Influence of Religion on the Mind

INFLUENCE OF RELIGION ON THE MIND.

BY SIR HUMPHRY DAVY.

[Every young man, who has been compelled through missionary some time to the study of religion, can testify that labors, to devote such study has created in him the liveliest interest. It is only such as

have not been obliged to pay attention to the subject, and therefore have failed to investigate, who consider religious topics tedious or uninterest- ing. Both classes will find comfort in the study of the following excerpt from the writings of Sir Humphry Davy, the great chemist and man of letters, and the inventor of the safety lamp. Editors.]

The doctrine of the materialists was always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull and insupportable [doctrine to me, and necessarily tending to atheism. When I had heard, with disgust, in the dissecting rooms, the plan of the physiologist, of the gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were neces- sary by its own inherent forces, and at last issuing into intellectual existence, a walk into the green fields or woods, by the banks of I saw in all rivers, brought back my feelings from nature to God. the powers of matter the instruments of the Deity. The sun- beams, the breath of the zephyr, awakening animation in forms prepared by divine intelligence to receive it, the insensate seed, the slumbering eggs which were to be vivified, appeared, like the new-born animal, works of a divine mind; I saw love as the crea- tive principle in the material world, and this love only as a divine

attribute. Then my own mind I felt connected with new sensa- tions and indefinite hopes— a thirst for immortality; the great names

of other ages and of distant nations appeared to me to be still

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living around me, and even in the fancied movements of the heroic and great, I saw, as it were, the decrees of the indestructibility of mind. These feelings, though generally considered as poetical, yet, I think, offer a sound philosophical argument in favor of the immortality of the soul. In all the habits and instincts of young animals, their feelings and movements, may be traced an intimate relation to their improved perfect state; their sports have always affinities to their modes of hunting or catching their food; and young birds, even in the nest, show marks of fondness which, when their frames are developed, become signs of actions neces- sary to the reproduction and preservation of the species. The desire of glory, of honor, of immortal fame, and of constant knowledge, so usual in young persons of well-constituted minds, cannot, I think, be other than symptoms of the infinite and pro- gressive nature of the intellect — hopes which, as they cannot be gratified here, belong to a frame of mind suited to a nobler state of existence. Religion, whether natural or revealed, has always the same beneficial influence on the mind. In youth, in health and prosperity, it awakens feelings of gratitude and sublime love, and purifies at the same time it exalts. But it is in misfortune, in sickness, in age that its effects are most truly and beneficially felt; when sub- mission in faith and humble trust in the divine will, from duties becomes pleasures, undecaying sources of consolation. Then, it creates powers which were believed to be extinct; and gives a freshness to the mind, which was supposed to have passed away forever, but which is now renovated as an immortal hope. Then it is the Pharos, guiding the wave-tossed mariner to his home —as the calm and beautiful still basins or fiords, surrounded by tran- quil groves and pastoral meadows, to the Norwegian pilot escaping

— from a heavy storm in the North Sea or as the green and dewy spot, gushing with fountains, to the exhausted and thirsty traveler in the midst of the desert. Its influence outlives all earthly enjoyments and becomes stronger as the organs decay and the frame dissolves. It appears as that evening-star of light in the horizon of life, which we are sure, is to become, in another season, a morning star; and it throws its radiance through the gloom and shadow of death.