Since, then, every creature is a benefit from God, how can we live surrounded by these proofs of His love, and yet never think of Him? If wearied and hungry you seated yourself at the foot of a tower, and a beneficent creature from above sent you food and refreshment, could you forbear raising your eyes to your kind benefactor? Yet God continually sends down upon you blessings of every kind. Find me, I pray you, but one thing which does not come from God, which does not happen by His special Providence. Why is it, then, that you never raise your eyes to this indefatigable and generous Benefactor? Ah! we have divested ourselves of our own nature, so to speak, and have fallen into worse than brute insensibility. I blush, in truth, to say what we resemble in this particular, but it is good for man to hear it. We are like a herd of swine feeding under an oak. While their keeper is showering down acorns, they greedily devour them, grunting and quarrelling with one another, yet never raising their eyes to the master who is feeding them. Oh! brute-like ingratitude of the children of Adam! We have received the light of reason, and an upright form. Our head is directed to heaven, not to earth, which ought to teach us to raise the eyes of our soul to the abode of our Benefactor.
Would that irrational creatures did not excel us in this duty! But the law of gratitude, so dear to God, is so deeply impressed on all creatures that we find this uoble sentiment even in the most savage beasts. What nature is more savage than that of a lion? Yet Appian, a
