God in daily thought and feeling, for he loves and worships himself. "These are my talents!" he says to himself; "behold my power of thought, and feeling, and fancy, and language; I ask none to take care of me—I can take care of myself, and carve out my own fortune, and create my own destiny!" How can there be any real acknowledgment of God in heart (whatever may be the confession of the lips,) with one who is thus puffed up with pride and self-conceit and self-dependence? It is only from the altar of a humble heart, that the flame of true worship ascends to Heaven.
Here, then, we see the grand error, by falling into which the human understanding led man on to pride, self-conceit, self-love, denial of God, and hence into all evils,—namely, the taking for a reality the appearance that he lived of himself, that his faculties, abilities, feelings, and energies, were all his own and self-derived. This appearance, thought of, dwelt upon again and again, and at length confirmed in the mind into a belief, produced the deepest spirit of self-adulation and self-love, whence sprung all evil.
Now, we may observe, that this result was an effect of man's possessing a rational or thinking faculty, a power of reflection and self-observation; in the exercise of which faculty, being liable to form erroneous judgments and conclusions, mistaking appearances for realities, he did, in this case, fall into a fatal error, which, in course of time and by degrees, produced dire evil. We, may thus perceive that the possibility of evil was necessarily attached to man's being endowed with the faculty of reason and observation,—while the brute animals, not possessing this faculty, could not lead them-
