Immortal
spirits are compelled to fix all their thinking and scheming, and
all their efforts, on the soil which bears them nourishment. It often
comes to pass as yet, that when the laborer has ended, and promises
himself, for his pains, the continuance of his own existence and of
those pains, then hostile elements destroy in a moment what he had
been slowly and carefully preparing for years, and delivers up the
industrious painstaking man, without any fault of his own, to
hunger and misery. It often comes to pass as yet, that inundations,
storm-winds, volcanoes, desolate whole countries, and mingle works
which bear the impress of a rational mind, as well as their authors,
with the wild chaos of death and destruction. Diseases still hurry men
into a premature grave, men in the bloom of their powers, and children
whose existence passes away without fruit or result. The pestilence
still stalks through blooming states, leaves the few who escape
it bereaved and alone, deprived of the accustomed aid of their
companions, and does all in its power to give back to the wilderness
the land which the industry of man had already conquered for its own.
So it is, but so it cannot surely have been intended always to remain.
No work which bears the impress of reason, and which was undertaken
for the purpose of extending the dominion of reason, can be utterly
lost in the progress of the times.
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