Yet the second stanza is lovely beyond a doubt; and the whole is most
artistic, although after a tame fashion. Whether indeed the heavenly
bodies _teach_ what he says, or whether we should read divinity worthy of
the name in them at all, without the human revelation which healed men, I
doubt much. That divinity is there--_Yes_; that we could read it there
without having seen the face of the Son of Man first, I think--_No_. I do
not therefore dare imagine that no revelation dimly leading towards such
result glimmered in the hearts of God's chosen amongst Jews and Gentiles
before he came. What I say is, that power and order, although of God, and
preparing the way for him, are not his revealers unto men. No doubt King
David compares the perfection of God's law to the glory of the heavens,
but he did not learn that perfection from the heavens, but from the law
itself, revealed in his own heart through the life-teaching of God. When
he had learned it he saw that the heavens were like it.
To unveil God, only manhood like our own will serve. And he has taken the
form of man that he might reveal the manhood in him from awful eternity.
CHAPTER XIX.
THE PLAIN.
But Addison's tameness is wonderfully lovely beside the fervours of a man
of honoured name,--Dr. Isaac Watts, born in 1674.
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