessive or unreasonable. The mischiefs of enthusiasm arise, not from the force or fervor, but from the perversion of the religious affections. The very idea of addressing petitions to him who "worketh all things" according to the counsel of his own eternal and unalterable will, and the enjoined practice of clothing sentiments of piety in articulate forms of language, though these sentiments, before they are invested in words, are perfectly known to the Searcher of hearts, imply that, in the terms and the mode of intercourse between God and man, no attempt is made to lift the latter above his sphere of limited notions and imperfect knowledge. The terms of devotional communion rest even on a much lower ground than that which man, by efforts of reason and imagination, would fain attain to. Prayer, in its very conditions, supposes, not only a condescension of the divine nature to meet the human, but a humbling of the human nature to a lower range than it might reach. But the region of abstract conceptions, of lofty reasonings, of magnificent images, has an atmosphere too subtile to support the health of true piety; and in order that the warmth and vigor of life may be maintained in the heart, the common level of the natural affections is chosen as the scene of intercourse between heaven and earth. In accordance with this plan of devotion, not only does the Supreme conceal himself from our senses, but he reveals in his word barely a glimpse of his essential glories. By some naked affirmations we are indeed secured against false and grovelling notions of the divine nature; but these hints are incidental, and so scanty that every excursive mind goes beyond them in its conceptions of the infinite attributes.