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Those who admitted the possibility of other forms and creeds were either Atheists or, what was deemed worse than Atheists, Papists, because Papists were assumed to be traitors also, and desirous of selling the country to Spain. An undevout man in that land and at that epoch was an almost unknown phenomenon. Religion was as much a recognized necessity of existence as food or drink.
For surely no one needs to be told that this is not the conception of the miracle which has existed in the minds of the devout, and equally of the undevout, from the beginning of thought until the present day.
Truly said the wise man "An undevout astronomer is mad."
"Physician art thou? one all eyes, Philosopher! a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother's grave?" This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one, "An undevout astronomer is mad." A man's being endowed with rare mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.
Larry was undevout, careless, thinking little of spiritual things, so little, that he had scarcely troubled himself either to question or to accept what he had been taught, but he was quick to respond to emotion of any kind; now he listened, with an unaccustomed reverence, to Barty's voice, brokenly whispering the prayers of his Church.
How much to be pitied are the gifted esoterics who, in such a quest, vainly point their telescopes into the star-thronged firmament, and plunge their reasoning powers into the abyss of consciousness and such-like mysteries! "An undevout astronomer is mad!"
"Sermons in stone" abound at every turn; and if, as the poet has affirmed, "An undevout astronomer is mad," with still more truth can it be said that those are blind who in this wonderful environment look not "through Nature up to Nature's God."
"One is apt to think, at first view, that St. Jerome was right in saying, "'She who comes in glittering vest To mourn her frailty, still is frail. But St. Jerome was in the wrong, after all; for a flashy, unsuitable attire in church is not always a mark of an undevout or entirely worldly mind; it is simply a mark of a raw, uncultivated taste.
Neither do I mean, that mere intellectual study would make them clear to the careless or the undevout; but, supposing us to seek honestly to know God's will, and to pray devoutly for his help to guide us to it, then our study is not vain nor uncertain; the mind of the Scriptures may be discovered; we may distinguish plainly between what is clear, and what is not clear; and what is not clear will be found far less in amount, and infinitely less in importance, than what is clear.
It is an honor to man, put upon him from above, as one of the gratuitous dignities of his being. "An undevout astronomer is mad," said one who had opened his mind to a broad grasp of the wonders which this upper heaven holds in its bosom.
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