But if you wish God to be your guide and your friend, you must conform to his pleasure.  Certainly you can not wonder that the infinitely Wise should prefer His own wisdom to yours, and that he should choose for His children their allotments, rather than leave them to choose for themselves.  That part of His pleasure, which you are to obey, is all summed up in the single word duty, and it is perfectly disclosed in the Scriptures.  The whole scheme is so formed as to be plain, easy, profitable, and delightful; profitable in hand, delightful in the possession.  Every part and precept of the whole is calculated for this end, and will make you only wise, good, and happy.

Life has been often styled an ocean, and our progress through it a voyage.  The ocean is tempestuous and billowy, overspread by a cloudy sky, and fraught beneath with shelves and quicksands.  The voyage is eventful beyond comprehension, and at the same time full of uncertainty, and replete with danger.  Every adventurer needs to be well prepared for whatever may befall him, and well secured against the manifold hazards of losing his course, sinking in the abyss, or of being wrecked against the shore.

These evils have all existed at all times.  The present, and that part of the past which is known to you by experience, has seen them multiplied beyond example.  It has seen the ancient and acknowledged standards of thinking violently thrown down.  Religion, morals, government, and the estimate formed by man of crimes and virtues, and of all the means of usefulness and enjoyment, have been questioned, attacked, and in various places, and with respect to millions of the human race, finally overthrown.  A licentiousness of opinion and conduct, daring, outrageous, and rending asunder every bond formed by God or man, has taken place of former good sense and sound morals, and has long threatened the destruction of human good.  Industry, cunning, and fraud have toiled with unrivaled exertions to convert man into a savage and the world into a desert.  A wretched and hypocritical philanthropy, also, not less mischievous, has stalked forth as the companion of these ravages:  a philanthropy born in a dream, bred in a hovel, and living only in professions.  This guardian genius of human interests, this friend of human rights, this redresser of human wrongs, is yet without a heart to feel, and without a hand to bless.  But she is well furnished with lungs, with eyes, and a tongue.  She can talk, and sigh, and weep at pleasure, but can neither pity nor give.  The objects of her attachment are either knaves and villains at home, or unknown sufferers beyond her reach abroad.  To the former, she ministers the sword and the dagger, that they may fight their way into place, and power, and profit.  At the latter she only looks through a telescope of fancy, as an astronomer searches for stars invisible to the eye.  To every real object of charity within her reach she complacently says, “Be thou warmed, and be thou filled; depart in peace.”