consciousness and seem to begin life again, it is always the same figure before me, always the same presence filling my heart...Formerly the day was dulled by the absence of the Lord. I used to wake invaded by all sorts of sad impressions, and I did not find him on my path. To‐day he is with me; and the light cloudiness which covers things is not an obstacle to my communion with him. I feel the pressure of his hand, I feel something else which fills me with a serene joy; shall I dare to speak it out? Yes, for it is the true expression of what I experience. The Holy Spirit is not merely making me a visit; it is no mere dazzling apparition which may from one moment to another spread its wings and leave me in my night, it is a permanent habitation. He can depart only if he takes me with him. More than that; he is not other than myself: he is one with me.
It is not a juxtaposition, it is a penetration, a profound modification of my nature, a new manner of my being.” Quoted from the MS. “of an old man” by WILFRED MONOD: Il Vit: six méditations sur le mystère chrétien, pp. 280‐283.
269 Compare M. MAETERLINCK: L’Ornement des Noces spirituelles de Ruysbroeck, Bruxelles, 1891, Introduction, p. xix.
271 SCHMÖLDERS: Op. cit., p. 210.
272 Enneads, BOUILLIER’S translation, Paris, 1861, iii. 561. Compare pp.
274 Op. cit., Strophe 10.
275 H. P. BLAVATSKY: The Voice of the Silence.
276 SWINBURNE: On the Verge, in “A Midsummer Vacation.”
277 Compare the extracts from Dr. Bucke, quoted on pp. 398, 399.
278 As serious an attempt as I know to mediate between the mystical region and the discursive life is contained in an article on Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, by F. C. S. SCHILLER, in Mind, vol. ix., 1900.
279 I abstract from weaker states, and from those cases of which the books are full, where the director (but usually not the subject) remains in doubt whether the experience may not have proceeded from the demon.
280 Example: Mr. John Nelson writes of his imprisonment for preaching Methodism: “My soul was as a watered garden, and I could sing praises to God all day long; for he turned my captivity into joy, and gave me to rest as well on the boards, as if I had been on a bed of down. Now could I say, ‘God’s service is perfect freedom,’ and I was carried out much in prayer that my enemies might drink of the same river of peace which my God gave so largely to me.” Journal, London, no date, p. 172.
281 RUYSBROECK, in the work which Maeterlinck has translated, has a chapter against the antinomianism of disciples. H. DELACROIX’S book (Essai sur le mysticisme spéculatif en Allemagne au XIVme Siècle, Paris, 1900) is full of antinomian material. Compare also A. JUNDT: Les Amis de Dieu au XIVme Siècle, Thèse de Strasbourg, 1879.
282 Compare PAUL ROUSSELOT: Les Mystiques Espagnols, Paris, 1869, ch.
xii.
283 See CARPENTER’S Towards Democracy, especially the latter parts, and JEFFERIES’S wonderful and splendid mystic rhapsody, The Story of my Heart.
284 In chapter i. of book ii. of his work Degeneration, “MAX NORDAU” seeks to undermine all mysticism by exposing the weakness of the lower kinds. Mysticism for him means any sudden perception of hidden significance in things. He explains such perception by the abundant uncompleted associations which experiences may arouse in a degenerate brain. These give to him who has the experience a vague and vast sense of its leading further, yet they awaken no definite or useful consequent in his thought. The explanation is a plausible one for certain sorts of feeling of significance; and other alienists (WERNICKE, for example, in his Grundriss der Psychiatrie, Theil ii., Leipzig, 1896) have explained “paranoiac” conditions by a laming of the association‐organ. But the higher mystical flights, with their positiveness and abruptness, are surely products of no such merely negative condition. It seems far more reasonable to ascribe them to inroads from the subconscious life, of the cerebral activity correlative to which we as yet know nothing.
285 They sometimes add subjective _audita et visa_ to the facts, but as these are usually interpreted as transmundane, they oblige no alteration in the facts of sense.
286 Compare Professor W. WALLACE’S Gifford Lectures, in Lectures and Essays, Oxford, 1898, pp. 17 ff.
287 Op. cit., p. 174, abridged.
288 Ibid., p. 186, abridged and italicized.
290 As regards the secondary character of intellectual constructions, and the primacy of feeling and instinct in founding religious beliefs, see the striking work of H. FIELDING, The Hearts of Men, London, 1902, which came into my hands after my text was written.
“Creeds,” says the author, “are the grammar of religion, they are to religion what grammar is to speech. Words are the expression of our wants; grammar is the theory formed afterwards. Speech never proceeded from grammar, but the reverse. As speech progresses and changes from unknown causes, grammar must follow” (p. 313). The whole book, which keeps unusually close to concrete facts, is little more than an amplification of this text.
291 For convenience’ sake, I follow the order of A. STÖCKL’S Lehrbuch der Philosophie, 5te Auflage, Mainz, 1881, Band ii. B. BOEDDER’S Natural Theology, London, 1891, is a handy English Catholic Manual; but an almost identical doctrine is given by such Protestant theologians as C. HODGE: Systematic Theology, New York, 1873, or A.
H. STRONG: Systematic Theology, 5th edition, New York, 1896.
292 It must not be forgotten that any form of _dis_order in the world might, by the design argument, suggest a God for just that kind of disorder. The truth is that any state of things whatever that can be named is logically susceptible of teleological interpretation. The ruins of the earthquake at Lisbon, for example: the whole of past history had to be planned exactly as it was to bring about in the fullness of time just that particular arrangement of débris of masonry, furniture, and once living bodies. No other train of causes would have been sufficient. And so of any other arrangement, bad or good, which might as a matter of fact be found resulting anywhere from previous conditions. To avoid such pessimistic consequences and save its beneficent designer, the design argument accordingly invokes two other principles, restrictive in their operation. The first is physical: Nature’s forces tend of their own accord only to disorder and destruction, to heaps of ruins, not to architecture.
This principle, though plausible at first sight, seems, in the light of recent biology, to be more and more improbable. The second principle is one of anthropomorphic interpretation. No arrangement that for _us_ is “disorderly” can possibly have been an object of design at all. This principle is of course a mere assumption in the interests of anthropomorphic Theism.
When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful, æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature are just like this. She is a vast _plenum_ in which our attention draws capricious lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things ’unadapted’ to each other in this world than there are things ’adapted’; infinitely more things with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of relations that never yet attracted our attention.
The facts of order from which the physico‐theological argument starts are thus easily susceptible of interpretation as arbitrary human products. So long as this is the case, although of course no argument against God follows, it follows that the argument for him will fail to constitute a knock‐down proof of his existence. It will be convincing only to those who on other grounds believe in him already.
293 For the scholastics the _facultas appetendi_ embraces feeling, desire, and will.
294 Op. cit., Discourse III. § 7.
295 In an article, How to make our Ideas Clear, in the Popular Science Monthly for January, 1878, vol. xii. p. 286.
296 Pragmatically, the most important attribute of God is his punitive justice. But who, in the present state of theological opinion on that point, will dare maintain that hell fire or its equivalent in some shape is rendered certain by pure logic? Theology herself has largely based this doctrine upon revelation; and, in discussing it, has tended more and more to substitute conventional ideas of criminal law for a priori principles of reason. But the very notion that this glorious universe, with planets and winds, and laughing sky and ocean, should have been conceived and had its beams and rafters laid in technicalities of criminality, is incredible to our modern imagination. It weakens a religion to hear it argued upon such a basis.
297 John Caird: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, London and New York, 1880, pp. 243‐250, and 291‐299, much abridged.
298 A. C. FRASER: Philosophy of Theism, second edition, Edinburgh and London, 1899, especially part ii. chaps. vii. and viii.; A. SETH [PRINGLE‐PATTISON]: Hegelianism and Personality, Ibid., 1890, passim.
The most persuasive arguments in favor of a concrete individual Soul of the world, with which I am acquainted, are those of my colleague, Josiah Royce, in his Religious Aspect of Philosophy, Boston, 1885; in his Conception of God, New York and London, 1897; and lately in his Aberdeen Gifford Lectures, The World and the Individual, 2 vols., New York and London, 1901‐02. I doubtless seem to some of my readers to evade the philosophic duty which my thesis in this lecture imposes on me, by not even attempting to meet Professor Royce’s arguments articulately. I admit the momentary evasion. In the present lectures, which are cast throughout in a popular mould, there seemed no room for subtle metaphysical discussion, and for tactical purposes it was sufficient, the contention of philosophy being what it is (namely, that religion can be transformed into a universally convincing science), to point to the fact that no religious philosophy has actually convinced the mass of thinkers.
Meanwhile let me say that I hope that the present volume may be followed by another, if I am spared to write it, in which not only Professor Royce’s arguments, but others for monistic absolutism shall be considered with all the technical fullness which their great importance calls for. At present I resign myself to lying passive under the reproach of superficiality.
299 Idea of a University, Discourse III. § 7.
300 Newman’s imagination so innately craved an ecclesiastical system that he can write: “From the age of fifteen, dogma has been the fundamental principle of my religion: I know no other religion; I cannot enter into the idea of any other sort of religion.” And again, speaking of himself about the age of thirty, he writes: “I loved to act as feeling myself in my Bishop’s sight, as if it were the sight of God.” Apologia, 1897, pp. 48, 50.
301 The intellectual difference is quite on a par in practical importance with the analogous difference in character. We saw, under the head of Saintliness, how some characters resent confusion and must live in purity, consistency, simplicity (above, p. 280 ff.).
For others, on the contrary, superabundance, over‐pressure, stimulation, lots of superficial relations, are indispensable. There are men who would suffer a very syncope if you should pay all their debts, bring it about that their engagements had been kept, their letters answered, their perplexities relieved, and their duties fulfilled, down to one which lay on a clean table under their eyes with nothing to interfere with its immediate performance. A day stripped so staringly bare would be for them appalling. So with ease, elegance, tributes of affection, social recognitions—some of us require amounts of these things which to others would appear a mass of lying and sophistication.
302 In Newman’s Lectures on Justification, Lecture VIII. § 6, there is a splendid passage expressive of this æsthetic way of feeling the Christian scheme. It is unfortunately too long to quote.
303 Compare the informality of Protestantism, where the “meek lover of the good,” alone with his God, visits the sick, etc., for their own sakes, with the elaborate “business” that goes on in Catholic devotion, and carries with it the social excitement of all more complex businesses. An essentially worldly‐minded Catholic woman can become a visitor of the sick on purely coquettish principles, with her confessor and director, her “merit” storing up, her patron saints, her privileged relation to the Almighty, drawing his attention as a professional _dévote_, her definite “exercises,” and her definitely recognized social _pose_ in the organization.
305 A fuller discussion of confession is contained in the excellent work by FRANK GRANGER: The Soul of a Christian, London, 1900, ch. xii.
306 Example: “The minister at Sudbury, being at the Thursday lecture in Boston, heard the officiating clergyman praying for rain. As soon as the service was over, he went to the petitioner and said, ‘You Boston ministers, as soon as a tulip wilts under your windows, go to church and pray for rain, until all Concord and Sudbury are under 307 AUGUSTE SABATIER: Esquisse d’une Philosophie de la Religion, 2me éd., 1897, pp. 24‐26, abridged.
308 My authority for these statistics is the little work on Müller, by FREDERIC G. WARNE, New York, 1898.
309 The Life of Trust; Being a Narrative of the Lord’s Dealings with George Müller, New American edition, N. Y., Crowell, pp. 228, 194, 219.
310 Ibid., p. 126.
311 Op. cit., p. 383, abridged.
312 Ibid., p. 323.
313 I cannot resist the temptation of quoting an expression of an even more primitive style of religious thought, which I find in Arber’s English Garland, vol. vii. p. 440. Robert Lyde, an English sailor, along with an English boy, being prisoners on a French ship in 1689, set upon the crew, of seven Frenchmen, killed two, made the other five prisoners, and brought home the ship. Lyde thus describes how in this feat he found his God a very present help in time of trouble:— “With the assistance of God I kept my feet when they three and one more did strive to throw me down. Feeling the Frenchman which hung about my middle hang very heavy, I said to the boy, ‘Go round the binnacle, and knock down that man that hangeth on my back.’ So the boy did strike him one blow on the head which made him fall...Then I looked about for a marlin spike or anything else to strike them withal. But seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do?’ Then casting up my eye upon my left side, and seeing a marlin spike hanging, I jerked my right arm and took hold, and struck the point four times about a quarter of an inch deep into the skull of that man that had hold of my left arm. [One of the Frenchmen then hauled the marlin spike away from him.] But through GOD’S wonderful providence! it either fell out of his hand, or else he threw it down, and at this time the Almighty GOD gave me strength enough to take one man in one hand, and throw at the other’s head: and looking about again to see anything to strike them withal, but seeing nothing, I said, ‘LORD! what shall I do now?’ And then it pleased GOD to put me in mind of my knife in my pocket. And although two of the men had hold of my right arm, yet GOD Almighty strengthened me so that I put my right hand into my right pocket, drew out the knife and sheath,...put it between my legs and drew it out, and then cut the man’s throat with it that had his back to my breast: and he immediately dropt down, and scarce ever stirred after.”—I have slightly abridged Lyde’s narrative.
314 As, for instance, In Answer to Prayer, by the BISHOP OF RIPON and others, London, 1898; Touching Incidents and Remarkable Answers to Prayer, Harrisburg, Pa., 1898 (?); H. L. HASTINGS: The Guiding Hand, or Providential Direction, illustrated by Authentic Instances, Boston, 1898 (?).
315 C. HILTY: Glück, Dritter Theil, 1900, pp. 92 ff.
316 “Good Heaven!” says Epictetus, “any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence, to a humble and grateful mind. The mere possibility of producing milk from grass, cheese from milk, and wool from skins; who formed and planned it? Ought we not, whether we dig or plough or eat, to sing this hymn to God? Great is God, who has supplied us with these instruments to till the ground; great is God, who has given us hands and instruments of digestion; who has given us to grow insensibly and to breathe in sleep. These things we ought forever to celebrate...But because the most of you are blind and insensible, there must be some one to fill this station, and lead, in behalf of all men, the hymn to God; for what else can I do, a lame old man, but sing hymns to God? Were I a nightingale, I would act the part of a nightingale; were I a swan, the part of a swan. But since I am a reasonable creature, it is my duty to praise God...and I call on you to join the same song.”
Works, book i. ch. xvi., CARTER‐HIGGINSON translation, abridged.
317 JAMES MARTINEAU: end of the sermon “Help Thou Mine Unbelief,” in Endeavours after a Christian Life, 2d series. Compare with this page the extract from Voysey on p. 275, above, and those from Pascal and Madame Guyon on p. 286.
318 Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse, 1897, p. 122.
319 Op. cit., Letter XXX.
320 Above, p. 248 ff. Compare the withdrawal of expression from the world, in Melancholiacs, p. 151.
322 A friend of mine, a first‐rate psychologist, who is a subject of graphic automatism, tells me that the appearance of independent actuation in the movements of his arm, when he writes automatically, is so distinct that it obliges him to abandon a psychophysical theory which he had previously believed in, the theory, namely, that we have no feeling of the discharge downwards of our voluntary motor‐centres. We must normally have such a feeling, he thinks, or the _sense of an absence_ would not be so striking as it is in these experiences. Graphic automatism of a fully developed kind is rare in religious history, so far as my knowledge goes. Such statements as Antonia Bourignon’s, that “I do nothing but lend my hand and spirit to another power than mine,” is shown by the context to indicate inspiration rather than directly automatic writing. In some eccentric sects this latter occurs. The most striking instance of it is probably the bulky volume called, ’Oahspe, a new Bible in the Words of Jehovah and his angel ambassadors,’ Boston and London, 1891, written and illustrated automatically by DR. NEWBROUGH of New York, whom I understand to be now, or to have been lately, at the head of the spiritistic community of Shalam in New Mexico. The latest automatically written book which has come under my notice is “Zertoulem’s Wisdom of the Ages,” by GEORGE A. FULLER, Boston, 1901.
323 W. SANDAY: The Oracles of God, London, 1892, pp. 49‐56, abridged.
324 Op. cit., p. 91. This author also cites Moses’s and Isaiah’s commissions, as given in Exodus, chaps. iii. and iv., and Isaiah, chap. vi.
325 Quoted by AUGUSTUS CLISSOLD: The Prophetic Spirit in Genius and Madness, 1870, p. 67. Mr. Clissold is a Swedenborgian. Swedenborg’s case is of course the palmary one of _audita et visa_, serving as a basis of religious revelation.
326 NÖLDEKE, Geschichte des Qorâns, 1860, p. 16. Compare the fuller account in Sir WILLIAM MUIR’S Life of Mahomet, 3d ed., 1894, ch.
iii.
327 The Mormon theocracy has always been governed by direct revelations accorded to the President of the Church and its Apostles. From an obliging letter written to me in 1899 by an eminent Mormon, I quote the following extract:— “It may be very interesting for you to know that the President [Mr.
Snow] of the Mormon Church claims to have had a number of revelations very recently from heaven. To explain fully what these revelations are, it is necessary to know that we, as a people, believe that the Church of Jesus Christ has again been established through messengers sent from heaven. This Church has at its head a prophet, seer, and revelator, who gives to man God’s holy will.
Revelation is the means through which the will of God is declared directly and in fullness to man. These revelations are got through dreams of sleep or in waking visions of the mind, by voices without visional appearance, or by actual manifestations of the Holy Presence before the eye. We believe that God has come in person and spoken to our prophet and revelator.”
328 For example, on pages 135, 163, 333, above.
329 From this point of view, the contrasts between the healthy and the morbid mind, and between the once‐born and the twice‐born types, of which I spoke in earlier lectures (see pp. 162‐167), cease to be the radical antagonisms which many think them. The twice‐born look down upon the rectilinear consciousness of life of the once‐born as being “mere morality,” and not properly religion. “Dr. Channing,” an orthodox minister is reported to have said, “is excluded from the highest form of religious life by the extraordinary rectitude of his character.” It is indeed true that the outlook upon life of the twice‐born—holding as it does more of the element of evil in solution—is the wider and completer. The “heroic” or “solemn” way in which life comes to them is a “higher synthesis” into which healthy‐ mindedness and morbidness both enter and combine. Evil is not evaded, but sublated in the higher religious cheer of these persons (see pp. 47‐52, 362‐365). But the final consciousness which each type reaches of union with the divine has the same practical significance for the individual; and individuals may well be allowed to get to it by the channels which lie most open to their several temperaments. In the cases which were quoted in Lecture IV, of the mind‐cure form of healthy‐mindedness, we found abundant examples of regenerative process. The severity of the crisis in this process is a matter of degree. How long one shall continue to drink the consciousness of evil, and when one shall begin to short‐circuit and get rid of it, are also matters of amount and degree, so that in many instances it is quite arbitrary whether we class the individual 330 Compare, e.g., the quotation from Renan on p. 37, above.
331 “Prayerful” taken in the broader sense explained above on pp. 463 ff.
332 How was it ever conceivable, we ask, that a man like Christian Wolff, in whose dry‐as‐dust head all the learning of the early eighteenth century was concentrated, should have preserved such a baby‐like faith in the personal and human character of Nature as to expound her operations as he did in his work on the uses of natural things? This, for example, is the account he gives of the sun and its utility:— “We see that God has created the sun to keep the changeable conditions on the earth in such an order that living creatures, men and beasts, may inhabit its surface. Since men are the most reasonable of creatures, and able to infer God’s invisible being from the contemplation of the world, the sun in so far forth contributes to the primary purpose of creation: without it the race of man could not be preserved or continued...The sun makes daylight, not only on our earth, but also on the other planets; and daylight is of the utmost utility to us; for by its means we can commodiously carry on those occupations which in the night‐time would either be quite impossible, or at any rate impossible without our going to the expense of artificial light. The beasts of the field can find food by day which they would not be able to find at night. Moreover we owe it to the sunlight that we are able to see everything that is on the earth’s surface, not only near by, but also at a distance, and to recognize both near and far things according to their species, which again is of manifold use to us not only in the business necessary to human life, and when we are traveling, but also for the scientific knowledge of Nature, which knowledge for the most part depends on observations made with the help of sight, and, without the sunshine, would have been impossible. If any one would rightly impress on his mind the great advantages which he derives from the sun, let him imagine himself living through only one month, and see how it would be with all his undertakings, if it were not day but night. He would then be sufficiently convinced out of his own experience, especially if he had much work to carry on in the street or in the fields...From the sun we learn to recognize when it is midday, and by knowing this point of time exactly, we can set our clocks right, on which account astronomy owes much to the sun...By help of the sun one can find the meridian...But the meridian is the basis of our sun‐dials, and generally speaking, we should have no sun‐dials if we had no sun.”
Vernünftige Gedanken von den Absichten der natürlichen Dinge, 1782, pp. 74‐84.
Or read the account of God’s beneficence in the institution of “the great variety throughout the world of men’s faces, voices, and handwriting,” given in Derham’s Physico‐theology, a book that had much vogue in the eighteenth century. “Had Man’s body,” says Dr.
Derham, “been made according to any of the Atheistical Schemes, or any other Method than that of the infinite Lord of the World, this wise Variety would never have been: but Men’s Faces would have been cast in the same, or not a very different Mould, their Organs of Speech would have sounded the same or not so great a Variety of Notes; and the same Structure of Muscles and Nerves would have given the Hand the same Direction in Writing. And in this Case, what Confusion, what Disturbance, what Mischiefs would the world eternally have lain under! No Security could have been to our persons; no Certainty, no Enjoyment of our Possessions; no Justice between Man and Man; no Distinction between Good and Bad, between Friends and Foes, between Father and Child, Husband and Wife, Male or Female; but all would have been turned topsy‐turvy, by being exposed to the Malice of the Envious and ill‐Natured, to the Fraud and Violence of Knaves and Robbers, to the Forgeries of the crafty Cheat, to the Lusts of the Effeminate and Debauched, and what not!
Our Courts of Justice can abundantly testify the dire Effects of Mistaking Men’s Faces, of counterfeiting their Hands, and forging Writings. But now as the infinitely wise Creator and Ruler hath ordered the Matter, every man’s Face can distinguish him in the Light, and his Voice in the Dark; his Hand‐writing can speak for him though absent, and be his Witness, and secure his Contracts in future Generations. A manifest as well as admirable Indication of the divine Superintendence and Management.”
A God so careful as to make provision even for the unmistakable signing of bank checks and deeds was a deity truly after the heart of eighteenth century Anglicanism.
I subjoin, omitting the capitals, Derham’s “Vindication of God by the Institution of Hills and Valleys,” and Wolff’s altogether culinary account of the institution of Water:— “The uses,” says Wolff, “which water serves in human life are plain to see and need not be described at length. Water is a universal drink of man and beasts. Even though men have made themselves drinks that are artificial, they could not do this without water. Beer is brewed of water and malt, and it is the water in it which quenches thirst. Wine is prepared from grapes, which could never have grown without the help of water; and the same is true of those drinks which in England and other places they produce from fruit...Therefore since God so planned the world that men and beasts should live upon it and find there everything required for their necessity and convenience, he also made water as one means whereby to make the earth into so excellent a dwelling. And this is all the more manifest when we consider the advantages which we obtain from this same water for the cleaning of our household utensils, of our clothing, and of other matters...When one goes into a grinding‐ mill one sees that the grindstone must always be kept wet and then one will get a still greater idea of the use of water.”
Of the hills and valleys, Derham, after praising their beauty, discourses as follows: “Some constitutions are indeed of so happy a strength, and so confirmed an health, as to be indifferent to almost any place or temperature of the air. But then others are so weakly and feeble, as not to be able to bear one, but can live comfortably in another place. With some the more subtle and finer air of the hills doth best agree, who are languishing and dying in the feculent and grosser air of great towns, or even the warmer and vaporous air of the valleys and waters. But contrariwise, others languish on the hills, and grow lusty and strong in the warmer air of the valleys.
“So that this opportunity of shifting our abode from the hills to the vales, is an admirable easement, refreshment, and great benefit to the valetudinarian, feeble part of mankind; affording those an easy and comfortable life, who would otherwise live miserably, languish, and pine away.
“To this salutary conformation of the earth we may add another great convenience of the hills, and that is affording commodious places for habitation, serving (as an eminent author wordeth it) as screens to keep off the cold and nipping blasts of the northern and easterly winds, and reflecting the benign and cherishing sunbeams, and so rendering our habitations both more comfortable and more cheerly in winter.
“Lastly, it is to the hills that the fountains owe their rise and the rivers their conveyance, and consequently those vast masses and lofty piles are not, as they are charged, such rude and useless excrescences of our ill‐formed globe; but the admirable tools of nature, contrived and ordered by the infinite Creator, to do one of its most useful works. For, was the surface of the earth even and level, and the middle parts of its islands and continents not mountainous and high as now it is, it is most certain there could be no descent for the rivers, no conveyance for the waters; but, instead of gliding along those gentle declivities which the higher lands now afford them quite down to the sea, they would stagnate and perhaps stink, and also drown large tracts of land.
“[Thus] the hills and vales, though to a peevish and weary traveler