ends are to be brought about in the struggles of party -among the crooked ways and crooked visions of narrow-minded men-amidst moral fanatics and material fanatics, and men who are too cold-hearted and selfish to be fanatical in any thing is a question far too hard for this Preface. But there is, we have good hope, a power in high principle and truth that will work its way; and an overruling Providence that knows how to bring much good even out of much evil; and guided by this good hope we heartily apply the noble words of Bacon, not merely to the spread of knowledge among those who are called fortune's favourites or men of high station, or among men of academic leisure, but to the diffusion of sound learning among all the members of the state of whatsoever condition, whether high or low.-"Let no man, upon a weak conceit of sobriety or an ill-applied moderation, think or maintain that a man can search too far, or be too well studied in the book of God's word or in the book of God's works-divinity or philosophy: but rather let men endeavour an endless progress or proficience in both only let men beware that they apply both to charity, and not to swelling; to use, and not to ostentation; and again, that they do not unwisely mingle or confound these learnings together."

§ 9.

Conditions of the Mind that have led men to deny a Personal Creator-Atheism and PantheismIllustrations of the doctrine of Final Causes-Galvanic and Phrenological Hypotheses, Mechanical Inventions, &c.

It may perhaps be well to consider, through a few pages, under what conditions of the understanding men have been led to deny the evidence of a great personal, creative, and sustaining Power through the whole world of nature.

Atheism is at least consistent with itself. If a man believe not in God, he cannot believe in a Creator; but I stop not to argue with an avowed Atheist. I pause only by the way, to express my conviction that there is a proof (sometimes called à priori) of the being of a God, derived from the mind of man and the right exercise of its inner powers, which no one can gainsay without renouncing his reason, and its supreme authority in judging of truth and falsehood: and if this proof be not accepted, or be little suited to our habits. of thought, there is assuredly a proof à posteriori, based on our experience of what passes within ourselves, and on our observation of what is external to us, that brings, or ought to bring, conviction irresistible to the human heart. But this question has been discussed at sufficient length at the beginning of this Preface and in the following Discourse, and I must not dwell on it here.

There is another form of unbelief, very nearly allied

to Atheism, though passing under the less odious name of Pantheism. True Theism demands a personal preordaining Power. It demands a cause for all the phenomena of the universe, whether of mind or matter: it requires, in one word, a personal, intelligent God and Creator. Pantheism will perhaps allow all we understand in our first conceptions of mind and matter. It will sometimes tell us, and in goodly language, of the material and moral adaptations of the universe-of its beauties, its harmonies, and its laws. But it denies the personality of the Godhead. It is not, on this scheme, true that God created all nature; but that all nature is God; and the word God becomes no longer a personal term defining our conception of a Creator and Ruler over the world; but an abstract collective term to define and comprehend all the phenomena of the universe. In its grosser, and perhaps most common type, Pantheism deifies the dead elements, and advances not one single step beyond sensual phenomena. Man is the highest type of being-nothing but matter at its highest point of development. Material and moral are to be comprehended under one category. All within him and all without him is sensual; and his loftiest conceptions and highest abstractions are but marks of an inner and mechanical creative power. His ideas of external nature may have some archetype in the world without; but his noblest conceptions are but abortive dreams without substance or reality. has no knowledge of Cause beyond that which is suggested to him sensually by the mere sequence of events

He

within his own narrow material experience and his higher conceptions of eternity, of infinity, and First Cause, are no reflexions of the being and attributes of a God; but are the material, and, it may be, the diseased creations of his own organic system. And as

his organic structure, and all the powers residing therein, have sprung out of the combinations of dead material elements by progressive development; so out of this material development may spring something higher still and hence (for something like this I have read of among the crazy dreams of a gross material Pantheism) though God did not create nature, yet nature may in the end evolve a personal God, foreshadowed now in nature's womb by god-like man!

But there is an opposite philosophical creed which has been called ideal. It denies the very existence of external material nature, and, in a certain sense, may be said to spiritualize the universe. This strange form

of metaphysical belief has indeed been adopted by some good religious men. But whatever is contrary

to nature must be false; and the almost inevitable fruit of such a creed is universal scepticism; or a form of ideal Pantheism, in which the material world is almost shut out from thought, and the mind of man is deified. Under such a creed, men have been taught that all religion derived from any authority external to themselves is no better than a dream-that all forms of belief are but types of the development of the mind of man, evolved by himself out of himself, and not given to him by his Maker as a rule of life. And if we take for

granted the fundamental truth of the ideal scheme, this conclusion seems inevitable: for external teaching can only come to the mind through the senses; and if we begin by denying the evidence of sense, how can we admit the authority of any form of external teaching?

Lastly, there is one oriental form of Pantheism, still, I believe, held by many millions of our fellowcreatures, which makes God the only true personal existence, of which all the complicated phenomena of mind and matter are but the simple attributes. In this creed man has no true enduring personality; absorption into the substance of the Godhead is the end of all religion, and annihilation is the supreme good. Buddhism absorbs man into the Godhead, and thereby destroys all right conception of Creation and Creator. Pantheism, in one form of its extravagance, seems to absorb God into man; and, in all its forms, it confounds the God of nature with the natural world which is the work of his hands.

It is not my object to describe at any length the religious aberrations of the human mind. I have no capacity for such a task; but I may remark, by the way, how very little there is of novelty in many of the modern metaphysical forms of unbelief. Some of our modern pantheistic Rationalists have deserted the inductive onward track of truth and reason, and have gone back into the dreary labyrinths of ancient folly. In their zeal to uproot what we think the sure foundations of our religion, they have dared to mythicise the plain and