Oh! father, you don't know how much good the Bible can
do, for you've never tried it. Now, I'll read a chapter and it
will soften your heart as it softened the hearts of the Hurons."
While poor Hetty had so much reverence for, and faith in, the
virtues of the Bible, her intellect was too shallow to enable her
fully to appreciate its beauties, or to fathom its profound and
sometimes mysterious wisdom. That instinctive sense of right which
appeared to shield her from the commission of wrong, and even cast
a mantle of moral loveliness and truth around her character, could
not penetrate abstrusities, or trace the nice affinities between
cause and effect, beyond their more obvious and indisputable
connection, though she seldom failed to see all the latter, and
to defer to all their just consequences. In a word, she was one
of those who feel and act correctly without being able to give a
logical reason for it, even admitting revelation as her authority.
Her selections from the Bible, therefore, were commonly distinguished
by the simplicity of her own mind, and were oftener marked for
containing images of known and palpable things than for any of the
higher cast of moral truths with which the pages of that wonderful
book abound - wonderful, and unequalled, even without referring to
its divine origin, as a work replete with the profoundest philosophy,
expressed in the noblest language.
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