Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Pleasure resulting from tracing effects back to their cause CHAPTER III. FIRST RELIGIOUS IMPRESSIONS. It is both pleasant and profitable to trace the connexion between cause and effect?to observe how things that are small in their beginning, spread out in the revolution of years into consequences that are vast and immeasurable. This is equally true in the moral as in the natural world. In looking upon the world of nature around us, where such facts strike the eye, an impressive lesson of instruction is conveyed to us. Go up, and watch the new-born rill Just trickling from its mossy bed, Streaking the heath-clad hill With a bright emerald thread. Canst thou her bold career foretell, What rocks she shall o'erleap or rend 1 How far in ocean's swell Her freshening billows send 1 Perchance that little brook shall flow, The bulwark of some mighty realm, Bear navies to and fro, With monarchs at their helm. The traveller who has marked the broad current of some majestic river, bearing on its surface to the distant mart half the products and wealth of a mighty nation, feels peculiar emotions awakened within him when, having reached some remote point in the country, he steps over a little rivulet, and learns that this is the source of that proud stream. In tracing the history of a mighty empire that has controlled the destiny of nations, and changed the political aspect of the world, as we go back to the earliest beginnings of that social compact, we mark with Unpromising appearances. peculiar interest the first links of the chain which bound that vast empire together, with which the happiness of unnumbered millions were connected. And in contemplating a glorified spirit in felicity with God, for ever freed from sin, filled with seraphic love, and...