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Missionary Society making a grant for that purpose; which, however, was discontinued at the end of six months.

The school began with between 30 and 40 children. In the course of six months, the number grew to 150 in regular attendance, under the care of three female teachers. Nearly half the number were literally taken into the family of Mr. Pease, and made that their home, being entirely supported from the funds of charity: many others also, besides instruction, had part of their board at the establishment. Most of them being gathered in from the lowest haunts of vice and wretchedness, raked out, so to speak, from the sewerage of debasement, as if they had been the very spawn of its loathsomeness, it was of course some time before they could be formed to anything like decency and order. Besides their inward steeping of dirtiness, their external filth was such as to poison the air of the school-room, and cause sickness among its occupants; insomuch that a bathing-room had to be provided for the children of each sex, with a man and woman to give them frequent and thorough washing.

At the time of our first acquaintance with the institution, all these points had been duly attended to; discipline was fully established; cleanliness, good order, and propriety of demeanor everywhere prevailed. Since then, we have repeatedly been at the school, and never without experiencing an inward, scarce-repressible gush of delectation at sight of the young faces ruddy with happiness, and the young eyes bright with mental and physical health; and to think that, chiefly through the Christian enterprise, the practical wisdom, the inventive and adaptive forethought of one man, the penal dungeon, the early grave, and the still worse receptacles where, spell-bound of guilt and shame, the soul festers and rots away piecemeal in a living death, that these had been defrauded of so many victims, and the walks of virtue, of honest comfort, and useful industry replenished with so many germs of hope and promise.

(To be Continued.)

NOTICES OF BOOKS.

Skepticism a Folly: Five Letters, occasioned by a Geological Article in the Westminster Review for July, 1857. By ADAM TOWNLEY, D.D., Incumbent of Paris, C. W. Toronto: Published by Thompson & Co., 1857.

We have rarely met with what seemed to us a more unfortunate and ill-judged publication than the present. The author is, in his way, a man of very considerable ability, and of a downright honesty which is deserving of all respect; but surely he ought to beware how he ventures before the public with a process of reasoning. He may be capable of better things than logic; but logic, in any large or dignified sense of the term, certainly is not his forte.

Dr. Townley is a pertinacious stickler for the hardest and most exacting literalism of Scripture interpretation. And it is a significant fact, that the Westminster Review, which is an openly and avowedly infidel publication, insists on precisely the same rules of interpretation, as Dr. Townley does : only the one does it to the end of discrediting Christianity, the other to the end of discrediting geology. Accordingly, the divine sides out-and-cut with the Review against all those Christian geologists who, with the view of opening the door for a reconciliation of the Mosaic and the geological records. have ventured to question whether the literal, or what commonly passes for the literal interpretation of Moses be right.

How exceedingly far Dr. Townley pushes his literalism, may be judged from the fact, that he will not even allow the Deluge to have been caused, in part, by the sinking of the land, so as to admit an overflowing of water from the sea. "The natural cause," says he, "which Mr. Miller assigns for even his supposed partial Flood is diametrically opposed to the Scriptural one. He attributes it to the sinking of the earth; the Scriptures, on the contrary, most emphatically to the fountains of the great deep being broken up, and the windows of heaven being opened,' and pouring forth torrents of rain; until, not as Miller conjectures, the earth sank, but, as Moses repeats at least three times, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth;' or, as St. Peter, so many ages after, declares, they overflowed the earth that then was.'" We give the passage precisely as it came from the author, Italics and all. And we submit that the thing amounts to a hopeless reductio ad absurdum of his rule of interpretation: in other words, it is a running of his literalism clean into the ground. We plead guilty to the crime of seeing no particular strength, or beauty, or dignity in a faith that stands on so palpable a dotage of

literalism.

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But let us observe, in one or two particulars, how great sacrifices both of science and of divinity Dr. Townley prefers to make, rather than give up or even relax his hide-bound literalism. While he repels the idea of natural causes having borne any part in bringing about the Deluge, he nevertheless allows it "reasonable to suppose that the variety of species may have greatly increased from natural causes, since the Flood." In this case, the Italics are

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ours. But what an extraordinary admission! Professor Oken and the Lamarckians never, in their wildest gusts of "inspiration," went further towards untenanting creation of its GOD." The position is as bad as it can be in divinity, and therefore it cannot be worse in science: but neither, on the other hand, is it any better; for science, being obliged by its very constitution to take natural causes as it finds them, has no way of accounting for the origin of species in the kingdoms of organic nature, but by the intervention of a Supernatural Cause. When Nicodemus said, "We know that Thou art a teacher come from God; for no man can do these miracles that Thou doest, except God be with him;" he argued on the self-same grounds of reason as science does in referring the production of organic species to other than natural causes. And the reasoning is precisely the same in principle when it is asked, "He that planted the car, shall He not hear? He that formed the eye, shall He not see?" But all such arguments, though good in science, good in divinity, and good in common sense, might easily be nonsuited and set aside on the principles implied in Dr. Townley's position.

In the same behalf, Dr. Townley seems willing to upset the whole doctrine of Final Causes, and cut off the very basis of all arguments from Design. For instance, according to that doctrine, vision is the end or final cause of the eye; and in order to the attaining of this end there must be light. In other words, the eye is adapted to light, and is of no use without it; and therefore the existence of light must be presupposed at the forming of the eye, else the argument from design will not hold. So, too, the eye itself is the end or final cause of a certain arrangement and configuration in the animal structure: as the eye is adapted to light, so certain bones or their analogues are made and placed on purpose for the eye. Such a provision for eyes is found in the fossil trilobites of the Silurian rocks. From this fact science, divinity, and common sense infer the existence of light in the time of the trilobites. Dr. Townley queries whether the belief, "that the trilobites of the Paleozoic period had eyes suited to the present organization of light," may not have been adopted because it appears to militate against the Scriptural account of the origin of light." "It seems to me," says he, " that the exact nature of the eyes of these trilobites must have been taken marvellously upon trust. Though their organic remains may be abundant in a fossil state, I can scarcely think that the delicate coatings of the eye, with its still more subtile fluids, have been so wondrously preserved, that the anatomist and the optician can decide upon the exact relation which this most delicate organ bore to light, or its equiva lent." It is not easy to see how any instance of design in the arrangements of nature can stand through such reasoning as this. But the author seems not to be aware how far the facts in the case really reach. Enough is known of those ancient Silurian eyes, to identify them, in structure and function, with these of existing Crustacea. Dr. Carpenter, of London, is among our highest living authorities in such questions; and he tells us, "It is peculiarly interesting to find the faceted surface of the eyes extremely well marked in the fossil remains of the extinct trilobites.

The author, however, finds one thing in geology to exult over and appland. It is well known, that certain infidel writers, starting with the alleged impossibility of miracles, and unable to account for the beginning of the human race without a miracle, have taken refuge in the position that the human race Lever had any beginning, but that it reaches back through an endless series of generations, being, in fact, eternal. The same holds, in reference to all the other species of organic nature. And infidelity is perfectly consistent in this: for it is just as contrary to experience, that a new species of animal should begin to be, as that a man should rise from the dead. The resources of metaphysical argument have been often strained to their utmost, to drive infidelity from this position; but never with success: all their proofs, that man must have had a beginning, have been met by proofs equally solid, that man could not have had a beginning. What was necessary, to settle the question, was simply a few facts. Geology furnishes these in abundance; it has found the beginning of man, and thousands of other similar beginnings, as simple matters of fact. But geology no more than infidelity can account for the origin of man, or of any other species, without a miracle. And thus it is that, from the volume of the rocks, thousands of miracles have been thoroughly authenticated, insomuch as to stand, at this day, among the recognized facts of human experience. We have, not merely a history of them delivered by fallible men, or by infallible inspiration, but the very things themselves telling their own story. And thus it is that the great Doctrine of Miracles has come to be established on a firm basis of Scientific Induction. And Hume's snug-built ship of infidel logic, after cruising about the world so long, as if it were proof against the tempests of metaphysic assault, has at last split all to pieces on the rocks.

Dr. Townley is justly delighted at this result. "It is pleasant," says he, "where one finds so much to deplore, to be able to speak in terms of high gratification of the able manner in which both Mr. Miller and the writer of The Book and the Rocks place in bold relief the complete refutation which the recent discoveries in the science of geology have given to the skeptical conceits of the eternity of the world, the infinite succession of the human race, &c. In earnest and glowing language they rejoicingly show how entirely in harmony are geology and Holy Writ on these important points." This is very well; but it is hardly safe for a man to urge the testimony of a witness whom he has himself impeached. If geology proves that man had a beginning, it also proves at the same time, and on the self-same grounds, that many hundred species of animals were created, run through vast cycles of being, and became extinct, before the creation of man. And its arguments to both these points are so perfectly bound up together, and all of a piece, that you will have to take the whole or none. Geology infers, it can infer nothing whatsoever as to the beginning of the human race, unless it also infer that many other races had their beginning on earth myriads of ages before the human began. If, for instance, you quote geology as proving that man and the forecited trilobite both had a beginning, but still maintain that they began within three or four common solar days of each other; we answer, that geology proves the two to

have started thousands of centuries apart, else it does not prove that either of them ever started at all; for it takes, and can take no note of time whatsoever, except by differences of time.

This, to be sure, does not necessarily pinch Dr. Townley; for it appears, after all, that his stiff-necked literalism is not intended for his own case: he only takes liberty away from others, in order to give it to himself. Any vari ation from the exact twenty-four-hours period touching the six days he resents es an insult to Inspiration; but he thinks there is "no such objection to the idea that our globe itself, and, if you will, the countless systems by which it is surrounded, had been in existence innumerable ages; and that, after returning, perhaps repeatedly, to chaos, whatever that may be, they were once more called into joyous existence during the six days by recreative Divine power, as narrated in the Book of Genesis.” So, again, a late writer in Blackwood having remarked touching the creation of the sun, moon, and stars on the fourth day, "This is optical, not astronomical truth;" Dr. Townley jerks him up thus: "I fancy I can see the quiet sneer of the Westminster on reading such a defence of the holy literal truth of that volume. And this caviling is certainly most uncalled for, as the account of the heavenly bodies is literally and astronomically' correct, when considered in their relations and influences upon our earth;-and this it was, of course, the legitimate object of the sacred historian to state." But who made him the judge of the historian's "legiti mate object?" And what becomes of "the holy literal truth" in his expla nation of the matter? So, too, in regard to the Divine rest, he snubs the writer aforesaid for supposing, (which, by the way, he does not suppose,) that the term rest is applicable to the Creator in the same sense as to man. But, if the Divine rest differs from the human, why may not God's day of rest differ from man's just as much? and if His day of rest differs from man's day of rest, why may not His days of work differ equally from man's days of work? What right has Dr. Townley to depart from " the holy literal truth" in the word rest, and then go to snapping at others for the same departure in the word day? The Doctor also insists upon it, that in the account of creation GOD " has not given the slightest intimation that He was using language in other than its ordinary meaning." Not the slightest intimation? St. Augustine thought far otherwise. And in regard to the first three days at least, how could the language be understood to mean our solar diurnal periods, when, according to the record itself, there was yet no sun to mark them, nor to make them? Surely the author would do well to take a small dose of candour.

In reading Dr. Townley, we were almost continually reminded of Sir Thomas Browne's well-known saying about his faith being of so high a strain that he took special delight in believing things because they were impossible Sir Thomas, however, was aware that he had a queer twist in his brain; and he put this forth as one of the things that could never have been entertained but "by such extravagant and irregular heads as mine." And the charming egotist nurses his odd quirks and humours, and pets them, and talks about them merely for his own amusement, without any thought of proposing them as

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