he cannot show this, we are still prepared to show, that the principle of which Mr. Brownson predicates the necessity of an infallible organization or church, is false. That principle we take to be this: In moral and religious things, in matters of moral and religious truth and practice, there must be certainty. It is indispensable that there be an instrumentality which can assure man what is true and right without the possibility of mistake. The whole notion of an infallible interpreter grows out of this presumed necessity. There would be no objection to the position-which however we do not intend to take-that the State should decide when its claims come in contact with the claims of the individual, provided it were certain that its decision would be just. But this certainty is not affirmed, either of the State or the individual, and hence there must be some other power of which certainty can be affirmed. Such, we make no doubt Mr. Brownson will say, is the Catholic position.

Now we affirm, not only that this certainty is unnecessary-not only that it does not exist, but that in the nature of things it cannot exist. We are aware that the individual whose argument we have been calling in question, is versed in the whole range of speculative philosophyperhaps no man in this country is more so. He knows intimately the chronological and philosophical relations of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Reid; and as he reads this, the tack-and-tack process of thought which these eminent names represent, is distinctly in his mind's eye. He knows with what severity of logic Berkeley, reasoning from the principles of Locke, annihilated the material world, and with what still more remorseless logic, Hume threw uncertainty upon all kinds and degrees of knowledge. He knows the necessity, which the skepticism of Hume exposed, of laying a new foundation for knowledge, and how this foundation being laid by Kant, the superstructure of the Common Sense school-which may be said to have begun with Reid and to end with Hamilton-was reared. Aware of our author's familiarity with these things, we assure our readers, calmly and deliberately, that Mr. Brownson will not, in the strict sense of the term, claim certainty for any doctrine or precept of the Catholic Church. On the contrary, we think he will

say, that beyond the simple phenomena of consciousnessof which certainty, if the word is allowed to have any meaning, must be affirmed-there is no such thing as strict certainty. And we further assert, that should our author some day take a notion to the Berkeleian theory, he will demonstrate the non-existence of matter with quite as much of conclusiveness as he now argues for the infallible Church!

It is often complained that speculative philosophy has developed so little that is positive and satisfactory. It should be set down to its credit, that it has exposed so much that is unsatisfactory; and by making clear the conditions and limitations of human knowledge, has put a check upon that too confident dogmatism in which the human spirit so loves to indulge. It would give us surprise should our Catholic author not prove among the most prompt to acknowledge its benefits in this particular. Now if philosophy has made any thing clear, it is that strict certainty can be affirmed only of those phenomena, including of course their subjects, which are attested by consciousness. A shade of doubt rests upon the objective validity of these phenomena. There is a theoretical uncertainty touching all objectivity. Sensible reality cannot be demonstrated; and the more remote alleged facts are from consciousness, the greater the doubt that is necessarily involved. The great distance which divides all historical and most logical matter from the seat of cognition, necessarily gives a degree-sometimes a very great degree of uncertainty to all that is predicated of outward testimony, or that is reached by a process of reasoning. Now, much of the pretensions of the Catholic Church depends on historical evidence; how Mr. Brownson can affirm certainty of what is sustained by such evidence, and still claim to be philosophically consistent, is more than we can understand. Farther, even admitting that the decisions of the church are infallible, most of the processes whereby its communications are published, cannot also be infallible. How many things must be trusted, before a decision, made in Rome, can be assumed to be known in Boston,-things too which no intelligent Catholic will aver to be without the liability of mistake. And liability to mistake in the matter of communicating a truth,

extinguishes the whole doctrine of infallibility. All that can be said is, that a degree of certainty can be had sufficient for practical purposes. It is not demonstrably certain, for instance, that there is an external world. Nevertheless, as the mass of men find it convenient to trust their senses, as it would be awkward to act on the supposition that all that is seen, felt, and heard, is only ideal,it may be assumed that there is certainty enough to answer every useful purpose. It is indeed matter of history, that Berkeley, after he demonstrated the existence of matter to be theoretically uncertain, bought a farm in Rhode Island. At best, Mr. Brownson can establish no more than a practical certainty for the decisions of his Church; and we can get enough of this for our purpose through reason and conscience. Practically, then, we see not how we could be gainers by substituting his medium of truth for our own. The claims of his church do really seem to us anything but philosophical. These claims presuppose a certainty which in the nature of things is impossible.

Before quitting the general subject under discussion, we must call attention to a "difficulty" in the way of Catholic pretension, which it would give us much satisfaction to have our author meet. Everything coming from the church, having its authority, he deems infallible; every thing coming from without the church he deems fallible or uncertain. It seems clear that the infallible cannot be predicated of the fallible,—that certainty cannot be based upon uncertainty. Now Mr. Brownson has written two articles to convince us that there is such a thing as an infallible church. What kind of argument has he made use of? Not the authority of the church itself, for this would be to reason in a circle. Of course he argues from principles which he presumes that we mutually concede; and these principles, he says, are fallible, are uncertain. His whole argument, then, is a fallible argument-reasoning with us it is necessarily this; it would be an assumption of the very point in dispute to bring forward a different kind of argument. It is by such reasoning, and of necessity only by such, that he expects to convert Protestants to Catholicism. Suppose he succeeds. In this event his convert's Catholicism really rests upon Protestantism.

The argument which made him a Catholic was a fallible argument. He has reached certainty by a process of uncertainty. The infallible church, as he receives it, stands upon a basis of fallibility! It is difficult to understand how the superstructure can be broader and more impregnable than the foundation which supports it. It is difficult to understand how a conclusion can embrace what is not in the premises-how the conclusion of certainty can be evolved from premises which, at least, are liable to deceive. We can indeed conceive of one way by which it may be attempted to remove the difficulty which we thus urge. It may be said, that though a fallible argument brings a convert into the church, yet, once in, he comes in contact with a new set of evidences, and that these new proofs are sufficient to make certain what, up to the time of his contact with them, was necessarily uncertain. We reason somewhat in this way with reference to the relative merits of the external and internal evidences of Christianity. We cannot conceive that the external argument is of itself alone sufficient to establish one in the Christian faith. It may, however, be sufficient to bring one to the Christian faith-to bring his spiritual nature into contact with the principles of this faith, and in this way furnish the occasion whereby the experimental or internal argument shall be brought into operation. But if it is attempted in the same way to make good what is lacking in the argument for Catholicism, which takes hold of the Protestant as a Protestant-if it is attempted to complete the argument by an experimental confirmation, what is this but to appeal to the spiritual nature of man? and what is this, again, but to trust the reason and conscience of the individual? Which ever way we look at it, we cannot perceive that the Catholic Church has any special advantage over the individual soul, considered as the medium of truth from God to man.

In concluding this article, we may say that, as the matter now appears to us, we shall not be likely to continue the discussion. Nevertheless, if our author takes further notice of our attempts to call in question his reasoning, we shall be certain to read what he may offer with care, and we trust with candor. It gives us no little satisfaction to add, that the discussion has been, on our part, a

very pleasant one, and has done not a little to assure us that there is no necessity that the language of controversy should be otherwise than civil, or that its temper should be unchristian.

G. H. E.

ART. XXVIII.

Geology and the Fall.

The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. By Hugh Miller. Boston: 1857.

No intelligent observer of the course of thought in the religious world, can have failed to notice the reluctant, but inevitable, retreat of certain theological views and interpretations of Scripture, before the resistless tides of scientific light, which have "prevailed and increased greatly upon the earth" within the last half century. Nor has the conflict by any means ceased, even in regard to the more obvious concessions of theology. The great capitals and strong fortresses of thought and opinion have yielded; the leading minds of our times recognize the new views, but in the remoter districts the old dispensation still bears sway. The six days of creation, the universality of the deluge, and the first appearance of death after the fall of man, were well established articles of the popular faith; and the change which has taken place in regard to them, has been produced by the irresistible necessities which have arisen from the development of a vast and firm array of scientific facts. The necessity is of a like nature, and is perhaps as cogent as that which arose from the Copernican theory, and the facts of Galileo. Men at first were startled by the statements of the Florentine discoverer, because they thought that they overturned the word of God; but it is now plainly seen that they did not impair the vitality of the word, but only changed its clothing. So also in the three great points of doctrine mentioned above, we now begin to see that the Bible loses neither beauty, force, nor authority, by the change to which the