Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Bishop Philip N. Shuttleworth

Whilst all the surrounding world lay immersed in the profoundest moral darkness; whilst Egypt, which has been celebrated as the instructress of mankind, lay grovelling before her oxen, her birds, her reptiles, and her pot-herbs; whilst Grecian and Roman altars, even at a moment when heathen refinement was at its highest, were smoking before the emblems of the grossest appetites and of the rankest intemperance;—there in an obscure corner of the globe, overlooked and despised by the surrounding nations, was to be seen the astonishing spectacle of one small people, with no literature but their own sacred books, no arts but those derived from a most limited and unwilling intercourse with their neighbours, celebrating, as they had done for ages, the praises of the great unseen immaterial Creator of the universe, in sentiments the justness and sublimity of which poetry in her highest flights has never to this day been able to equal, nor philosophy in her utmost pride of discovery to improve.

Life’s evening, we may rest assured, will take its character from the day which has preceded it; and if we would close our career in the comfort of religious hope, we must prepare for it by early and continuous religious habit.