Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: STUDY FOURTH. Replies To The Objections Against Providence. Such are the principal objections raised against a Providence, which no one will accuse me of having stated too. feebly. Did these murmurings proceed from some wretched mariner, or some oppressed peasant, my astonishment would be less: but it is amidst the luxury of Greece and Rome, in the bosom of the wealth of Indostan, of the pomp of Persia, of the voluptuousness of China, of the overflowing abundance of European capitals, that men first started up who dared to deny the existence of a Deity. On the contrary, the houseless Tartars; the savages of America, continually pressed with famine ; the Negroes, without foresight, and without a police ; the inhabitants of the rude climates of the north, such as the Laplanders, the Greenlanders, the Esquimaux, see gods every where, even in a flint, in a pebble. In all countries the poor rise early, labour the ground, live in the open air, and in the fields. They believe, from a sentiment natural to weak minds, that the objects of their religious worship will be at their disposal in proportion as they are within their reach. Hence it is that the devotions of the common people, in every country, are presented in the fields, and have natural objects for their centre. It always attracts the religion of the peasantry. A hermitage on the side of a mountain, a chapel at the source of a stream, an image of the Virgin in wood, niched in the trunk of an oak, have, to them, a much more powerful attraction than the gilded altars of our cathedrals. The principal religious acts of the people in Turkey, Persia, the Indies, and China, are pilgrimages in the fields. The rich, on the contrary, prevented in all their wants and wishes by men, no longer look up to God for any thing. Their w...