Imatges de pàgina
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as merely an affair of outposts, which, however terminating, will leave the main strength of the Christian argument unimpaired. We have already endeavoured to show, how without any invasion even on the literalities of the Mosaic record, the indefinite antiquity of the globe might safely be given up to naturalists, as an arena whether for their sportive fancies or their interminable gladiatorship. On this supposition the details of that operation narrated by Moses, which lasted for six days on the earth's surface, will be regarded as the steps, by which the present economy of terrestrial things was raised, about six thousand years ago, on the basis of an earth then without form and void. While, for aught of information we have in the Bible, the earth itself may, before this time, have been the theatre of many lengthened processes the dwelling place of older economies that have now gone by; but whereof the vestiges subsist even to the present day, both to the needless alarm of those who befriend the cause of Christianity, and to the unwarrantable triumph of those who have assailed it.

27. Let us never quit the strongholds of the Christian argument in hazarding a mere affair of outposts, unless we are quite sure of the ground we stand upon. There are certain zealous defenders of Christianity who in this way have done an injury to the cause. And it does give rise to a most unnecessary waste of credit and confidence, it does give the enemies of religion a most unnecessary triumph, when its defenders expose their ignorance in the maintenance of a position, which

even though given up leaves Christianity as firmly based as ever, on those miraculous and prophetic and experimental evidences which substantiate the Bible as the authentic record of an authentic communication from Heaven to Earth, as a Book indited by holy men of God, who stood charged, not with the matters of physical science, but with those transcendently higher matters which relate to the moral guidance and the moral destiny of our species.

28. Yet whatever room there might be for wise and sound policy in managing the Christian argument, there is no reason at all for the pusillanimous feeling of dismay. Our cause may suffer a partial and temporary discredit from the mismanagement of its friends—but not all the strength and subtlety of its most powerful adversaries can achieve its permanent overthrow. Those days have gone by of triumphant anticipation to the enemies of the cross, when the wit of Voltaire, and the eloquence of Rousseau, and the sophistry of Hume, entered into menacing combination on the side of infidelity. These have all been withstood-and on the arena, too, of literary and intellectual debate where many a feat of championship has been performed, in repelling those successive attacks, which under the semblance of philosophy have been made upon the Faith. For after all it is but a semblance and nothing more. That demi-infidel spirit, which for a generation or two has kept such hold of the seats of philosophy, did not find its ascendancy there till we had sunk down to an age of little men. Those great master-spirits of a former age, after whom

there appeared the pigmies of what may be called a second-rate philosophy, were wholly exempted from it. In the days of proudest achievement and most colossal minds it was comparatively unknown -and so far from feeling a disgrace or a descent in Christianity, the illustrious names of Newton and Locke and Bacon and Boyle stand all associated with the defence and illustration of it.

CHAPTER III.

On the Strength of the Evidences for a God in the Phenomena of Visible and External Nature.

1. WE include among the phenomena of external nature whatever can be exposed to the observation of human eyes—and therefore, the organization and mechanism of our own bodies. There is distinct and additional evidence for a God-and that too, we think, the strongest and most influential of any, grounded on a phenomenon purely mental, and so coming under the dominion of consciousness alone. This we shall advert to afterwards-but meanwhile, we should like to offer a brief recapitulation of what we deem to be the strong points of the Theistical argument, as far as it has yet been proceeded in; that by means of a condensed view we may perceive distinctly wherein it is that the main force of the reasoning lies.

2. The first strong point of this argument is grounded on the distinction which we have already

endeavoured to make palpable between the laws of matter and the collocations of matter. In the reasoning for a God from the mere existence of matter, we certainly do not remark any strong point of argument whatever. And then, when this argument from the existence of matter is given up, there remains another obscure and indeterminable controversy about its properties, as to which of them may be essential, and which of them must have been communicated at the will and by the appointment of a devising and purposing and intelligent Being. Now so long as the argument tarries either at the existence or at the laws of matter, we do not think that we have yet come to any lucid or effective consideration upon the subject. We hold that at this part of the question the cause of Natural Theology has suffered from the confidence joined with the obscurity of those reasonings which have been made use of by its supporters; and that it were therefore a mighty service to the cause did we separate what in it is decisive and what in it is doubtful from each other.

3. They are the collocations, then, which form by far the most unequivocal tokens of a Divinity that the material world has to offer. We understand the term in a more comprehensive sense than that which is conveyed by its mere etymology. We mean not only that the parts of matter have been placed in right correspondence to each other; but that these parts, so placed, have been rightly sized and rightly shaped, for some obviously beneficial end of the combination in question-and moreover that forces of a right intensity and direc

tion have been made to meet together so as to be productive of some desirable result. The world is full of such collocations and the strong circumstance is, that there is nothing in the yet ascertained laws of matter that could have given rise to them -insomuch that if at this moment any of them were destroyed, there appears nothing in these laws which could possibly replace them. It is true, that in astronomy, the argument founded on these, is all the less impressive, that it requires but the concurrence of few independent circumstances to complete the astronomical system. Such a concurrence however is indispensable—and in virtue of this it is, that the planetarium has been so exquisitely formed as never to deviate far from a mean state, but only to oscillate a little way on either side of it else the system would have contained within itself the elements of its own destruction. It marks what the atheistical tendency is, that La Place should have ascribed this beautiful result to a law, and not to the collocations. He seems to have felt throughout his reasonings, wherein it was that the plausibility of atheism chiefly lay. But this also carries in it an intimation to us, wherein it is that the main strength lies of the argument for a Divinity. No doubt, the law is indispensable, and enters as one element into the calculation. But we have already noticed that the collocations are equally indispensable; and they enter as other elements into the calculation. So that if ever a time was when these collocations were not, if the present order of the heavens have had a commencement,-there seems nothing in

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