One crystal night, in 1756, twenty years before the Declaration of Independence, he stood beneath a sky full of stars, “thrown into a kind of transport.” He knew such wonders of the heavens to be the gifts of God, he wrote, but greatest of all was the gift of an inquiring mind. But all the provisions that He has [made] for the gratification of our senses . . . are much inferior to the provision, the wonderful provision, that He has made for the gratification of our nobler powers of intelligence and reason. He has given us reason to find out the truth, and the real design and true end of our
...more
