of Christian truth was, in ancient times, obscured by some bad teachers, who deformed its surface by an incrustation of oriental philosophy. And it is true, in these days, that our belief in the being of a God, the best hopes that are bound up among the elements of our moral nature, and the plain facts of historical evidence, are all to be swallowed up, disintegrated, re-digested, and sent out anew, as a kind of living spawn upon which ideal Pantheism is to incubate, and hatch whatsoever monstrous forms it pleases. There can be no social or practical wisdom among men while schemes and fantastical visions of this kind have any currency among them. In their license of speculation, and in their dogmatic contempt for the more sober conclusions of inductive reason, as well as for revealed religion, they may boast their intellectual liberty; but we may safely predict that they will never build any lasting monuments of social wisdom, or be the true friends of civil freedom. They may call themselves philosophers; but by casting away the lessons of experience they have practically put themselves back into a state both of moral and social childhood.

One set of opinions I have endeavoured to keep steadily in view through the long discussions of this Preface. I have contended, that all sound philosophy begins by the inductive method, and that we can never sever it, with safety, from its logical and chronological history that we have a proof of the being of a personal God involved in the elements of our nature— that the exercise of a Creative power in nature is not

incredible, but certain-that the exercise of a miraculous power is not, therefore, incredible-that we have a grand cumulative historical evidence for the truth of revealed religion-that we have a great additional internal evidence from its lessons of self-denial and its pure morality-and that we have also a grand external evidence for its truth derived from the history of its propagation, and from its effects on the civil progress of mankind.

Analogy supplies us with another important argument for the truth of revealed religion, which ought, properly, to have appeared in an earlier part of this section but it is so distinct from all other arguments, and at the same time so important, that I have removed it from what might be thought its more natural place, and added it as a supplement to the preceding remarks on Christian Evidences: and I wish the reader still to bear in mind, that I pretend not here to give a treatise on Christian Evidences, but only a series of short hints, thrown out in sincerity and good-will, for the student's guidance; and it matters little in what order they are put before him, if they be only fitted to give a true aim to the conduct of his mind, in the study of the gravest questions that can ever be submitted to him, and on the right determination of which will depend a great portion of his social happiness, and all the reasonable hopes he can ever have of living hereafter in his Maker's presence.

Arguments from Analogy.

The Deist believes in a God of Nature. The Christian believes in the same God, and admits the first principles of the Deist; but he also believes that God is the author of Revelation. If this be true, we may look for some analogy between God's dealings with man in the world of Nature, and his dealings with man in the system of religion offered to our belief; for experience tells us that all Nature, so far as we comprehend it, is on a consistent plan. Every analogy of this kind, fairly made out, is a positive argument for the truth of our religion, and may help to win over the Deist to the side of Christian truth. Again, there are formidable difficulties in the way of our full acceptance of Christianity as a system of belief and a rule of life. No one pretends to deny this. But if it can be shewn by analogy, that the same difficulties present themselves in the religion of Nature, then may we confirm the wavering Christian; for these very difficulties supply him with an analogical argument in favour of his religion. And by the same argument we may perhaps convince the Deist; for he cannot, as a consistent Deist, rest content among great and unresolved difficulties; and he must either come over to the Christian side, or seek his refuge in an extinction of all inquiry, or in downright Atheism. But we have little to fear from a passive philosophical scepticism; and we have nothing to fear from Atheism, for it is abhorrent to the nature of It can exist, as a negative form of belief, only in

man.

the mind of one who is in a state of moral mutilation; and can never (except indeed under some masked form of Pantheism) be dangerous to the public faith. Such, in a few words, seems to be Butler's argument in his great work on The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed.

His argument is perhaps difficult to grasp, from the severe and unimaginative, but truth-loving spirit in which he has placed it before the reader; and I have heard some very able men declare that they had endeavoured, in vain, to feel the force of it. Let me then do my best to clear the way, and (without pretending to follow the order of his reasoning, or to give his exact illustrations) to sketch in a few sentences the nature of his argument; in no fond hope of satisfying the reader, but in the honest hope of leading him to a patient study of Butler's work.

(1) Revealed religion tells us of the unity of the Godhead. Nature proclaims the same truth: but at the time our religion was published for the acceptance of mankind, this great truth was not commonly believed and well understood even by learned heathens.

(2) Revelation tells us that God created the heaven and the earth-that man was the last created of living beings-and that God then rested from His labours. Many learned heathens held that the order of nature, animate as well as inanimate, had been from eternity. Modern science gives us the truest elements of the Religion of Nature, and proves that the order of Nature has not been eternal, and that man is a creature

Science also tells us, that creative power in Nature

of the last and latest period. since the appearance of man, appears to have been at rest. That there are difficulties in the interpretation of the opening words of the Book of Genesis, we do not deny. To bring them into a literal accordance with all the phenomena in the past history of Nature would imply, on our part, a perfect knowledge of the past history of Nature; but such a knowledge we have not. The progress of science may clear up these difficulties, and the discussion of them has no fit place here; for the argument from analogy can only be drawn from facts that are clear and well established. We may however very safely go one step farther. There appear to have been many successive acts of creation (whether they come within the meaning of the opening words of the Bible, I do not here inquire), all on one great organic plan; and, so far as we can comprehend them, they seem to have been in accordance with the successive conditions of the earth. If this be true, we have an analogical argument, not only for the prescience and power of the God of Nature, but also for His continued providential government.

We may go further still-we may draw from the natural history of the earth, analogical arguments in favour of Revelation. For if God have brought all animated Nature into its present condition by successive acts of creation, which have become incorporated, from time to time, in the system of Nature; Why may we not suppose that he has dealt in the same manner with the moral part of Nature? Why may we not