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Updated: May 13, 2025
God desires to teach us, by the pains and heartaches of an undevout life, by disappointments, foiled plans, wrecked hopes, inner poverty, the difference between His service and that of 'the kingdoms of the countries, if haply He may not be forced to let the full flood of fatal results overwhelm us.
What more fit to make a man patient, humble, reverent, than being stopped short, as every man of science is, after each half-dozen steps, by some tremendous riddle which he cannot explain which he may have to wait years to get explained which as far as he can see will never be explained at all? The poet says: "An undevout astronomer is mad," and he says truth.
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.
Mitchell was very apt, while observing the heavens in the evening, to quote from one or the other of these poets, or from the Bible. "An undevout astronomer is mad" was one of his favorite quotations. Among the poems which Maria learned in her childhood, and which was repeatedly upon her lips all through her life, was, "The spacious firmament on high."
Knowledge and intellectual training may work evil in an undevout mind, but when consecrated to the service of Christ, learning becomes the handmaid of piety. The strength and power of the Christian Church of to-day are attributable in no small degree to the Christian colleges, that have not only encouraged mental training, but have fostered refinement and humble evangelical piety.
But he will be neither worse nor better, than the numerous believers, who, notwithstanding Religion and its sublime precepts, follow a conduct which Religion condemns. Is a credulous assassin less to be feared, than an assassin who believes nothing? Is a very devout tyrant less tyrannical than an undevout tyrant? Nothing is more uncommon, than to see men consistent.
The result, so far as concerts the workman's life of faith, is a proclivity to undevout scepticism.
He was thorough in his investigation, sparing neither labor nor pains to get at the truth. It may well enough be true that the designedly untruthful historian, like the undevout astronomer, is an anomaly, for inaccuracy comes not from purpose, but from neglect. Now Gardiner went to the bottom of things, and was not satisfied until he had compassed all the material within his reach.
It has been, said that "an undevout astronomer is mad;" and if Astronomy, of all the sciences, be the one most calculated to gratify the intellect, surely it is the one which should most vividly awaken the religious sentiment.
"The undevout astronomer is mad," said eighteenth-century deism: to-day we are more apt to think that the uncritical astronomer is dense. There is a sort of colossal stupidity about the stars in their courses that overpowers and disquiets us.
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