PROPERTIES or laws of matter. Heat and gravitation are each as simple as the Divinity. The affections of body, with the exception indicated, may, for aught we know, or are entitled in the first stage of our induction to affirm, be alike necessary with its essence, and alike inexplicable. Interference ab extra has never been observed to produce analogous phenomena. It cannot therefore be required to account for these.

Nor yet do we infer the divine existence from the phenomena of pure CONSCIOUSNESS. Were we disembodied spirits, without knowledge or memory of any beginning, it would probably never occur to us to search after a cause for our own existence. The known existence of one spirit could not be simplified by the supposed existence of another. To say that intelligence is required to produce intelligence would be to say that intelligence is required to produce God. We should, therefore be impelled to class our purely spiritual existence with other ultimate facts, mysterious, doubtless, as all existence is mysterious, but not susceptible of being made less so by our multiplying assumptions of kindred and parallel mystery. Once prove the existence of a Divine Creator, and it will become necessary and rational to refer all else to Him-the affections of matter, the operations of mind. But from these things we cannot prove that existence. *

How, then, is that existence proved, or rather-for the argument is a strict induction-certainly inferred? Simply and solely from COLLOCATIONS, DISPOSITIONS, and ADAPTATIONS of matter which are perceived to be analogous, not to the known results or capacities of Law, but to the known energies and capacities of Intelligence. Were the city of London to be swallowed up by an earthquake and the island of Great Britain to be swept of human inhabitants, we do not

"We study the nature and operations of the mind, and gather from them marks of design Among the most remarkable of these is the power of reasoning," &c.-Brougham's Discourse on Natural Theology, Part I. Sect. iii. But is reason in the Divine Mind a "mark of design"? It is essential to discriminate between mind as such, and mind as domiciled in a physical frame into which it must have been put by the Author of that frame; or again mind as instructed and directed by other mind. Coleridge tells the story of an illiterate servant-girl who spoke Greek verses in a fever. It turned out that a former master had been in the habit of reciting these aloud within her hearing. The instinct which enables the unreasoning bee to avail itself of the utilities unfolded to man by the most refined investigation (Appendix D.) refers us, in manner analogous, to a prompting Mind. But mind as such cannot be considered as necessarily indicative of design.

believe that Law would ever repeople the waste any more than we believe it would rebuild the city. The English insect would never "develope" or "select" into the English dog, or the English dog into the English man, any more than the unquarried rock would "develope" into the towers of Westminster, or "select" into the dome of St. Paul's. What is thus prospectively so evident, when put as a hypothesis, is no less evident in retrospect, when surveyed as a reality. We are entitled to believe, and impelled to pronounce, that what Law could not do in the future it has not done in the past.

The principle of the argument rests on two axioms, each certain to a demonstration. Something is caused. Something is not. There is causation somewhere. Causation cannot be everywhere. We are shut up to affirm causation of some phenomena. We are equally shut up to deny it of all. Let a block of marble a be the effect of nothing :

the configuration of parts in the Apollo c is, we know, the result of skill and intelligence. Interposing between these the contested phenomenon Man, the question simply is, to which is he similar? On which line of analogy must he be laid? Is he an ultimate fact, like the marble; or, like the sculpture, a monument of design? The inquiry is as legitimate as the reply is clear. Natural Theology places one finger on the superb statuary: she points with another to the far more superb and complex original: she claims for both the character of effect, effect of intelligent cause. The moulding intelligence may be mysterious, so also may be the material moulded; but the former has stamped a signature upon the latter by which itself is known. There is no tendency in nature to produce men and women any more than their marble simulacra. The human frame is matter marshalled by Omnipotence not less surely than the mimetic statuary is matter marshalled by man.

The Argument from Design, then, is valid, and it is complete. Conviction that a given effect is strictly supernatural is the appropriate primary basis of belief in supernatural cause, that is, in God. No subtle “demonstrations" consisting of ingenious word-play will supply its place. An earnest faith cannot be built on metaphysic

quicksands: attention is only wasted in listening to oracles that either give us verbiage in lieu of reasons, or asseverate loudly that we must believe without reasons, that no reasons can be given, and that no reasons are required.

B.

ON THE NATURAL IMPRESSIVENESS OF THE ARGUMENT

FROM DESIGN.

The following passages are assembled on the principle of showing the force with which this argument has struck thinkers of all schools, times, and countries; in some cases, as in that of Kant, despite themselves :—

1. Socrates.- "Having heard that Aristodemus ridiculed the worshippers of the gods-'Tell me,' said he, 'O Aristodemus, if there are any men you admire for their wisdom.' 'I do.' 'Their names?' 'Homer as an epic poet, Polycletus as a statuary, Zeuxis as a painter.' 'And which think you are the more worthy of admiration-the framers of images, mindless and motionless, or the framers of creatures full of life and energy?' 'Does not He then

who made men in the beginning seem to you to have given them for use their several organs of perception-eyes to see sights, ears to hear sounds? . . . Seems it not to you the work of forethought to have fenced the delicate vision with eyelids, like doors, thrown open when it is necessary to see, but closed in sleep? Or to have

placed the cutting teeth in front, and the molars behind? Is it doubtful whether all this be the work of chance or of premeditation?'

'Be sure, O Socrates, if I were persuaded the gods had care for man, I would not neglect the gods. 'Thinkest thou not they care for man? They who made man erect, and able to look upward; and giving lower creatures only feet to walk withal, have furnished man

with hands to work those things which pertain to his superiority? And though all brutes have tongues, they have made man's tongue only so adroit and nimble as to achieve articulate speech, and to give signal of all our thoughts in sounds. Moreover, besides caring for man's body, they have implanted in him his most excellent part, the soul. What other creature can apprehend or worship the Deity? Nay, are not men as gods, among the other creatures, excelling them, in virtue of their nature, both in body and soul? For the mind of man would be powerless to fulfil its purposes if lodged in the body of an ox; and hands without mind do not raise the ape above brutes. Yet you, Aristodemus, endowed with both, doubt the care of the gods. What would you have them do for you to show their care?'"-Memorabilia, Lib. I. c. iv.

2. Cicero." He who ascribes the constitution of the universe to chance, I understand not why he should not also suppose that a vast quantity of the one-and-twenty letters, made of gold or any other material, might, if thrown promiscuously on the ground, arrange themselves spontaneously into the Annals of Ennius. Admirable is that of Aristotle: If there were a race of men who had always lived under ground in splendid mansions, furnished with pictures and statues, and all other luxuries of the rich; and if, never having visited the surface of the earth, and having only heard by vague rumour of a certain Divine Power, they were suddenly to be ushered, through a cleaving of the earth, to the upper region, so that the whole panorama of nature should at once burst upon their view : when they should take in at a glance earth, sea, and sky; when they should note the greatness of the clouds and the force of the winds; when they should survey the sun in his glory and power, diffusing light by day, and see the whole heaven bespangled with stars by night, and watch the variations of the waxing and waning moon, and the punctual courses of the stars ;--assuredly they would conclude that there were gods, and that these were their godlike works. **

*The general impression was shared by Plato. Yet how crude and wild the most advanced conception of cosmical beginnings among the ancients was !-The Mosaic "Cosmogony" has recently been the subject of an elaborate impeachment. "Inspiration," as Michaelis long ago distinguished, "is not Omniscience:" the thing hypothetically required is not the miraculous anticipation of scientific truth of detail, or the revealing of such knowledge before its time, but such an Influence as should

"Need I speak of the bones and their joints so wonderfully adjusted both for stability, and motion, and action? Or of the nerves by which the body is pervaded? To this providence

of nature many things fall to be added from which may be gathered what excellent prerogatives the gods have bestowed on men; as in conferring the erect posture, that they alone of living creatures might look to heaven and reach the knowledge of the gods. The senses also, as interpreters and messengers, are located in the head as in a tower, wonderfully subserving their appointed uses. He,

moreover, who does not ascribe the mind and reason of man to the Divine care, seems to me to be himself destitute of mind and reason. What a gift is speech, and what incredible skill has been

secure that, when the knowledge came, the general dignity, congruity, broad truthfulness, and religious impressiveness of the lesson, should suffer no harm from the advent of such knowledge. This harm has not happened from Modern Astronomy to the eighth or the nineteenth Psalm; nor yet will it happen from Geology to the first chapter of Genesis. Could as much be said for the highest flights of the unaided human reason of ancient time in the same region of speculation? The most profound modern thinker, of reverential mind, will feel himself in communion with a certain Divine Insight, as he listens to the reverend record from which his flippant inferiors so glibly derogate. But even the latter might own the difference between inspiration and the want of it, if the Timaus of Plato were read in churches instead of the "Cosmogony" of Moses.

Perhaps the class of difficulties now alluded to might be abated were it kept in mind that as in Scripture the recognition of the Divine does not imply the suppression or coercion of the Human, so the frankest recognition of the limitations of the Human does by no means negative the co-presence, in its own sphere, of the Divine. The reader will find some admirable remarks on this head in Dr. Hannah's volume on The Fall and its Results, pp. 28-32 (Rivingtons, 1857.)

I have spoken of the "broad truthfulness " of the Sacred Record. It is not at all necessary to the reality of the inspiration of Moses that he himself should have been aware of the receptivity of the mystic "days." And yet is there nothing striking in the coincidence that modern science should have chosen for the last great efflux of Creative Energy a name borrowed from the conception of darkness and the dawn? (Eocene.) Or, again, assuming the Fifth and Sixth "days, or Creative segments of duration, as receptive of the Mesozoic and Cenozoic Fauna, (culminating in Manfor whom a priori, although this would have been discrepant with geological fact, a distinct "day" might have been expected), is it not worth a thought that the naturally closer affinity of all the Cold-blooded Vertebrata inter se is reflected in the "great sea-monsters" and "winged fowl" of verse 22, while the "cattle" or milkgivers of verse 24 (with the Ophidians and Carnivora, "creeping thing and beast of the earth") is as exact an expression as language can afford for the Typical Mammalia of Tertiary times?-These correspondences are not essential, it may be, to that function of the record over which inspiration may be held to have kept guard. But are they simply casual? Does even Plato afford the like?