Observations placeholder
William Howitt - Happier far are those who are too humble for conceit and feel the guidance of angel-fingers
Identifier
026988
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
William Howitt (18 December 1792 – 3 March 1879), was a prolific English writer on history and other subjects. William and his wife Mary also owned a school still used today; Howitt Primary School in Heanor, Derbyshire.
Howitt was born at Heanor, Derbyshire. His parents were Quakers, and he was educated at the Friends public school at Ackworth, Yorkshire. His younger brothers were Richard and Godrey whom he helped tutor. In 1814 he published a poem on the Influence of Nature and Poetry on National Spirit. He married, in 1821, Mary Botham, who like himself was a Quaker and a poet. William and Mary Howitt collaborated throughout a long literary career, the first of their joint productions being The Forest Minstrels and other Poems (1821).
A description of the experience
From Matter to Spirit – The Result of Ten Years Experience in Spirit Manifestation – Sophia Elizabeth De Morgan
The following through an educated mind is on the subject of influx in the natural world. It is written through the hand of Wm. Howitt, whose uninfluenced works need no eulogium from me.
He who bestows intelligence, who-ever and anon endows the earth with a new man or a new discovery, breathing intimations of a new dawn, opening vistas into new regions of capability, and thus for ever adding to the mass of human achievement and scientific affluence, yet taking no credit for it, but allowing his children to adorn themselves in his own splendours and his own honours; shall he stint his gifts according to the laws of the world's wisdom?
Who has set bounds to his power or his will, to his munificence, or the modes of his operation?
Who has issued laws of reason, and rules of logic which shall bind Him?
His paths are still higher than the clouds, or the atmosphere of earth; ay, far beyond the stretch of the subtlest wit's imagination; and as he astonished, and even scandalised the world of old by walking with the untaught, and abiding with the little ones of the earth, so now, and in many a coming age, his footsteps will be seen amid the wilderness of strange things, and his profoundest plans shall appear but folly to the glow-worm greatness of proud dust………………………..
'So fail the proud in despising the treasure-chambers of humility, forgetting that their own birth is from the earth, the common matrix of the diamond, the ruby, the gold widely worshipped, the lofty priest, the infinite beauty and poetry of the flower-kingdom, and all the mineral and chemic substances with which physical science works proudly yet darkly, but on its useful way by hands whose touch it feels not.
Happier far are those who are too humble for conceit-the dazzled darkness of men erring at summer-noon - but feel the guidance of angel-fingers, and fear no misleading in the garden of God.