Discourses on All the Principal Branches of Natural Religion and Social Virtue Vol. 1 (1749)

Volume 1 of 2. It is generally allowed to be the peculiar felicity and glory of mankind that they are capable of the knowledge of God; a knowledge that is the most grand and enlarging, the most sublime and ennobling, the most delightful and transporting, the most instructive and improving of all others; since the object of it is the center of all perfection and the source of all good. It is this that sets us at the head of the visible creation, and by which we are chiefly distinguished from the inferior orders of living creatures: there being no one faculty in the world which we now inhabit, besides the human understanding, that is adapted, and by its transcendent excellence and singular capacities devoted, and, as it were, consecrated to this most exalted and useful knowledge. Due to the age and scarcity of the original we reproduced, some pages may be spotty, faded or difficult to read. Written in Old English.