Ebook New Cyclopædia of Prose Illustrations, Adapted to Christian Teaching

Eternal Father, the Watchman of Israel, neither slumbereth nor sleepeth, you will not wonder that, by a law as benign as it is authoritative, God has impressed activity upon his favorite creature, man, and has provided that his shall not be a zoophite existence, clinging in blind helplessness as a parasite to its guardian rock, but a life beautiful and holy, a life of quickened pulses, and an activity and an energy of which insensate matter knows not; and finding in the rapturous doing of every-day life its very soul and essence of joy. There is a necessity in man, then, for activity. Act he must and will; and it is the province of religion to direct and control this tendency, so that his doing may be according to that which is right.