A meditation on the Psalms, and on the evidence for the existence of God that is plain for every eye to see.
In The Spectator for Saturday August 16th, 1712, Joseph Addison argued for the great moral benefits of Christian belief while utterly rejecting any attempt to enforce it on the unwilling. A week later, he published a follow-up on the various ways to strengthen faith. Among them he recommended regular divine worship, an upright life, and retreats to the countryside to contemplate the works of God’s hands. He ended with these verses.
Joseph Addison gives thanks to God for caring for him body and soul, from the cradle to the grave.
In The Spectator for Saturday August 9th, 1712, Joseph Addison reflected on the virtue of gratitude towards God, who “does not only confer upon us those bounties, which proceed more immediately from his hand, but even those benefits which are conveyed to us by others.” Gratitude was one area, he said, where the poets of the Old Testament far surpassed the poets of classical Greece and Rome, because they had a deity more worthy of it; and he closed with his own attempt.