a step from their usual haunts, every spot on which they tread is pregnant with some new danger;-the earth seems to them a continued precipice. The blind, says a very excellent writer, who had, himself, never enjoyed the blessing of sight; the blind, not only may be, but actually are, during a considerable period, apprehensive of danger in every motion, towards any place from whence their contracted powers of perception give them no intelligence. All the various modes of delicate proportion; all the beautiful varieties of lights and colours; whether exhibited in the works of nature, or of art; are to them irretrievably lost;-dependant for every thing, except mere subsistence, on the good offices of others; obnoxious to injury from every point, which they are neither capacitated to receive, nor qualified to resist, they are, during the present state of being, rather prisoners at large, than citizens of nature. To estimate the advantages of sight, or of any other blessing coeval with life, we should call in the force of contrast, and consider what the condition of man would have been, had it pleased God to create him without it. Devoid of sight, man would acquire his knowledge of the properties of bodies, slowly, singly, and with extreme uncertainty;—the sluggish current of his ideas would render him unfit for enterprize, his submission to every danger passive, or his opposition fruitless, and confused;some faint intelligence he would derive from sound; but he could receive few accurate notions from any greater distance than he could reach. From all that knowledge of bodies which we derive from an acquaintance with their affinities to light; and which, to us, are the signs of vigour and decay, salubrity, and harm; youth and age; hatred and love; he would be eternally precluded; his mind must necessarily be exercised upon diminutive objects; because, though a long continued series of touches would give him an accurate notion of each part touched, he could not, from such disconnected intelligence, collect the notion of a single individual mass. The works of. God thus broken into baubles, and given to him bit by bit, what can this truncated, mutilated being know of the wisdom and power of his Creator?-Open to him now the visible world; he penetrates into distant space;―he sees, at one glance, millions of objects;-he views the breadth, and depth, and altitude of things;-he perceives, there is a God among the aged streams; and the perpetual mountains, and the everlasting hills. My brethren, as no other topic, worthy of your attention, presses upon me, I conclude, with recommending most earnestly, these distressed objects to your notice; and I remind you how merciful our blessed Saviour was wont to shew himself to their afflictions. Blind Bartimeus sat by the way-side begging; and, as the crowd passed by, he cried, with a loud voice, "Thou son of David have mercy on me." Jesus stopped the multitude; and, before them all, restored him to his sight. The first thing that he saw, who never saw before, was the Son of God. These blind persons, like Bartimeus, will never see, till they behold their Redeemer on the last day; not as he then was, in his earthly shape, but girded by all the host of heaven;-the judge of nations; |