Nevertheless, from the accidents of the position in which we are placed, the divine influence may appear under an aspect immensely unlike that in which we should view it if our prospect of the intelligent universe were more extended than it is. Thus the sad tenant of a dungeon, who has spent the days of many years alive in the darkness of the tomb, thinks far otherwise of the light of the sun, as he watches the pencil ray that traverses his prison wall, than those do who walk abroad amid the splendors of the summer's noon. Or we may imagine a world of once animated beings to be lying in the coldness and corruption of death, and we may suppose that the creative power returns and reanimates some among the dead, restoring them instantaneously to the warmth, and vigor, and enjoyments of life. The spectator of this partial resurrection, who had long contemplated nothing but the dismal stillness and corruption of the universal death, might, in his glad amazement, forget that the death of so many, not the life of the few, is anomalous, and strange, and contrary to the order of nature. The miracle, if so he will term it, is nothing more—nothing else, than what is every instant taking place throughout the wide realms of happy existence. The life-giving energy whose beams of expansive beneficence had been for a while, and in this world of death, intercepted or withdrawn, has returned with a kindling revulsion to its wonted channel; and now moves on in copious tranquillity. The dead may indeed still outnumber the living; nevertheless it is the condition of the former, not that of the latter, that is extraordinary; and the return to life, how amazing soever it may seem, could with no propriety be called supernatural.