The Works of Richard Bentley, D D

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: would do us little service; it would be terminated by neighbouring hills and woods; or, in the largest and evenest plain, by the very convexity of the earth; unless we could always inhabit the tops of mountains and cliffs, or had wings too to fly aloft, when we had a mind to take a prospect. And if mankind...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: would do us little service; it would be terminated by neighbouring hills and woods; or, in the largest and evenest plain, by the very convexity of the earth; unless we could always inhabit the tops of mountains and cliffs, or had wings too to fly aloft, when we had a mind to take a prospect. And if mankind had had wings (as perhaps some extravagant Atheist may think us deficient in that), all the world must have consented to clip them; or else human race had been extinct before this time, nothing, upon that supposition, being safe from murder and rapine. Or, if the eyef were so acute as to rival the finest microscopes, and to discern the smallest hair upon the leg of a gnat, it would be a curse, and not a blessing to us; it would make all things appear rugged and deformed; the most finely polished crystal would be unevenand rough; the sight of our own selves would affright us; the smoothest skin would be beset all over with ragged scales and bristly hairs; and besides, we could not see at one view above what is now the space of an inch, and it would take a considerable time to survey the then mountainous bulk of our own bodies. Such a faculty of sight, so disproportioned to our other senses and to the objects about us, would be very little better than blindness itself. And again, God hath furnished us with invention and industry, so that by optical glasses we can more than supply that imaginary defect of our own eyes, and discover more remote and minute bodies with that assistance, than perhaps the most whimsical Atheist would desire to do without it. So likewise if our sense of hearing were exalted proportionallyf to the former, what a miserable condition would mankind be in What whisper could be low enough, but many would overhear it ? What affairs, that most require it, cou...