difficulties that meet him, at every step in the search of truth.—And from these he turns into what appears the flowery, and more easy paths of error and falsehood, allured and deceived by their more attractive forms. Or, in the second place, he delegates his liberty to others, and along with that liberty, all the duties, responsibilities, and rights, which it involves, to receive, in return, whatever his delegates may see fit to give him, which he discovers too late to remedy, are dungeons, and chains, vassalage, and its consequnt degradation.
Or, in the third place, mistaking, through ignorance, error for truth, folly for wisdom, evil for good, and the vain speculations of his pride for the dictates of reason; under the combined influence of all these, he pursues phantoms and shadows, that in their mazy and erratic dance, lead him on farther from God, truth and light, and into deeper darkness, greater folly, and wider and wilder wastes of ruin; each successive stage of his downward progress becoming more hopeless, because more helpless.
And, in such aspects, humiliating and sad, has the condition of this world ever appeared; and, in such aspects does it, to a great extent, still exist. And, disasterous and humiliating as the results are, which we have briefly traced from their causes, and laid before you; and wide, deep and incurable, as appear the evils that rest upon it; in tracing them back to their cause, they will carry us to these very causes we have already assigned—man’s failure to exercise the liberty, his God bestowed upon him, and his failure to meet these duties, and responsibilities, which that liberty involves and imposes upon all its subjects. And, as certainly as truth is rejected, in any, and all its varied departments, just so certainly, will ruin and degradation follow; and man, in his descending progress, will dig for himself, a fouler and a lower deep in the sink of moral and intellectual degradation, to which he voluntarily consigns himself, when he abandons truth, and casts it away from him, with all its duties, responsibilities and claims.
And such has been, and to a great extent, such still is the conduct, and history of man. And the result of all this has been, just what are declared by the pen of inspiration—“that darkness has covered the earth, and gross darkness the people”—and the corners of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty; but truth still existed—but existed like heat and electricity, in a latent and inactive state, under this superincumbent mass of clouds, and thick darkness, thrown overs the world, as a universal funeral pall, by error and ignorance, falsehood and superstition; a darkness so thick, that it could be felt, yea, and was, and is more terrible felt still, on many an ill-fated land, than that tangible darkness that once brooded over the land of Egypt. Were it not, that truth is of God, and partakes of his essential nature and being, it must have perished long ere now, assailed as it was, by all the powers of
