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The perusal of the written instructions, , with a determination to be guided by them, meliorates the heart and affections, pacifies the restlessness of our inquisitive minds, and produces corresponding changes in our behaviour and conduct. In one word, it reduces the chaos of the human mind to order. Every mind not so reduced, is literally in a disordered state, unfit for its own government, bordering upon disease, and tending to produce corresponding bodily disturbance.
In the moral, as in the physical, government of the universe, the benevolent Maker wills perfect order. A presumptuous disobedience of his instructions, is as much a contravention of his goodness, as hurling, if it were possible, a planet from its orbit. An habitual disobedience induces moral insanity, unfits a man for intercourse with his fellow creatures, and directly and indirectly tends to the impairment of health. The following powerful description of the wretched state of mind of an irreligious man of pleasure, is not over-drawn. " He is (as Aristotle expresses it) at variance with himself. He is neither brute enough to enjoy his appetites, nor man enough to govern them. He knows and feels that what he pursues, is not his true good; his reflexion shewing him only that misery which his habitual sloth and ignorance will not suffer him to remedy. At lengthy being grown odious to himself and abhorring his own company, he runs into every idle assembly, not from the hopes of pleasure, but merely to respite the pains of his own mind. Listless and uneasy at the present, he has no delight in reflecting on what is past, or in the prospect of anything to come. This
