JK# 
 
 
<o 
 
 DUKE 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LIBRARY 
 
 treasure %oo7n 
 
 THE 
 
 COLERIDGE 
 
 COLLECTION 
 
 
THE 
 
 STATESMAN'S MANUAL ; 
 
 OR 
 
 THE BIBLE THE BEST GUIDE TO POLITICAL 
 SKILL AND FORESIGHT : 
 
 it Hag Sermon, 
 
 ADDRESSED TO 
 
 THE HIGHER CLASSES OF SOCIETY, 
 WITH AN APPENDIX, 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 COMMENTS and ESSAYS 
 
 CONNECTED WITH 
 
 THE STUDY OF THE INSPIRED WRITINGS. 
 
 By S. T. COLERIDGE, Esq, 
 
 ** Ad ist haec quaeso vos, qualia cunque primo videantur aspectu, 
 adtendite, ut qui vobis forsan insanire videar, saltern quibus insaniam 
 ratioaibus eognoscatis." 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 PRINTED FOR GALE AND FENNER, PATER-NOSTER ROW; 
 
 3. M. RICHARDSON, ROYAL EXCHANGE; AND 
 
 HATCHARD, PICCADILLY. 
 
 1816. 
 
 3 4 -t^ti 
 
841.74 
 
 2 0, 
 
 Printed by S. Curtis, Southampton Place, Camberwell. 
 
LAY SERMON, <fcc. 
 
 PSALM LXXVIII. v. 5, 6, 1. 
 
 5. For he established a testimony in Jacob 
 and appointed a law in Israel; which he 
 commanded our fathers, that they should 
 make them known to their children. 6. That 
 the generation to come might know them, 
 even the children which should be born; 
 who should arise and declare them to their 
 children : 1. That they might set their hope 
 in God, and not forget the works of God. 
 
 IF our whole knowlege and information 
 concerning the Bible had been confined to the 
 one fact of its immediate derivation from God^ 
 we should still presume that it contained rules 
 and assistances for all conditions of men under 
 all circumstances ; and therefore for commu- 
 nities no less than for individuals. The con- 
 tents of every work must correspond to the 
 character and designs of the work-master; 
 
( 4 ) 
 
 and the inference in the present case is too 
 obvious to be overlooked, too plain to be re- 
 sisted. It requires, indeed, all the might of 
 superstition to conceal from a man of common 
 understanding the further truth, that the in- 
 terment of such a treasure in a dead language 
 must needs be contrary to the intentions of 
 the gracious Donor. Apostacy itself dared not 
 question the premise: and that the practical 
 consequence did not follow, is conceivable only 
 under a compleat system of delusion, which 
 from the cradle to the death-bed ceases not to 
 overawe the will by obscure fears, while it 
 pre-occupies the senses by vivid imagery and 
 ritual pantomime. But to such a scheme all 
 forms of sophistry are native. The very ex- 
 cellence of the Giver has been made a reason 
 for withholding the gift ; nay the transcend- 
 ent value of the gift itself assigned as the 
 motive of its detention. We may be shocked 
 at the presumption, but need not be surprized 
 at the fact, that a jealous priesthood should 
 have ventured to represent the applicability 
 of the Bible to all the wants and occasions of 
 men as a wax-like pliability to all their fancies 
 and prepossessions. Faithful guardians of Holy 
 Writ ! they are constrained to make it useless 
 in order to guard it from profanation; and 
 
( 5 ) 
 
 those., whom they have most defrauded, are 
 the readiest to justify the fraud. For im- 
 posture, organized into a comprehensive and 
 self-consistent whole, forms a world of its 
 own, in which inversion becomes the order of 
 nature. 
 
 Let it not be forgotten, however, (and I 
 recommend the fact to the especial attention 
 of those among ourselves, who are disposed to 
 rest contented with an implicit faith and pas- 
 sive acquiescence) that the Church of Super- 
 stition never ceased to avow the profoundest 
 reverence for the Scriptures themselves, and 
 what it forbids its vassals to ascertain, it not 
 only permits, but commands them to take for 
 granted. 
 
 Whether, and to what extent, this suspen- 
 sion of the rational functions, this spiritual 
 slumber, will be imputed as a sin to the souls 
 who are still under chains of papal darkness, 
 we are neither enabled or authorized to deter- 
 mine. It is enough for us to know that the 
 land, in which we abide, has like another 
 Goshen been severed from the plague, and that 
 we have light in our dwellings. The road of 
 salvation for us is a high road, and the way- 
 farers, though ' simple, need not err therein/ 
 The Gospel lies open in the market-place, 
 
( 6 ) 
 
 and on every windo seat, so that (virtually, 
 at least) the deaf m T hear the words of the 
 Book! It is preael \ at every turning, so 
 that the blind may see them. (Isai. xxix. 18.) 
 The circumstances then being so different, if 
 the result should prove similar, we may be 
 quite certain that we shall not be held guilt- 
 less. The ignorance, which may be the excuse 
 pf others, will be our crime. Our birth and 
 denizenship in an enlightened and protestant 
 land, will, with all our rights and franchises 
 to boot, be brought in judgment against us, 
 and stand first in the fearful list of blessings 
 abused. The glories of our country will form 
 the blazonry of our own impeachment, and 
 the very name of Englishmen, which we are 
 almost all of us too proud of, and scarcely 
 any of us enough thankful for, will he an- 
 nexed to that of Christians only to light up 
 our shame, and aggravate our condemnation. 
 I repeat, therefore, that the habitual un- 
 reilectingness, which in certain countries may 
 be susceptible of more or less palliation in most 
 instances, can in this country be deemed 
 blameless in none. The humblest and least 
 educated of our countrymen must have wik 
 fully neglected the inestimable privileges, se- 
 cured to all alike, if he has not himself founds 
 
( 1 ) 
 
 if he has not from his Avn personal expe- 
 rience discovered, the jLtf sufficiency of the 
 Scriptures in all knoV. K -Ige requisite for a 
 right performance of his duty as a man and a 
 christian. Of the labouring classes, who in all 
 countries form the great majority of the in- 
 habitants^ more than this is not demanded, 
 more than this is not perhaps generally desire- 
 able— i£ They are not sought for in public 
 counsel, nor need they be found where politic 
 sentences are spoken. — It is enough if every 
 one is wise in the working of his own craft : 
 so best will they maintain the state of the 
 world." 
 
 But you, my friends, to whom the fol- 
 lowing pages are more particularly addressed, 
 as to men moving in the higher class of 
 society : — You will, I hope, have availed 
 yourselves of the ampler means entrusted to 
 you by God's providence, to a more exten- 
 sive study and a wider use of his revealed 
 will and word. From you we have a right 
 to expect a sober and meditative accomoda- 
 tion to your own times and country of those 
 important truths declared in the inspired 
 writings f for a thousand generations/ and of 
 the awful examples, belonging to all ages, by 
 which those truths are at once illustrated and 
 
( 8 ) 
 
 confirmed. Would you feel conscious that 
 you had shewn yourselves unequal to your 
 station in society — would you stand de- 
 graded in your own eyes ; if you betrayed an 
 utter want of information respecting the acts 
 of human sovereigns and legislators? And 
 should you not much rather be both ashamed 
 and afraid to know yourselves inconversant 
 with the acts and constitutions of God, whose 
 law executeth itself, and whose Word is the 
 foundation j the power, and the life of the 
 universe ? Do you hold it a requisite of your 
 rank to shew yourselves inquisitive concerning 
 the expectations and plans of statesmen and 
 state-counsellors? Do you excuse it as na- 
 tural curiosity, that you lend a listening ear 
 to the guesses of state-gazers, to the dark 
 hints and open revilings of our self-inspired 
 state fortune-tellers, * the wizards, that peep 
 and mutter' and forecast, alarmists by trade, 
 and malecontents for their bread? And 
 should you not feel a deeper interest in predic- 
 tions which are permanent prophecies, because 
 they are at the same time eternal truths? 
 Predictions which in containing the grounds of 
 fulfilment involve the principles of foresight, 
 and teach the science of the future in its per- 
 petual elements ? 
 
( 9 ) 
 
 But I will struggle to believe that of 
 those whom I now suppose myself addressing, 
 there are few who have not so employed 
 their greater leisure and superior advantages 
 as to render these remarks, if not wholly 
 superfluous, yet personally inapplicable. In 
 common with your worldly inferiors, you 
 will indeed have directed your main atten- 
 tion to the promises and the information 
 conveyed in the records of the evangelists 
 and apostles: promises, that need only a 
 lively trust in them, on our own part, to be 
 the means as well as the pledges of our eternal 
 welfare! information that opens out to our 
 knowledge a kingdom that is not of this 
 world, thrones that cannot be shaken, and 
 sceptres that can neither be broken or trans- 
 ferred! Yet not the less on this account will 
 you have looked back with a proportionate 
 interest on the temporal destinies of men 
 and nations, stored up for our instruction 
 in the archives of the Old Testament: not 
 the less will you delight to retrace the 
 paths by which Providence has led the 
 kingdoms of this world through the valley of 
 mortal life — Paths, engraved with the foot- 
 marks of captains sent forth from the God of 
 Armies! Nations in whose guidance or chastise 
 
 B 
 
- ( 10 ) 
 
 ment the arm of Omnipotence itself was made 
 bare. 
 
 Recent occurrences have given additional 
 strength and fresh force to our sage poet's 
 eulogy on the Jewish prophets : 
 
 As men divinely taught and better teaching 
 
 The solid rules of civil government 
 
 In their majestic unaffected style, 
 
 Than all the oratory of Greece and Rome. 
 
 In them is plainest taught and easiest learnt 
 
 What makes a nation happy and keeps it so, 
 
 What ruins kingdoms and lays cities flat. 
 
 Paradise Regained, iv. 354. 
 
 If there be any antidote to that restless 
 craving for the wonders of the day, which in 
 conjunction with the appetite for publicity is 
 spreading like an efflorescence on the surface 
 of our national character ; if there exist means 
 for deriving resignation from general discon- 
 tent, means of building up with the very 
 materials of political gloom that stedfast frame 
 of hope which affords the only certain shelter 
 from the throng of self-realizing alarms, at the 
 same time that it is the natural home and 
 workshop of all the active virtues ; that anti- 
 dote and these means must be sought for in the 
 collation of the present with the past, in the 
 habit of thoughtfully assimilating the events of 
 
( 11 ) 
 
 our own age to those of the time before 
 us. If this be a moral advantage derivable 
 from history in general, rendering its study 
 therefore a moral duty for such as possess the 
 opportunities of books, leisure and education, 
 it would be inconsistent even with the name 
 of believers not to recur with pre-eminent 
 interest to events and revolutions, the records 
 of which are as much distinguished from all 
 other history by their especial claims to divine 
 authority, as the facts themselves were from 
 all other facts by especial manifestation of 
 divine interference. c Whatsoever things,' saith 
 Saint Paul (Romans xv. 4.) tf were written 
 aforetime, were written for our learning; that 
 we through patience and comfort of the Scrip- 
 tures might have hope/ 
 
 In the infancy of the world, signs and 
 wonders were requisite in order to startle and 
 break down that superstition, idolatrous in 
 itself and the source of all other idolatry, 
 which tempts the natural man to seek the 
 true cause and origin of public calamities in 
 outward circumstances, persons and incidents : 
 in agents therefore that were themselves but 
 surges of the same tide, passive conductors of 
 the one invisible influence, under which the 
 total host of billows, in the whole line of sue- 
 
( 12 ) 
 
 cessive impulse, swell and roll shoreward; 
 there finally, each in its turn, to strike, roar 
 and be dissipated. 
 
 But with each miracle worked there was 
 a truth revealed, which thence forward was 
 to act as its substitute: And if we think 
 the Bible less applicable to us on account of 
 the miracles, we degrade ourselves into mere 
 slaves of sense and fancy, which are indeed 
 the appointed medium between earth and 
 heaven, but for that very cause stand in a 
 desirable relation to spiritual truth then only, 
 when, as a mere and passive medium, they 
 yield a free passage to its light. It was only 
 to overthrow the usurpation exercised in and 
 through the senses, that the senses were mira- 
 culously appealed to. Reason and Religion (b) 
 are their own evidence. The natural Sun is in 
 this respect a symbol of the spiritual. Ere he 
 is fully arisen, and while his glories are still 
 under veil, he calls up the breeze to chase 
 away the usurping vapours of the night-season, 
 and thus converts the air itself into the mini- 
 ster of its own purification : not surely in proof 
 or elucidation of the light from heaven, but to 
 prevent its interception. 
 
 Wherever, therefore, similar circumstances 
 co-exist with the same moral causes, the prin- 
 
( 13 ) 
 
 ciples revealed j and the examples recorded, in 
 the inspired writings render miracles super- 
 fluous : and if we neglect to apply truths in 
 expectation of wonders, or under pretext of the 
 cessation of the latter, we tempt God and 
 merit the same reply which our Lord gave to 
 the Pharisees on a like occasion. f A wicked 
 and an adulterous generation seeketh after a 
 sign, and there shall no sign he given to it, hut 
 the sign of the prophet Jonas:' that is, a threat- 
 ening call to repentance, (c) Equally appli- 
 cable and prophetic will the following verses 
 be. c The men of Nineveh shall rise in judg- 
 ment with this generation and shall condemn 
 it, because they repented at the preaching of 
 Jonas, and behold, a greater than Jonas is here. 
 — The queen of the South shall rise up in the 
 judgment with this generation, and shall con- 
 demn it : for she came from the uttermost parts 
 of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, 
 and behold a greater than Solomon is here.* 
 For have we not divine assurance that Christ 
 is with his church, even to the end of the world"? 
 And what could the queen of the South, or the 
 men of Nineveh have beheld, that could enter 
 into competition with the events of our own 
 times, in importance, in splendor, or even in 
 strangeness and significancy? 
 
( 14 ) 
 
 The true origin of human events is so little 
 susceptible of that kind of evidence which can 
 compel our belief; so many are the disturbing 
 forces • which in every cycle or ellipse of 
 changes modify the motion given by the first 
 projection; and every age has, or imagines it 
 has, its own circumstances which render past 
 experience no longer applicable to the present 
 case; that there will never be wanting answers, 
 and explanations, and specious flatteries of 
 hope to persuade a people and its govern- 
 ment, that the history of the past is inappli- 
 cable to their case. And no wonder, if we 
 read history for the facts instead of reading 
 it for the sake of the general principles, 
 which are to the facts as the root and sap of 
 a tree to its leaves: and no wonder, if history 
 so read should find a dangerous rival in 
 novels, nay, if the latter should be preferred 
 to the former on the score even of pro- 
 bability. I well remember, that when the 
 examples of former Jacobins, as Julius Caesar, 
 Cromwell, and the like, were adduced in 
 France and England at the commencement 
 of the French Consulate, it was ridiculed as 
 pedantry and pedant's ignorance to fear a re- 
 petition of usurpation and military despotism 
 at the close of the enlightened eighteenth 
 
( 15 ) 
 
 Century ! Even so, in the very dawn of the 
 late tempestuous day, when the revolutions of 
 Corcyra, the prescriptions of the Reformers, 
 Marius, Caesar, <fec. and the direful effects of 
 the levelling tenets in the Peasant's War in 
 Germany, (differenced from the tenets of the 
 first French constitution only by the mode of 
 wording them, the figures of speech being 
 borrowed in the one instance from theology, 
 and in the other from modern metaphysics) 
 were urged on the Convention, and its vindica- 
 tors; the magi of the day, the true citizens of 
 the world, the Plusquam-perfecti of patriotism, 
 gave us set proofs that similar results were 
 impossible, and that it was an insult to so phi- 
 losophical an age, to s6 enlightened a nation, 
 to dare direct the public eye towards them as 
 to lights of warning. Alas! like lights in the 
 stern of a vessel they illuminated the path 
 only that had been past over ! 
 
 The politic Florentine* has observed, that 
 there are brains of three races. The one un- 
 derstands of itself ; the other understands as 
 much as is shown it by others ; the third nei- 
 
 * Sono &i tre generazioai cerveili : 1'uno intende per 
 se; l'altro intende quan to da altri gliemostro; il terzo 
 uoa iateade ai per se stesso se per demostrazione d'altri. 
 
 Machiavelli. 
 
( 16 ) 
 
 ther understands of itself, nor what is shewn 
 it by others. In our times there are more per- 
 haps who belong to the third class from vanity 
 and acquired frivolity of mind, than from natu- 
 ral incapacity. It is no uncommon foible with 
 those who are honoured with the acquaint- 
 ance of the great, to attribute national events 
 to particular persons, particular measures, to 
 the errors of one man, to the intrigues of ano- 
 ther, to any possible spark of a particular occa- 
 sion, rather than to the true proximate cause, 
 (and which alone deserves the name of a cause) 
 the predominant state of public opinion. And 
 still less are they inclined to refer the latter 
 to the ascendancy of speculative principles, 
 and the scheme or mode of thinking in vogue. 
 I have known men, who with significant nods 
 and the pitying contempt of smiles, have de- 
 nied all influence to the corruptions of moral 
 and political philosophy, and with much so- 
 lemnity have proceeded to solve the riddle of 
 the French Revolution by Anecdotes ! Yet 
 it would not be difficult, by an unbroken chain 
 of historic facts, to demonstrate that the most 
 important changes in the commercial relations 
 of the world had their origin in the closets or 
 lonely walks of uninterested theorists ; — that the 
 mighty epochs of commerce^ that have changed 
 
( If ) 
 
 the face of empires ; nay, the most important 
 of those discoveries and improvements in the 
 mechanic arts, which have numerically in- 
 creased our population beyond what the wisest 
 statesmen of Elizabeth's reign deemed possible^ 
 and again doubled this population virtually ; 
 the most important, I say, of those inventions 
 that in their results 
 
 — best uphold 
 
 War by her two main nerves, iron and gold ; 
 
 had their origin not in the cabinets of states- 
 men, or in the practical insight of men of 
 business, but in the closets of uninterested 
 theorists, in the visions of recluse genius. To 
 the immense majority of men, even in civilized 
 countries, speculative philosophy has ever 
 been, and must ever remain, a terra incognita. 
 Yet it is not the less true, that all the epoch- 
 forming Revolutions of the Christian world, 
 the revolutions of religion and with them the 
 civil, social, and domestic habits of the nations 
 concerned, have coincided with the rise and 
 fall of metaphysical systems. So few are the 
 minds that really govern the machine of society, 
 and so incomparably more numerous and more 
 important are the indirect consequences of 
 things than their foreseen and direct effects. 
 
( 18 ) 
 
 It is with nations as with individuals. In 
 tranquil moods and peaceable times we are 
 quite practical. Facts only and cool common 
 sense are then in fashion. But let the winds 
 of passion swell, and strait way men begin to 
 generalize; to connect by remotest analogies; 
 to express the most universal positions of reason 
 in the most glowing figures of fancy; in short, 
 to feel particular truths and mere facts, as 
 poor, cold, narrow 3 and incommensurate with 
 their feelings. 
 
 The Apostle of the Gentiles quoted from a 
 Greek comic poet. Let it not then be con- 
 demned as unseasonable or out of place, if I 
 remind you that in the intuitive knowledge of 
 this truth, and with his wonted fidelity to 
 nature, our own great poet has placed the 
 greater number of his profoundest maxims 
 and general truths, both political and moral, 
 not in the mouths of men at ease, but of men 
 under the influence of passion, when the 
 mighty thoughts overmaster and become the 
 tyrants of the mind that has brought them 
 forth. In his Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Ham- 
 let, principles of deepest insight and widest 
 interest fly off like sparks from the glowing 
 iron under the loud anvil. It seems a paradox 
 only to the unthinking, and it is a fact that 
 
( 19 ) 
 
 none, but the unread in history, will deny, 
 that in periods of popular tumult and innova- 
 tion the more abstract a notion is, the more 
 readily has it been found to combine, the 
 closer has appeared its affinity, with the feel- 
 ings of a people and with all their immediate 
 impulses to action. At the commencement of 
 the French revolution, in the remotest villages 
 every tongue was employed in echoing and 
 enforcing the almost geometrical abstractions 
 of the physiocratic politicians and economists. 
 The public roads were crowded with armed 
 enthusiasts disputing on the inalienable sove- 
 reignty of the people, the imprescriptible laws 
 of the pure reason, and the universal constitu- 
 tion, which, as rising out of the nature and 
 rights of man as man^ all nations alike were 
 under the obligation of adopting. Turn over 
 the fugitive writings, that are still extant, of 
 the age of Luther; peruse the pamphlets and 
 loose sheets that came out in flights during 
 the reign of Charles the First and the Re-* 
 public; and you will find in these one con- 
 tinued comment on the aphorism of Lord 
 Chancellor Bacon (a man assuredly sufficiently 
 acquainted with the extent of secret and per- 
 sonal influence) that the knowledge of the 
 speculative principles of men in general 
 
( 20 ) 
 
 between the age of twenty and thirty, is the 
 one great source of political prophecy. And 
 Sir Philip Sidney regarded the adoption of 
 one set of principles in the Netherlands, 
 as a proof of the divine agency and the foun- 
 tain of all the events and successes of that 
 revolution. 
 
 A calm and detailed examination of the 
 facts justifies me to my own mind in hazard- 
 ing the bold assertion, that the fearful blunders 
 of the late dread revolution, and all the cala- 
 mitous mistakes of its opponents from its 
 commencement even to the sera of loftier 
 principles and wiser measures (an sera, that 
 began with, and ought to be named from, the 
 war of the Spanish and Portuguese insurgents) 
 every failure with all its gloomy results may be 
 unanswerably deduced from the neglect of some 
 maxim or other that had been established by 
 clear reasoning and plain facts in the writings 
 of Thucydides, Tacitus, Machiavel, Bacon, 
 or Harrington. These are red-letter names 
 even in the almanacks of worldly wisdom : 
 and yet I dare challenge all the critical 
 benches of infidelity to point out any one im- 
 portant truth, any one efficient, practical 
 direction or warning, which did not pre- 
 exist, and for the most part in a sounder, 
 
( 21 ) 
 
 more intelligible, and more comprehensive 
 form in the Bible. 
 
 In addition to this, the Hebrew legislator, 
 and the other inspired poets, prophets, histo- 
 rians and moralists of the Jewish church have 
 two immense advantages in their favor. First, 
 their particular rules and prescripts flow di- 
 rectly and visibly from universal principles, as 
 from a fountain: they flow from principles 
 and ideas that are not so properly said to be 
 confirmed by reason as to be reason itself! 
 Principles, in act and procession, disjoined from 
 which, and from the emotions that inevitably 
 accompany the actual intuition of their truth, 
 the widest maxims of prudence are like 
 arms without hearts, muscles without nerves. 
 Secondly, from the very nature of these 
 principles, as taught in the Bible, they are 
 understood in exact proportion as they are 
 believed and felt. The regulator is never sepa- 
 rated from the main spring. For the words of 
 the apostle are literally and philosophically 
 true : We (that is, the human race) live by 
 faith. Whatever we do or know, that in 
 kind is different from the brute creation, has 
 its origin in a determination of the reason to 
 have faith and trust in itself. This, its first 
 act of faith is scarcely less than identical 
 
( 22 ) 
 
 with its own being. Implicite, it is the 
 Copula — it contains the possibility — of every 
 position j to which there exists any corres- 
 pondence in reality. It is itself, therefore, 
 the realizing principle, the spiritual sub- 
 stratum of the whole complex body of truths. 
 This primal act of faith is enunciated in 
 the word, God : a faith not derived from ex- 
 perience^ but its ground and source, and with- 
 out which the fleeting chaos of fads would 
 no more form experience, than the dust of 
 the grave can of itself make a living man. 
 The imperative and oracular form of the 
 inspired Scripture is the form of reason itself 
 in all things purely rational and moral. 
 
 If it be the word of Divine Wisdom, we 
 might anticipate that it would in all things 
 be distinguished from other books, as the 
 Supreme Reason, whose knowledge is creative, 
 and antecedent to the things known, is distin- 
 guished from the understanding, or creaturely 
 mind of the individual, the acts of which are 
 posterior to the things, it records and arranges. 
 Man alone was created in the image of God : 
 a position groundless and inexplicable, if the 
 reason in man do not differ from the under- 
 standing. For this the inferior animals, (many 
 at least) possess in degree: and assuredly 
 
( 23 ) 
 
 the divine image or idea is not a thing of 
 degrees. 
 
 Hence it follows that what is expressed in 
 the inspired writings,, is implied in all absolute 
 science. The latter whispers what the former 
 utter as with the voice of a trumpet. As 
 sure as God liveth, is the pledge and assu- 
 rance of every positive truth^ that is asserted 
 by the reason. The human understanding 
 musing on many things^ snatches at truths but 
 is frustrated and disheartened by the fluctuating 
 nature of its objects ;+ its conclusions there- 
 fore are timid and uncertain^ and it hath no 
 way of giving permanence to things but by 
 reducing them to abstractions : hardly (saith 
 the author of the Wisdom of Solomon^ of 
 whose words the preceding sentence is a para- 
 phrase) hardly do we guess aright at things 
 that are upon earthy and with labour do we 
 find the things that are before us; but all 
 certain knowlege is in the power of God^ and 
 
 "t Tlorafita ydp ovk iqi llg ip(3rjvai r^ avrif ica& 
 *Hpa»cXcirov, ovte SvrjTrjg ovmaq Sig ti\pa<r$ai Kara e^iv' 6X\a 
 
 O^VTTjTL KCU Ta^El TJ/C f.l£Ta(3o\ijC (TKtSvrjffl KO.I TTaXlV GVVCiyEU, 
 
 fiaXKov he ovEe -rrakiv ovde vgepop a\\' &pa ovvigarai KaX 
 
 cnroXenrEi, ical Trpoffeiai teal uttekxc oBev ovR etc to etvai irzpaivei 
 
 to- yiyvvfievov avrrjg T<5 prj^ETroTE Xijyeiv prjh' JjTrairBaL n)v 
 
 yivtaiv. - „ 
 
 Plutarch, Edii.MvM. cap. xvin. Vol, p. ix, 2.39. 
 
( 24 ) 
 
 a presence from above. So only have the 
 ways of men been reformed, and every doctrine 
 that contains a saving truth, and all acts 
 pleasing to God (in other words, all actions 
 consonant with human nature, in its original 
 intention) are through wisdom : that is, the 
 rational spirit of man. 
 
 This then is the prerogative of the Bible ; 
 this is the privilege of its believing students. 
 With them the principle of knowledge is like- 
 wise a spring and principle of action. And 
 as it is the only certain knowledge, so are the 
 actions that flow with it the only ones on 
 which a secure reliance can be placed. The 
 understanding may suggest motives, may avail 
 itself of motives, and make judicious conjec- 
 tures respecting the probable consequences of 
 actions. But the knowledge taught in the 
 Scriptures produces the motives, involves the 
 consequences ; and its highest formula is still : 
 As sure as God liveth, so will it be unto 
 thee ! Strange as this position will appear to 
 such as forget that motives can be causes only 
 in a secondary and improper sense, inasmuch 
 as the man makes the motive, not the motives 
 the man ; and that the same thought shall be 
 a motive to one man and no motive to his 
 neighbour; (a sufficient proof that the motives 
 
( 25 ) 
 
 themselves are effects, the principle of which, 
 good or evil, lies far deeper) — matter for 
 scorn and insult though this position will furnish 
 to those, who think (or try to think) every 
 man out of his senses who has not lost his 
 reason (or alienated it by wilful sophistry, 
 demanding reasons for reason itself) yet all 
 history bears evidence to its truth. The 
 sense of expediency, the cautious balancing of 
 comparative advantages, the constant wake- 
 fulness to the Cui bono? — in connection 
 with the Quid mihi ? — all these are in their 
 places in the routine of Conduct, by which 
 the individual provides for himself the real 
 or supposed wants of to-day and to-morrow : 
 and in quiet times and prosperous circumstances 
 a nation presents an aggregate of such indivi- 
 duals, a busy ant-hill in calm and sunshine. 
 By the happy organization of a well-governed 
 society the contradictory interests of ten mil- 
 lions of such individuals may neutralize each 
 other, and be reconciled in the unity of the 
 national interest. But whence did this happy 
 organization first come ? — Was it a tree 
 transplanted from Paradise, with all its 
 branches in full fruitage? — -Or was it sowed 
 in sun-shine? — Was it in vernal breezes and 
 
 D 
 
( 26 ) 
 
 gentle rains that it fixed its roots, and grew 
 and strengthened? — Let History answer these 
 questions! — With blood was it planted — it 
 was rocked in tempests — the goat, the ass, 
 and the stag gnawed it — the wild boar has 
 whetted his tusks on its bark. The deep 
 scars are still extant on its trunk, and the 
 path of the lightning may be traced among 
 its higher branches. And even after its full 
 growth, in the season of its strength, ( when 
 its height reached to the heaven, and the 
 sight thereof to all the earth,' the whirlwind 
 has more than once forced its stately top to 
 to touch the ground: it has been bent like a 
 bow, and sprang back like a shaft. Mightier 
 powers were at work than Expediency ever 
 yet called up ! — yea, mightier than the mere 
 Understanding can comprehend ! One con- 
 firmation of the latter assertion you may find 
 in the history of our country, written by the 
 same Scotch philosopher, who devoted his life 
 to the undermining of the Christian religion ; 
 and expended his last breath in a blasphemous 
 regret that he had not survived it ! — by the 
 same heartless sophist who, in tins island, 
 was the main pioneer of that atheistic phi- 
 losophy, which in France transvenomed the 
 
( 21 ) 
 
 natural thirst of truth into the hydrophobia 
 of a wild and homeless scepticism ; the Elias 
 of that Spirit of Anti-christ, which 
 
 still promising 
 
 Freedom, itself too sensual to be free, 
 Poisons life's amities and cheats the soul 
 Of faith, and quiet hope and all that lifts 
 And all that soothes the spirit ! 
 
 This inadequacy of the mere understanding 
 to the apprehension of moral greatness we may 
 trace in this historian's cool systematic attempt 
 to steal away every feeling of reverence for every 
 great name by a scheme of motives, in which 
 as often as possible the efforts and enterprizes 
 of heroic spirits are attributed to this or that 
 paltry view of the most despicable selfishness. 
 But in the majority of instances this would 
 have been too palpably false and slanderous : 
 and therefore the founders and martyrs of 
 our church and constitution, of our civil and 
 religious liberty, are represented as fanatics 
 and bewildered enthusiasts. But histories 
 incomparably more authentic than Mr. 
 Hume's, (nay, spite of himself even his own 
 history) confirm by irrefragable evidence the 
 aphorism of ancient wisdom, that nothing 
 great was ever atchieved without enthusiasm. 
 For what is enthusiasm but the oblivion and 
 
( 28 ) 
 
 swallowing-up of self in an object dearer than 
 self, or in an idea more vivid? — How this is 
 produced in the enthusiasm of wickedness, 
 I have explained in the third Comment an- 
 nexed to this Discourse. But in the genuine 
 enthusiasm of morals, religion, and patriotism, 
 this enlargement and elevation of the soul 
 above its mere self attest the presence, and 
 accompany the intuition of ultimate prin- 
 ciples alone. These alone can interest the 
 undegraded human spirit deeply and endur- 
 ingly, because these alone belong to its essence, 
 and will remain with it permanently. 
 
 Notions, the depthless abstractions of fleet- 
 ing phenomena, the shadows of sailing vapors, 
 the colorless repetitions of rain-bows, have 
 effected their utmost when they have added 
 to the distinctness of our knowledge. For 
 this very cause they are of themselves ad- 
 verse to lofty emotion, and it requires the 
 influence of a light and warmth, not their 
 own, to make them chrystallize into a sem- 
 blance of growth. But every principle is 
 actualized by an idea; and every idea is liv- 
 ing, productive, partaketh of infinity, and (as. 
 Bacon has sublimely observed) containeth an 
 endless power of semination. Hence it is, 
 that science^ which consists wholly in ideas 
 
( 29 ) 
 
 and principles, is power. Scientia et potentia 
 (saith the same philosopher) in idem coinci- 
 dent. Hence too it is, that notions, linked 
 arguments, reference to particular facts and 
 calculations of prudence, influence only the 
 comparatively few, the men of leisurely minds 
 who have been trained up to them: and even 
 these few they influence but faintly. But for 
 the reverse, I appeal to the general character 
 of the doctrines which have collected the most 
 numerous sects, and acted upon the moral being 
 of the converts with a force that might well 
 seem supernatural ! The great principles of 
 our religion, the sublime ideas spoken out 
 everywhere in the Old and New Testament, 
 resemble the fixed stars, which appear of the 
 same size to the naked as to the armed eye ; 
 the magnitude of which the telescope may 
 rather seem to diminish than to increase. At 
 the annunciation of principles, of ideas, the 
 soul of man awakes, and starts up, as an exile 
 in a far distant land at the unexpected sounds 
 of his native language, when after long years 
 of absence, and almost of oblivion, he is sud- 
 denly addressed in his own mother-tongue. 
 He weeps for joy, and embraces the speaker 
 as his brother. How else can we explain the 
 fact so honorable to Great Britain, that the 
 
( 30 ) 
 
 poorest* amongst us will contend with as 
 much enthusiasm as the richest for the rights 
 of property? These rights are the spheres 
 and necessary conditions of free agency. 
 But free agency contains the idea of the free 
 will; and in this he intuitively knows the 
 sublimity, and the infinite hopes, fears, and 
 capabilities of his own nature. On what 
 other ground but the cognateness of ideas and 
 principles to man as man, does the nameless 
 soldier rush to the combat in defence of the 
 liberties or the honor of his country ? — Even 
 men wofully neglectful of the precepts of 
 religion will shed their blood for its truth. 
 
 Alas ! — the main hindrance to the use of the 
 Scriptures, as your Manual, lies in the notion 
 that you are already acquainted with its 
 contents. Something new must be presented 
 to you, wholly new and wholly out of 
 yourselves ; for whatever is within us must be 
 as old as the first dawn of human reason. 
 Truths of all others the most awful and 
 
 * The reader will remember the anecdote told with 
 so much humour in Goldsmith's Essay. But this is not 
 the first instance where the mind, in its hour of meditation 
 finds matter of admiration and elevating thought, in 
 circumstances that in a different mood had excited its 
 mirth. 
 
( 31 ) 
 
 mysterious and at the same time of universal 
 interest^ are considered as so true as to &se all 
 the powers of truths and lie bed-ridden in the 
 dormitory of the soul, side by side, with the 
 most despised and exploded errors. But it 
 should not be so with you! The pride of 
 education, the sense of consistency should 
 preclude the objection : for would you not be 
 .ashamed to apply it to the works of Tacitus, 
 or of Shakespear ? Above all, the rank which 
 you hold, the influence you possess, the 
 powers you may be called to wield, give a 
 special unfitness to this frivolous craving for 
 novelty. To find no contradiction in the 
 union of old and new, to contemplate the 
 ancient op days, his words and his works, 
 with a feeling as fresh as if they were now 
 first springing forth at his fiat — this charac- 
 terizes the minds that feel the riddle of the 
 world and may help to unravel it! This, 
 most of all things, will raise you above the 
 mass of mankind, and therefore will best 
 entitle and qualify you to guide and controul 
 them ! You say, you are already familiar 
 with the Scriptures. With the words, 
 perhaps, but in any other sense you might 
 as wisely boast of your familiar acquaintance 
 
( 32 ) 
 
 with the rays of the sun, and under that 
 pretence turn away your eyes from the light of 
 Heaven. 
 
 Or would you wish for authorities ? — for 
 great examples? — You may find them in the 
 writings of Thuanus, of Lord Clarendon, of 
 Sir Thomas More, of Raleigh ; and in the 
 life and letters of the heroic Gustavus 
 Adolphus. But these, though eminent states- 
 men were christians, and might lie under 
 the thraldom of habit and prejudice. I will 
 refer you then to authorities of two great men, 
 both pagans ; but removed from each other by 
 many centuries, and not more distant in their 
 ages than in their characters and situations. 
 The first shall be that of Heraclitus, the sad and 
 recluse philosopher. YloXvuaGir) voov ov Bd&bkn' 
 
 2i/3uXAa de fiaivofxzvat gojuari ayaXaga Km aKaWuTriga Kai 
 dfivpica ^Biyyofikvr] ^(tXi o)v eriov e £iicvt vrai rrj (Jhjovtj 
 
 $ia t6v 0e6v.* Shall we hesitate to apply to 
 the prophets of God, what could be affirmed 
 
 * Translation. — Multiscience (or a variety and 
 quantity of acquired knowledge) does not teach intelli- 
 gence. But the Sibyll with wild enthusiastic mouth 
 shrilling forth unmirthful, inornate, and unperfumed 
 truths reaches to a thousand years with her voice through 
 the power of God. 
 
( 33 ) 
 
 of theSibylls by a philosopher whom Socrates, 
 the prince of philosophers, venerated for the 
 profundity of his wisdom ? 
 
 For the other, I will refer you to the 
 darling of the polished court of Augustus, to 
 the man whose works have been in all ages 
 deemed the models of good sense, and are still 
 the pocket companions of those who pride 
 themselves on uniting the scholar with the 
 gentleman* This accomplished man of the 
 world has given an account of the subjects of 
 conversation between the illustrious statesmen 
 who governed, and the brightest luminaries, 
 who then adorned, the empire of the civilized- 
 world: 
 
 Sermo oritur non de villis domibusve alienis 
 Nee, male, nee ne lepus saltet. Sed quod magis ad no* 
 Pertinet, et nescire malum est, agitamus : utrumne 
 ■Divitiis homines, an sint virtute beati ? 
 El quo sit natura boni ? summumque quid eius ? # 
 
 Horat. Sermon, L. II. Sat. 6. v., 71, 
 
 * Translation. — Conversation arises not concerning 
 the country seats or families of strangers in a neighbour- 
 hood, or whether the dancing hare performed well or 
 ill. But we discuss what more nearly concerns us, and 
 which it is an evil not to know : whether men are made 
 nappy by wealth or by virtue ? In what consists the 
 nature of good ? And what is the supreme good and 
 to be our ultimate aim ? . > 
 
 E 
 
( 34 ) 
 
 Berkeley indeed asserts, and is supported 
 in his assertion by the great statesmen, Lord 
 Bacon and Sir Walter Raleigh, that without 
 an habitual interest in these subjects a man 
 maybe a dextrous intriguer, but never ean 
 be a statesman. (The -Friend, No. 5.) 
 
 But do you require some one or more 
 particular passage from the Bible, that may 
 at once illustrate and exemplify its applica- 
 bility to the changes and fortunes of empires? 
 Of the numerous chapters that relate to the 
 Jewish tribes, their enemies and allies, before 
 and after their division into two kingdoms, 
 it would be more difficult to state a single 
 one, from which some guiding light might 
 not be struck. And in nothing is Scriptural 
 history more strongly contrasted with the 
 histories of highest note in the present age, 
 than in its freedom from the hollo wness of 
 abstractions. While the latter present a 
 shadow-fight of Things and Quantities, the 
 former gives us the history of Men, and 
 balances the important influence of individual 
 Minds with the previous state of the national 
 morals and manners, in which, as constituting 
 a specific susceptibility, it presents to us the 
 true cause both, of the Influence itself, and of 
 the Weal or Woe that were its Consequents. 
 
( 35 ) 
 
 How should it be otherwise f The histories 
 and political economy of the present and 
 preceding century partake in the general 
 contagion of its mechanic philosophy^ and are 
 the product of an unenlivened generalizing 
 'Understanding. In the Scriptures they are 
 the living educts of the Imagination ; of that 
 reconciling and mediatory power ^ which in* 
 corporating the Reason in Images of the 
 Sense^ and organizing (as it were) the flux of 
 the Senses by the permanence and self-circling 
 energies of the Reason^ gives birth to a system 
 of symbols^ harmonious in themselves,, and 
 consubstansial with the truths^ of which they 
 are the conductors. These are the Wheels which 
 Ezekiel beheld^ when the hand of the Lord 
 was upon him^ and he saw visions of God as 
 he sate among the captives by the river of 
 Chebar. Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, 
 the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to 
 go: for the spirit of the living creature was in 
 the wheels also. The truths and the symbols 
 that represent them move in conjunction and 
 form the living chariot that bears up (for us) 
 the throne of the Bivine Humanity. Hence^ 
 by a derivative^ indeed^ but not a divided^ in- 
 fluence^ and though in a secondary yet in more 
 than a metaphorical sense^ tKe Sacred Book: 
 
( 36 ) 
 
 is worthily intitled the word of god. Hence 
 too, its contents present to us the stream of 
 time continuous as Life and a symbol of Eter- 
 nity, inasmuch as the Past and the Future 
 are virtually contained in the Present. Ac- 
 cording therefore to our relative position on its 
 banks the Sacred History becomes prophetic, 
 the Sacred Prophecies historical, while the 
 power and substance of both inhere in its Laws> 
 its Promises, and its Comminations. In the 
 Scriptures therefore both Facts and Persons must 
 of necessity have a two-fold significance, a past 
 and a future, a temporary and a perpetual, a 
 particular and a universal application. They 
 must be at once Portraits and Ideals. 
 
 Eheu! paupertina philosophia in pauper- 
 tinam religionem ducit : — A hunger-bitten 
 and idea-less philosophy naturally produces a 
 starveling and comfortless religion. It is 
 samohg the miseries of the present age that it 
 recognizes no medium between Literal and 
 Metaphorical. Faith is. either to be buried 
 in the dead letter, or its name and honors 
 usurped by a counterfeit product of the me- 
 chanical understanding, which in the blind- 
 ness of self-complacency confounds symbols 
 with allegories. Now an Allegory is but 
 ;a translation of abstract notions into a picture- 
 
( 3* } 
 
 language which is itself nothing but an ab* 
 straction from objects of the senses; the prin? 
 cipal being more worthless even than its 
 phantom proxy, both alike unsubstantial; 
 and the former shapeless to boot. On the 
 other hand a Symbol (6 iqw au ravrriyopiKovy 
 is characterized by a translucence of the Spe? 
 cial in the Individual or of the General in the 
 Especial or of the Universal in the General* 
 Above all by the translucence of the Eternal 
 .through and in the Temporal. It always 
 partakes of the Reality which it renders in- 
 telligible ; and while it enunciates the whole; 
 abides itself as a living part in that Unity, of 
 which it is the representative. The other are 
 hut empty echoes which the fancy arbitrarily 
 associates with apparitions of matter, less 
 beautiful but not less shadowy than the slop- 
 ing orchard or hill-side pasture-field seen in 
 the transparent lake below, Alas! for the 
 flocks that are to be led forth to such pastures! 
 .* It shall even be as when the hungry dreamethy 
 4ind behold! he eateth; but he wakethnnd his 
 soul is empty: or as when the thirsty dreameth 9 
 and behold he drinketh ; but he awaketh and 
 is faint!" (Isaiah xxix. 8.) O ! that we 
 -would seek for the bread which was given 
 ■from heaven, that we should eat thereof and 
 
( 38 ) 
 
 be. strengthened! O that we would draw at 
 the well at which the flocks of our fore- 
 fathers had living water drawn for them, 
 even that water which 5 instead of mocking the 
 thirst of him to whom it is given, becomes 
 a well within himself springing up to life 
 everlasting ! 
 
 When we reflect how large a part of our 
 present knowledge and civilization is owing, 
 directly or indirectly, to the Bible ; when we 
 are compelled to admit, as a fact of history, 
 that the Bible has been the main Lever by 
 which the moral and intellectual character of 
 Europe has been raised to its present compa- 
 rative height ; we should be struck, me 
 thinks, by the marked and prominent differ- 
 ence of this Book from the works which it is 
 now the fashion to quote as guides and autho- 
 rities in morals, politics and history. I will 
 point out a few of the excellencies by which 
 the one is distinguished, and shall leave it to 
 your own judgment and recollection to per- 
 ceive and apply the contrast to the pro*- 
 ductions of highest name in these latter days. 
 In the Bible every agent appears and acts as 
 a self-subsisting individual : each has a life of 
 its own, and yet all are one life. The ele- 
 ments of necessity and free-will are reconciled 
 
( 33 ) 
 
 in the Higher power of an omnipresent Pro- 
 vidence, that predestinates the whole in the 
 moral freedom of the integral parts. Of this 
 the Bible never suffers us to lose sight. The 
 root is never detached from the ground. It is 
 God everywhere : and all creatures conform 
 to his decrees, the righteous by performance 
 of the law, the disobedient by the sufferance 
 of the penalty. 
 
 Suffer me to inform or remind you, that 
 there is a threefold Necessity. There is a 
 logical, and there is a mathematical, neces- 
 sity; but the latter is always hypothetical^ 
 and both subsist formally only, not in any" 
 real object. • Only by the intuition and im- 
 mediate spiritual consciousness of the idea of 
 God, as the One and Absolute, at once the 
 Ground and the Cause, who alone containeth 
 in himself the ground of his own nature, and 
 therein of all natures, do we arrive at thef 
 third, which alone is a real objective, neces- 
 sity. Here the immediate consciousness de- 
 cides: the idea is its own evidence, and is 
 insusceptible of all other. It is necessarily 1 
 groundless and indemonstrable; because it is 
 itself the ground of all possible demonstration. 
 The Reason hath faith in itself, in its- own 
 revelations. O A0F02 E$H. Ipse dixit J So 
 
( 40 > 
 
 it is : for it is so ! All the necessity of causal! 
 relations (which the mere understanding rew 
 duces, and must reduce to co-existence and 
 regular succession* in the objects of which 
 they are predicated, and to habit and associa- 
 tion in the mind predicating) depends on, or 
 rather inheres in, the idea of the Omni* 
 present and Absolute : for this it is, in which 
 the Possible is one and the same with the* 
 {leal and the Necessary. Herein the Bible 
 differs from all the books of Greek philosophy^ 
 and in a two-fold manner. It doth not affirm 
 a Divine Nature only, but a God : and not a: 
 God only, but the living God. Hence in the: 
 Scriptures alone is the Jus divinum, or direct 
 Relation of the State and its Magistracy to 
 the Supreme Being, taught as a vital and in* 
 dispensable part of all moral and of all political 
 wisdom, even as the Jewish alone was a true! 
 theocracy. 
 
 „, But I refer to the demand. Were it my 
 object to touch on the present state of public: 
 affairs in this kingdom, or on the prospective 
 measures in agitation respecting our sister 
 
 . * See Hume's Essays. The sophist evades, as Cicero 
 long ago remarked, the better half of the predicament, 
 which is not " praeire" but " efficienter prseire." 
 
( 41 ) 
 
 island, I would direct your most serious me- 
 ditations to the latter period of the reign of 
 Solomon, and to the revolutions in the reign 
 of Rehoboam, his successor. But I should 
 tread on glowing embers. I will turn to a 
 subject on which all men of reflection are at 
 length in agreement — the causes of the revo- 
 lution and fearful chastisement of France. 
 We have learned to trace them back to the 
 rising importance of the commercial and manu- 
 facturing class, and its incompatibility with 
 the old feudal privileges and prescriptions ; to 
 the spirit of sensuality and ostentation, which 
 from the court had spread through all the 
 towns and cities of the empire ; to the pre- 
 dominance of a presumptuous and irreligious 
 philosophy; to the extreme over-rating of the 
 knowledge and power given by the improve- 
 ments of the arts and sciences, especially those 
 of astronomy, mechanics^ and a wonder-work- 
 ing chemistry ; to an assumption of prophetic 
 power, and the general conceit that states 
 and governments might be and ought to be 
 constructed as machines, every movement of 
 which might be foreseen and taken into pre- 
 vious calculation; to the consequent multi- 
 tude of plans and constitutions, of planners 
 and constitution-makers^ and the remorseless 
 
( 4? ) 
 
 arrogance with which the authors and pro- 
 selytes of every new proposal were ready to 
 realize it, be the cost what it might in the 
 established rights, or even in the lives, of men; 
 in short, to restlessness, presumption, sensual 
 indulgence, and the idolatrous reliance on 
 false philosophy in the whole domestic, social, 
 and political life of the stirring and effective 
 part of the community/, these all acting, at 
 once and together, on a mass of material^ 
 supplied by the unfeeling extravagance and 
 oppressions of the government, which ' shewed 
 no mercy, and very heavily laid its yoke.' 
 
 Turn then to the chapter from which the. 
 last words were cited, and read the following, 
 seren verses; and I am deceived if you will 
 not be compelled to admit, that the Prophet 
 Isaiah revealed the true philosophy of the. 
 French revolution more than two thousand 
 years before it became a sad irrevocable truth of 
 history. ' And thou saidst, I shall be a lady 
 for ever: so that thou didst not lay these 
 things to thy heart, neither didst remember 
 the latter end of it. Therefore, hear now 
 this, thou that art given to pleasures, that 
 dwellest carelessly, that say est in thine heart, 
 I am, and none else besides me! I shall 
 not sit as a widow, neither shall I know the 
 
( 43 ) 
 
 loss of children. But these two things shall 
 come to thee in a moment ^ in one day; the 
 loss of children^ and widowhood ; they shall 
 come upon thee in their perfection^ for the 
 multitude of thy sorceries^ and for the abund- 
 ance of thine inchantments. For thou hast 
 trusted in thy wickedness ; thou hast said^ 
 there is no overseer. Thy wisdoni and thy 
 knowledge, it hath perverted thee ; and thou 
 hast said in thine heart, I am, and none else 
 besides me. Therefore shall evil come upoii 
 thee, thou shalt not know * from whence it 
 riseth : and mischief shall fall upon thee^ 
 thou shalt not be able to put it off; attd 
 
 * The Reader will scarcely fail to find in this verse a 
 remembrancer of the sudden setting-in of the frost, a 
 fortnight before the usual time (in a country too, where 
 the commencement of its two seasons is in general 
 scarcely less regular than that of the wet and dry seasons 
 between the tropics) which caused, and the desolation 
 which accompanied, the flight from Moscow. The Rus- 
 sians baffled the physical forces of the imperial Jacobin, 
 because they were inaccessible to his imaginary forces. 
 The faith in St. Nicholas kept off at safe distance the 
 more pernicious superstition of the Destinies of Napoleon 
 the Great. The English in the Peninsula overcame the 
 real, because they set at defiance, and had heard only 
 to despise,- the imaginary powers of the irresistible Em- 
 peror. Thank heaven, the heart of the country was 
 sound at the core. 
 
( 44 ) 
 
 desolation shall come upon thee suddenly, 
 which thou shalt not know. Stand now with 
 thine enchantments, and with the multitude 
 of thy sorceries, wherein thou hast laboured 
 from thy youth ; if so be thou shalt be able 
 to profit, if so be thou may est prevail. Thou 
 art wearied in the multitude of thy counsels: 
 let now the astrologers, the stargazers, the 
 monthly, prognosticators stand up, and save 
 thee from these things that shall come upon 
 thee.' v ■ • •;■ 
 
 There is a grace that would enable us to take 
 up vipers, and the evil thing shall not hurt 
 us: a spiritual alchemy which can transmute 
 poisons into a panacaea. We are counselled 
 by our Lord himself to make unto ourselves 
 friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness : 
 and in this age of sharp contrasts and grotesque 
 combinations it would be a wise method of 
 sympathizing with the tone and spirit of the 
 Times, if we elevated even our daily news- 
 papers and political journals into Comments 
 on the Bible, 
 
 When I named this Essay a Sermon, I 
 sought to prepare the inquirers after it for 
 the absence of all the usual softenings sug- 
 gested by worldly prudence, of all compro- 
 
( 45 ) 
 
 mise between truth and courtesy. But not 
 even as a Sermon would I have addressed the 
 present Discourse to a promiscuous audience ; 
 and for this reason I likewise announced it in 
 the title-page , as exclusively ad clerum; i. e. 
 (in the old and wide sense of the word) to 
 men of clerkly acquirements^ of whatever 
 profession. I would that the greater part of 
 our publications could be thus directed, each 
 to its appropriate class of Readers. But this 
 cannot be ! For among other odd burs and 
 kecksiesj the misgrowth of our luxuriant 
 activity > we have now a Reading Public * — 
 
 * Some participle passive in the diminutive form, Eruditu- 
 lorum Natio for instance, might seem at first sight a fuller and 
 more exact designation; but the superior force and humor of the 
 former become evident whenever the phrase occurs as a step or 
 stair in a climax of irony. By way of example take the following 
 sentences, transcribed from a work demonstrating that the New 
 Testament was intended exclusively for the primitive converts from 
 Judaism, was accomodated to their prejudices, and is of no autho- 
 rity, as a rule of faith, for Christians in general. " The Reading 
 Public in this Enlightened Age, and Thinking Nation, by 
 its favorable reception of liberal ideas, has long demonstrated 
 the benign influence of that profound Philosophy which has 
 already emancipated us from so many absurd prejudices held in 
 superstitious awe . by our deluded forefathers. But the Dark Age 
 yielded at length to the dawning light of Pt,eason and Common- 
 Sense at the glorious, though imperfect, Revolution. The People 
 can be no longer duped or scared out of their imprescriptible and 
 inalienable Right to judge and decide for themselves on all ira* 
 
( 46 ) 
 
 as strange a phrase^ methinks, as ever forced 
 a splenetic smile on the staid countenance of 
 Meditation; and yet no fiction! For our 
 
 portant questions of Government and Religion. The scholastic 
 jargon of jarring articles and metaphysical creeds may continue for 
 a time to deform our Church-establishment ; and like the grotesque 
 figures in the nitches of our old gothic cathedrals may serve to 
 remind the nation of its former barbarism ; but the universal suf- 
 frage of a FREE AND ENLIGHTENED PUBLIC," &C &C ! 
 
 Among the Revolutions worthy of notice, the change in the 
 nature of the introductory sentences and prefatory matter in 
 serious Books is not the least striking. The same gross flattery 
 which disgusts us in -the dedications to individuals in the elder 
 writers, is now transferred to the Nation at large, or the Reaping 
 Public : while the Jeremiads of our old Moralists, and their 
 angry denunciations concerning the ignorance, immorality, and ir- 
 religion of the People, appear (mutatis mutandis, and with an appeal 
 to the worst passions, envy, discontent, scorn, vindictiveness, &c.) 
 itt the shape of bitter libels on Ministers, Parliament, the Clergy: 
 in short, on the State and Church, and all persons employed in 
 them. Likewise, I would point out to the Reader's attention the 
 marvellous predominance at present of the words, Idea and De- 
 monstration. Every talker now a days has an Idea; aye, and he 
 will demonstrate it too ! A few days ago, I heard one of the 
 Reading Public, a thinking and independant smuggler, euphonize 
 the latter word with much significance, in a tirade against the 
 planners of the late African expedition : — " As to Algiers, any 
 man that has half an Idea in his skull, must know, that it has 
 been long ago dey-monstered, I should say, dey-monstrified, &c." 
 But, the phrase, which occasioned this note, brings to my mind the 
 mistake of a lethargic Dutch traveller, who returning highly grati- 
 fied from a showman's caravan, which he had been tempted to enter 
 by the words, The Learned Pig, gilt on the pannels, met another 
 caravan of a similar shape, with The Reading Fly on it, in 
 
( 41 ) 
 
 Readers have, in good truth,- multiplied ex- 
 ceedingly^ and have waxed proud. It would 
 require the intrepid accuracy of a Colquhoun 
 to venture at the precise number of that vast 
 company only, whose heads and hearts are 
 dieted at the two public ordinaries of Litera- 
 ture, the circulating libraries and the periodical 
 press. But what is the result? Does the 
 inward man thrive on this regimen ? Alas 1 
 if the average health of the consumers may 
 be judged of by the articles of largest con- 
 sumption; if the secretions may be conjee* 
 tured from the ingredients of the dishes that 
 are found best suited to their palates ; from 
 all that I have seen, either of the banquet 
 or the guests, I shall utter my Profaccia 
 with a desponding sigh. From a popular 
 philosophy and a philosophic populace, Good 
 Sense deliver us ! i 
 
 letters of the same size and splendour. " Why, dis is voonders 
 above voonders ! " exclaims the Dutchman, takes his seat as first 
 comer, and soon fatigued by waiting, and by the very hush and 
 intensity of his expectation, gives way to his constitutional somnu- 
 lence, from which he is roused by the supposed showman at 
 Hounslow, with a "In what name, Sir I was your place taken? 
 Are you booked all the way for Reading ? — Now a Reading 
 Public is (to my mind) more marvellous still, and in the third tier 
 of " Voonders above Voonders. 1 *, 
 
( 48 ) 
 
 • At present > however, I am to imagine for 
 myself a very different audienee. I appeal 
 exclusively to men, from whose station and 
 opportunities I may dare anticipate a respect- 
 able portion of that (i sound book learnedness" 
 into which our old public schools still con- 
 tinue to initiate their pupils. I appeal to men 
 in whom I may hope to find, if not philo^ 
 sophy, yet occasional impulses at least to 
 philosophic thought. And here, as far as my 
 own experience extends, I can announce one 
 favorable symptom. The notion of our mea- 
 sureless superiority in good sense to our ances- 
 tors, so general at the commencement of the 
 French Revolution/ and for some years before 
 it , is out of fashion. We hear, at least, less 
 of the jargon of this enlightened age. After 
 fatiguing itself, as performer or spectator in 
 the giddy figure-dance of political changes, 
 Europe has seen the shallow foundations of its 
 self-complacent faith give way ; and among 
 men of influence and property, we have now 
 more reason to apprehend the stupor of de- 
 spondence,, than the extravagancies of hope, 
 unsustained by experience, or of self-con- 
 fidence not bottomed on principle. 
 
 In this rank of life the danger lies, not in 
 any tendency to innovation, but in the choice 
 
( 49 § 
 
 of the means for preventing it* And here my 
 apprehensions point to two opposite errors; 
 each of which deserves a separate notice* 
 The first consists in a disposition to think, 
 that as the Peace of Nations has been dis* 
 turbed by the diffusion of a false light, ifc 
 may be re-established by excluding the people 
 from all knowledge and all prospect of amelio- 
 ration. 0! never> never! Reflection and- 
 stirrings of mind, with all their restlessness, 
 and all the errors that result from their im* 
 perfection/ from the Too much, because Too 
 little, are come into the world. The Powers, 
 that awaken and foster the spirit of curiosity, 
 are to be found in every village: Books are. 
 in every hovel> The Infant's cries are 
 hushed with picture-hooks : and the Cottager^ 
 child sheds his first bitter tears over pages, 
 which render it impossible for the man to be 
 treated or governed as a child. Here as in, 
 so many other cases, the inconveniences that 
 have arisen from a things' having become too 
 generaly are best removed by making it 
 universal. 
 
 The other and contrary mistake proceeds 
 from the assumption, that a national education 
 will have been realized whenever the People 
 at large have been taught to read an<J write. 
 
 a 
 
( 50 ) 
 
 Now among the many means to the desired 
 end , this is doubtless one, and not the least 
 important. But neither is it the most so. 
 Much less can it be held to constitute Edu- 
 cation, which consists in educing the faculties^ 
 and forming the habits ; the means varying 
 according to the sphere in which the individuals 
 to be educated are likely to act and become 
 useful. I do not hesitate to declare, that 
 whether I consider the nature of the disci- 
 pline adopted,* or the plan of poisoning the 
 children of the poor with a sort of potential 
 infidelity under the " liberal idea" of teaching 
 those points only of religious faith, in which 
 all denominations agree, I cannot but denounce 
 the so called Lancastrian schools as per- 
 nicious beyond all power of compensation by 
 the new acquirement of Reading and Writing. 
 — But take even Dr. Bell's original and un- 
 sophisticated plan, which I myself regard 
 as an especial gift of Providence to the human 
 
 * See Mr. Southey's Tract on the New or Madras system of 
 Education : especially toward to the conclusion, where with 
 exquisite humor as well as with his usual poignancy of wit he 
 has detailed Joseph Lancaster's disciplinarian Inventions. But 
 even in the schools, that used to be called Lancastrian, these are, 
 I believe, discontinued. The true perfection of discipline in a 
 school is — The maximum of watchfulness with the minimum of 
 punishment. 
 
( 51 ) 
 
 race; and suppose this incomparable machine, 
 this vast moral steam-engine to have been 
 adopted and in free motion throughout the 
 Empire; it would yet appear to me a most 
 dangerous delusion to rely on it as if this of 
 itself formed an efficient national education. 
 We cannot, I repeat, honor the scheme too 
 highly as a prominent and necessary part of 
 the great process ; but it will neither supersede 
 nor can it be substituted for sundry other 
 measures, that are at least equally important. 
 And these are such measures too, as unfor- 
 tunately involve the necessity of sacrifices on 
 the side of the rich and powerful more costly, 
 and far more difficult than the yearly sub- 
 scription of a few pounds ! such measures as 
 demand more self-denial than the expenditure 
 of time in a committee or of eloquence in a 
 public meeting. 
 
 Nay, let Dr. Bell's philanthropic end have 
 been realized, and the proposed medicum of 
 learning universal : yet convinced of its insuffi- 
 ciency to stem up against the strong currents 
 set in from an opposite point, I dare not assure 
 myself, that it may not be driven backward 
 by them and become confluent with the evils, 
 it was intended to preclude. 
 
 What other measures I had in contem- 
 
( 52 ) 
 
 plation, it- has been my endeavour to explain 
 elsewhere. But I am greatly deceived, if 
 one preliminary to an efficient education of the 
 laboring classes be not the recurrence to a 
 more manly discipline of the intellect on the 
 part of the learned themselves, in short a 
 thorough re-casting of the moulds, in which 
 the minds of our Gentry, the characters of 
 our future Land-owners, Magistrates and Se- 
 nators, are to receive their shape and fashion. 
 O what treasures of practical wisdom would 
 be once more brought into open day by the 
 solution of this problem! Suffice it for the 
 present to hint the master-thought. The 
 first man, on whom the Light of an Idea 
 dawned, did in that same moment receive the 
 spirit and the credentials of a Law-giver: and 
 as long as man shall exist, so long will the 
 possession of that antecedent knowledge (the 
 maker and master of all profitable Experience) 
 which exists only in the power of an Idea, 
 be the one lawful qualification of all Dominion 
 in the world of the senses. Without this, Ex* 
 perience itself is but a cyclops walking back- 
 wards, under the fascination of the Past : and 
 we are indebted to a lucky coincidence of 
 outward circumstances and contingencies, least 
 of all things to be calculated on in times 
 
( S3 ) 
 
 like the present, if this one-eyed Experience 
 does not seduce its worshipper into practical 
 anachronisms. 
 
 But alas ! the halls of old philosophy have 
 been so long deserted, that we circle them 
 at shy distance as the haunt of Phantoms and 
 Chimaeras. The sacred Grove of Academus 
 is held in like regard with the unfoodful trees ; 
 in the shadowy world of Maro that had a 
 dream attached to every leaf. The very 
 terms of ancient wisdom are worn out, or- 
 (far worse !) stamped on baser metal : (ef 
 and whoever should have the hardihood to 
 reproclaim its solemn Truths must commence 
 with a Glossary. 
 
 In reviewing the foregoing pages, I am 
 apprehensive that they may be thought to" 
 resemble the overflow of an earnest mind 
 rather than an orderly premeditated com- 
 position. Yet this imperfection of form will 
 not be altogether uncompensated, if it should 
 be the means of presenting with greater live- 
 liness the feelings and impressions under 
 which they were written. Still less shall I 
 regret this defect if it should induce some 
 future traveller engaged in the like journey 
 to take the same station and to look through 
 the same medium at the one main object which 1 
 
( 54 ) 
 
 amid all my discursions I have still held in 
 view. The more, however, doth it behove 
 me not to conclude this address without at- 
 tempting to recapitulate in as few and as 
 plain words as possible the sum and substance 
 of its contents. 
 
 There is a state of mind indispensable for 
 all perusal of the Scriptures to edification, 
 which must be learnt by experience, and can 
 be described only by negatives. It is the 
 direct opposite of that which (supposing a 
 moral passage of Scripture to have been cited) 
 would prompt a man to reply, Who does not 
 know this ? But if the quotation should have 
 been made in sppport of some article of faith, 
 this same habit of mind will betray itself, in 
 different individuals, by apparent contraries, 
 which yet are but the two poles, or Plus 
 and Minus states, of the same influence. The 
 latter, or the negative pole may be suspected, 
 as often as you hear a comment on some high 
 and doctrinal text introduced with the words, 
 It only means so and so! For instance, I 
 object to a professed free-thinking christian 
 the following solemn enunciation of " the 
 riches of the glory of the mystery hid from 
 ages and from generations" by the philosophic 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, " Who (viz. the 
 
( 55 ) 
 
 Father) hath delivered us from the power of 
 darkness and hath translated us into the 
 kingdom of his dear Son: In whom we have 
 redemption through his blood, even the for' 
 giveness of sins : Who is the image of the 
 invisible God, the firstborn* of every creature : 
 For by him were all things created, that are 
 in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and 
 invisible, whether they be thrones, or do- 
 minions, or principalities, or powers : all 
 things were created by him, and for him .* 
 And he is before all things, and by him all 
 things consist And he is the head of the 
 body, the Church : who is the beginning, the 
 firstborn from the dead ; that in all things he 
 might have the preeminence. For it pleased 
 the Father that in him should all fulness 
 dwell : And, having made peace through the 
 hlood of his cross, by him to reconcile all 
 things unto himself; by him, I say, whether 
 they be things in earth, or things in heaven? 
 What is the reply? — Why,, that by these 
 words (very bold and figurative words it 
 must be confessed^ yet still) St. Paul only 
 
 * A mistaken translation. The words should be : Begotten 
 before all creation ; and even this does not convey the. full sense of 
 the superlative, TpwrorokoQ. The present version makes- the follow- 
 ing words absurd. 
 
( M ) 
 
 meant that the universal and eternal truths 
 of morality and a future state had been re- 
 proclaimed by an inspired teacher and con- 
 firmed by miracles ! The words only mean, 
 Sir, that a state of retribution after this life 
 had been proved by the fact of Christ's re- 
 surrection — -that is all ! — But I shall scarcely 
 obtain an answer to certain difficulties 
 involved in this free and liberal interpretation: 
 ex, gr, that with the exception of a handful 
 of rich men considered as little better than 
 infidels, the Jews were as fully persuaded of 
 these truths as Christians in general are at the 
 present day. Moreover that this inspired 
 Teacher had himself declared that if the 
 Jews did not believe on the evidence of 
 Moses and the Prophets, neither would they 
 though a man should rise from the dead. 
 
 Of the positive pole, on the other hand, 
 language to the following purport is the usual 
 Exponent, "It is a mystery : and we are 
 bound to believe the words without presuming 
 to enquire into the meaning of them." That 
 is we believe in St. Paul's veracity ; and that 
 is enough. Yet St. Paul repeatedly presses 
 on his Hearers that thoughtful perusal of the 
 Sacred Writings, and those habits of earnest 
 though humble enquiry which if the heart 
 
( 51 ) 
 
 only have been previously re-generated would 
 lead them u to a full assurance of Under- 
 standing a? eirlyvwmv, (to an entire assent of 
 of the mind; to a spiritual intuition, or positive 
 inward knowledge by experience) of the 
 mystery of God, and of the Father, and of 
 Christ, in which (nempe, 00$^*) are hid all 
 the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. 
 
 To expose the inconsistency of both these 
 extremes, and by inference to recommend 
 that state of mind, which looks forward to 
 (C the fellowship of the mystery of the faith, 
 as a spirit of wisdom and revelation in the 
 Knowledge of God, the eyes of the Under- 
 standing being enlightened — this formed my 
 General purpose. Long has it been at my 
 heart ! I consider it as the contra-distinguishing 
 principle of Christianity that in it alone vag 
 7t\stoq rv\q 7rXr?po^optac rrjg 2wax£we (the Under- 
 standing in its utmost power and opulence) 
 culminates in Faith, as in its crown of Glory^ 
 at once its light and its remuneration. On 
 this most important point I attempted long 
 ago to preclude, if possible, all misconception 
 and misinterpretation of my opinions, though 
 in a work which, from the mode of its pub- 
 lication and other circumstances must be 
 unknown or known but by name to the great 
 
 H 
 
( & ) 
 
 majority of my present Readers. Alas! in 
 this time of distress and embarrasment the 
 sentiments have a more especial interest, a 
 more immediate application, than when they 
 were first written. If (I observed) it be a 
 Truth attested alike by common feeling and 
 common sense, that the greater part of human 
 Misery depends directly on human Vices, and 
 the remainder indirectly, by what means can 
 we act on Men, so as to remove or preclude 
 these Vices and purify their principles of moral 
 election? The question is not by what 
 means each man is to alter his own character- 
 in order to this, all the means prescribed, 
 and all the aidances given by religion may be 
 necessary for him. Vain of themselves may 
 be — 
 
 . \ The sayings of the Wise 
 
 In ancient and in modern books inroll'd 
 
 Unless he feel within 
 Some source of consolation from above, 
 Secret refreshings, that repair his strength, 
 And fainting spirits uphold. 
 
 Sampson Agontstes. 
 
 This is not the question. Virtue would not 
 be Virtue could it be given by one fellow 
 creature to another. To make use of all the 
 means and appliances in our power to the ac^ 
 
( 59 ) 
 
 tual attainment of Rectitude, is the abstract 
 of the Duty which we owe to ourselves: To 
 supply those means as far as we can, com- 
 prizes our Duty to others. The question then 
 is, what are these means? Can they be any, 
 other than the communication of Knowledge 
 and the removal of those Evils and Impedi- 
 ments which prevent ifs reception ? It may f\ 
 not be in our power to combine both, but it is 
 in the power of every man to contribute to 
 the former, who is sufficiently informed to 
 feel that it is his Duty. If it be said, that we 
 should endeavor not so much to remove Igno- 
 rance, as to make the Ignorant religious : Re- 
 ligion herself, through her sacred oracles, 
 answers for me, that all effective Faith pre- 
 supposes Knowledge and individual Conviction. 
 If the mere acquiescence in Truth, uncompre- 
 hended and unfathomed, were sufficient, few 
 indeed would be the vicious and the miserable, 
 in this country at least where speculative In- 
 fidelity is, Heaven be praised, confined to a 
 small number. Like bodily deformity, there 
 is one instance here and another there; but 
 three in one place are already an undue pro- 
 portion. It is highly worthy of observation, 
 that the inspired Writings received by Chris- 
 tians are distinguishable from all other books. 
 
( eo ) 
 
 pretending to Inspiration, from the scriptures 
 of the Bramins, and even from the Koran, in 
 their strong and frequent recommendations of 
 Truth. I do not here mean Veracity, which 
 cannot but be enforced in every Code which 
 appeals to the religious principle of Man ; but 
 Knowledge. This is not only extolled as the 
 Crown and Honor of a Man, but to seek after it 
 is again and again commanded us as one of our 
 most sacred Duties. Yea, the very perfection 
 and final bliss of the glorified spirit is represent- 
 ed by the Apostle as a plain aspect, or intui- 
 tive beholding of truth in it's eternal and 
 immutable source. Not that Knowledge can 
 of itself do all ! The light of religion is not that 
 of the moon, light without heat ; but neither 
 is it's warmth that of the stove, warmth 
 without light. Religion is the sun whose 
 warmth indeed swells, and stirs, and actuates 
 the life of nature, but who at the same time 
 beholds all the growth of life with a master- 
 eye, makes all objects glorious on which he 
 looks, and by thai glory visible to others. 
 For this cause I bow my knees unto the Fa- 
 ther of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he would 
 grant you according to the riches of his glory, 
 to be strengthened with might by his Spirit in 
 the inner man; that Christ may dwell in your 
 
( 61 ) 
 
 hearts by faith; that ye being rooted and 
 grounded in love, may be able to comprehend 
 with all saints what is the breadth, and 
 length, and depth and heighth ; and to know 
 the love of Christ which passeth all know- 
 ledge, that ye might be filled with the fulness 
 of God. For to know God is (by a vital and 
 spiritual act in which to know and to possess 
 are one and indivisible) to acknowledge him 
 as the Infinite Clearness in the Incomprehen- 
 sible Fulness, and Fulness Incomprehensible 
 with Infinite Clearness. 
 
 This then comprizes my first purpose, 
 which is in a two fold sense general: for in the 
 substance, if not in the form, it belongs to all 
 my countrymen and fellow-christians without 
 distinction of Class, while for its object it em- 
 braces the whole of the inspired Scriptures 
 from the recorded first day of Heaven and 
 Earth, e're the light was yet gathered into ce- 
 lestial lamps or reflected from their revolving 
 mirrors, to the predicted Sabbath of the New 
 Creation, when Heaven and Earth shall have 
 become one city with neither " sun nor moon 
 to shine in it : for the glory of God shall light- 
 en it and the Lamb be the light thereof." 
 My second purpose is after the same manner 
 in a two fold sense specific : for as this Disqui- 
 
( 62 ) 
 
 sili on is nominally addressed to, so was it for 
 the greater part exclusively intended for, the 
 w perusal of the Learned : and its object like- 
 wise is to urge men so qualified to apply their 
 powers and attainments to an especial study 
 of the Old Testament as teaching the Ele- 
 ments of Political Science. 
 
 Is it asked, in what sense I use these words ? : 
 I answer : in the same sense as the terms are 
 employed when we refer to Euclid for the 
 Elements of the Science of Geometry, only 
 with one difference arising from the diversity 
 of the subject. With one difference only; but 
 that one how momentous ! All other sciences 
 are confined to abstractions, unless when the 
 term Science is used in an improper and flat- 
 tering sense — Thus we may speak without 
 boast of Natural History ; but we have not 
 yet attained to a Science of Nature. The 
 Bible alone contains a Science of Realities: 
 and therefore each of it's Elements is at the 
 same time a living Germ, in which the Pre- 
 sent involves the Future, and in the Finite 
 the Infinite exists potentially. That hidden 
 mystery in every, the minutest, form of exist- 
 ence, which contemplated under the relations 
 of time presents itself to the understanding 
 retrospectively, as an infinite ascent of Causes, 
 
(63 ) 
 
 and prospectively as an interminable progres- 
 sion of Effects — -that which contemplated 
 in Space is beheld intuitively as a law of ac- 
 tion and re-action j continuous and extending 
 beyond all bound — this same mystery freed 
 from the phenomena of Time and Space, and 
 seen in the depth of real Being, reveals itself 
 to the pure Reason as the actual immanence 
 of All in Each. Are we struck with admi- 
 ration at beholding the Cope of Heaven ima- 
 ged in a Dew-drop ? The least of the ani- 
 malcula to which that drop would be an Ocean 
 contains in itself an infinite problem of which 
 G od Omni-present is the only solution. The 
 slave of custom is roused by the Rare and the 
 Accidental alone; but the axioms of the Un- 
 thinking are to the philosopher the deepest 
 problems as being the nearest to the mysteri- 
 ous Root and partaking at once of its dark- 
 ness and it's pregnancy. 
 
 O what a mine of undiscovered treasures, 
 what a new world of Power and Truth would 
 the Bible promise to our future meditation, if 
 in some gracious moment one solitary text 
 of all its inspired contents should but dawn 
 upon us in the pure untroubled brightness of 
 an Idea, that most glorious birth of the 
 God-like within us, which even as the Light, 
 
( 64 ) 
 
 its material symbol, reflects itself from a 
 thousand surfaces, and flies homeward to its 
 Parent Mind enriched with a thousand forms, 
 itself above form and still remaining in its 
 own simplicity and identity ! O for a flash 
 of that same Light, in which the first position 
 of geometric science that ever loosed itself 
 from the generalizations of a groping and 
 insecure experience, did for the first time 
 reveal itself to a human intellect in all its 
 evidence and all its fruitfulness, Transparence 
 without Vacuum, and Plenitude without Opa- 
 city! O that a single gleam of our own 
 inward experience would make comprehensible 
 to us the rapturous Eureka, and the grateful 
 Hecatomb, of the philosopher of Samos ! or 
 that Vision which from the contemplation of 
 an arithmetical harmony rose to the eye of 
 Kepler, presenting the planetary world/and 
 all their orbits in the divine order of their 
 ranks and distances: or which, in the falling 
 of an Apple, revealed to the ethereal intuition 
 of our own Newton the constructive prin- 
 ciple of the material Universe. The pro- 
 mises which I have ventured to hold forth 
 concerning the hidden treasures of the Law 
 and the Prophets will neither be condemned 
 as paradox or as exaggeration, by the mind 
 
( 65 ) 
 
 that has learnt to understand the possibility, 
 that the reduction of the sands of the Sea to 
 number should j be found a less stupendous 
 problem by Archimedes than the simple con- 
 ception of the Parmenidean One. What 
 however is achievable by the human under- 
 standing without this light, may be comprised 
 in the epithet, kcvoo-tts&h : and a melancholy 
 comment on that phrase would the history of 
 human cabinets and Legislatures for the last 
 thirty years furnish! The excellent Barrow, 
 the last of the disciples of Plato and Archi- 
 medes among our modern mathematicians, 
 shall give the description and state the value : 
 and in his words I shall conclude. 
 
 AUud agere, to be impertinently busy, 
 doing that whioh conduceth to no good purpose 
 is in some respect worse than to do nothing. 
 Of such industry we may understand that of 
 the Preacher, u The labor of the foolish 
 wearieth every one of them," 
 
In the Press, 
 A SECOND LAY SERMON, 
 
 ADDRESSED 
 
 TO THE HIGHER AND MIDDLE CLASSES OF SOCIETY, 
 
 ON THE 
 
 PRESENT DISTRESSES OF THE COUNTRY. 
 
APPENDIX, 
 
 CONTAINING 
 
 COMMENTS and ESSAYS. 
 
 (A.) 
 
 IN this use of the word " sufficiency,'* I pre-suppose 
 on the part of the reader or hearer, a humble and 
 docile state of mind, and above all the practice of prayer, 
 as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best 
 if not the only means of becoming sincere to our own 
 hearts. Christianity is especially differenced from all 
 other religions by being grounded on facts which all 
 men alike have the means of ascertaining, the same 
 means, with equal facility, and which no man can 
 ascertain for another. Each person must be herein 
 querist and respondent to himself; Am I sick, and 
 therefore need a physician? — Am I in spiritual slavery, 
 and therefore need a ransomer? — Have I given a 
 pledge, which must be redeemed, and which I cannot 
 redeem by my own resources? — Am I at one with 
 God, and is my will concentric with that holy power, 
 which is at once the constitutive will and the supreme 
 
 a 
 
( » ) 
 
 reason of the universe? — If not, must I not be mad 
 if I do not seek, and miserable if I do not discover 
 and embrace, the means of at-one-ment ? To collect, 
 to weigh, and to appreciate historical proofs and pre- 
 sumptions is not equally within the means and op- 
 portunities of every man alike. The testimony of 
 books of history is one of the strong and stately 
 pillars of the church of Christ ; but it is not the 
 foundation, nor can it without loss of essential faith 
 be mistaken or substituted for the foundation. There 
 is a sect, which in its scornful pride of antipathy to 
 mysteries (that is, to all those doctrines of the pure and 
 intuitive reason, which transcend the understanding, and 
 can never be contemplated by it, but through a false 
 and falsifying perspective) affects to condemn all inward 
 and preliminary experience as enthusiastic delusion or 
 fanatical contagion. Historic evidence, on the other 
 hand, these men treat, as the Jews of old treated the 
 brazen serpent, which was the relic and evidence 
 of the miracles worked by Moses in the wilderness. 
 They turned it into an idol : and therefore Hezekiah 
 (who clave to the Lord, and did right in the sight of the 
 Lord, so that after him was none like him, among all the 
 kings of Judah, nor any that were before him) not 
 only ' removed the high places, and brake the images, 
 and cut down the groves ;' but likewise brake in pieces 
 the Brazen Serpent that Moses had made : for the 
 children of Israel did burn incense to it. 
 
 To preclude an error so pernicious, I request that 
 to the wilful neglect of those outward ministrations of 
 the word which all Englishmen have the privilege of 
 attending, the reader will add the setting at nought 
 likewise of those inward means of grace, without 
 which the language of the Scriptures, in the most 
 
( Hi ) 
 
 faithful translation and in the purest and plainest 
 English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead lan- 
 guage : a sun-dial by moonlight. 
 
 (B.) 
 
 Not without great hesitation should I express a 
 suspicion concerning the genuineness of any, the least 
 important passage in the New Testament, unless I 
 could adduce the most conclusive evidence from the 
 earliest manuscripts and commentators, in support of 
 its interpolation : well knowing that such permission 
 has already opened a door to the most fearful license. 
 It is indeed, in its consequences, no less than an as- 
 sumed right of picking and chusing our religion out of 
 the Scriptures. Most assuredly I would never hazard 
 a suggestion of this kind in any instance in which the 
 retention or the omission of the words could make the 
 slightest difference with regard to fact, miracle, or pre- 
 cept. Still less would I start the question, where the 
 hypothesis of their interpolation could be wrested to 
 the discountenancing of any article of doctrine con- 
 cerning which dissension existed : no, not though the 
 doubt or disbelief of the doctrine had been confined 
 to those, whose faith few but themselves would honor 
 with the name of Christianity ; however reluctant we 
 might be, both from the courtesies of social life and 
 the nobler charities of humility, to withhold from the 
 persons themselves the title of Christians. 
 
 But as there is nothing in v. 40 of Matthew, c. xii. 
 which would fall within this general rule, I dare permit 
 myself to propose the query, whether there does not exist 
 internal evidence of its being a gloss of some unlearned, 
 though pious, christian of the first century, which had 
 
 a 2 
 
( k ) 
 
 sliptinto the text? The following are my reasons. 1. It 
 is at all events a comment on the words of our Saviour, 
 and no part of his speech. 2. It interrupts the course 
 and breaks down the jut and application of our Lord's 
 argument, as addressed to men who from their unwil- 
 lingness to sacrifice their vain traditions, gainful hypo- 
 crisy, and pride both of heart and of demeanor, 
 demanded a miracle for the confirmation of moral 
 truths that must have borne witness to their own divi- 
 nity in the consciences of all who had not rendered 
 themselves conscience-proof. 3. The text strictly taken 
 is irreconcileable with the fact as it is afterwards 
 related, and as it is universally accepted. I at least 
 remember no calculation of time, according to which 
 the interspace from Friday evening to the earliest 
 tlawn of Sunday morning, could be represented as 
 three days and three nights. As three days our 
 Saviour, himself speaks of it (John ii. 19) and so it 
 would be described in common language as well as 
 according to the use of the Jews ; but I can find no 
 other part of Scripture which authorizes the phrase of 
 three nights. This gloss is not found either in the repe- 
 tition of the circumstance by Matthew himself (xvi. 4.) 
 nor in Mark, (viii. 12.) nor in Luke, (xii. 54.) Mark's 
 narration doth indeed most strikingly confirm my second 
 reason, drawn from the purpose of our Saviour's argu- 
 ment : for the allusion to the prophet Jonas is omitted 
 altogether, and the refusal therefore rests on the depra- 
 vity of the applicants, as proved by the wantonness of 
 the application itself. All signs must have been useless 
 to such men as long as the great sign of the times, the 
 call to repentance, remained without effect. 4. The 
 gloss corresponds with the known fondness of the 
 earlier Jewish converts, and indeed of the christians in 
 
( v ) 
 
 general of the second century, to bring out in detail 
 and into exact square every accommodation of the 
 Old Testament, which they either found in the gospels, 
 or made for themselves. It is too notorious into what 
 strange fancies, (not always at safe distance from 
 dangerous errors) the oldest uninspired writers of the 
 christian church were seduced by this passion of trans- 
 muting without scriptural authority incidents, names 
 and even mere sounds of the Hebrew Scriptures into 
 evangelical types and correspondencies. 
 
 An additional reason may perhaps occur to those 
 who alone would be qualified to appreciate its force: 
 viz. to biblical scholars familiar with the opinions and 
 arguments of sundry doctors, rabbinical as well as 
 christian, respecting the first and second chapter of 
 Jonah. 
 
 (c.) 
 
 Reason and Religion differ only as a two-fold ap- 
 plication of the same power. But if we are obliged 
 to distinguish, we must ideally separate. In this 
 sense I affirm, that Reason is the knowlege of the 
 laws of the Whole considered as One : and as such it is 
 contradistinguished from the Understanding, which 
 concerns itself exclusively with the quantities, qualities, 
 and relations of particulars in time and space. The 
 Understanding, therefore, is the science of phaenomena, 
 and their subsumption under distinct kinds and sorts, 
 (genus and species.) Its functions supply the rules and 
 constitute the possibility of Experience; but remain 
 mere logical forms, except as far as materials are given 
 by the senses or sensations. The Reason, on the other 
 hand, is the science of the universal,, having tbe ideas 
 
( vi ) 
 
 of Oneness and Allness as its two elements or pri- 
 mary factors. In the language of the old schools, 
 
 Unity -f Omneity 
 Totality. 
 
 The Reason first manifests itself in man by the ten- 
 dency to the comprehension of all as one. We can neither 
 rest in an infinite that is not at the same time a whole, 
 nor in a whole that is not infinite. Hence the natural 
 Man is always in a state either of resistance or of cap- 
 tivity to the understanding and the fancy, which cannot 
 represent totality without limit : and he either loses the 
 One in the striving after the Infinite, (i. e. Atheism with 
 or without polytheism) or the Infinite in the striving 
 after the One, (i. e. anthropomorphic monotheism.) 
 
 The rational instinct, therefore, taken abstractedly 
 and unbalanced, did in itself, ( ' ye shall be as gods ! 
 Gen. iii. 5.) and in its consequences, (the lusts of the 
 flesh, the eye, and the understanding, as in verse the 
 sixth,) form the original temptation, through which man 
 fell: and in all ages has continued to originate the 
 same, even from Adam, in whom we all fell, to the 
 atheists who deified the human reason in the person of 
 a harlot during the earlier period of the French revo- 
 lution. 
 
 To this tendency, therefore, Religion, as the con- 
 sideration of the Particular and Individual (in which 
 respect it takes up and identifies with itself the excel- 
 lence of the Understanding) but of the Individual, as it 
 exists and has its being in the Universal (in which respect 
 it is one with the pure Reason,) — to this tendency, I say, 
 
( vii ) 
 
 Religion assigns the due limits, and is the echo of the 
 1 voice of the Lord God walking in the garden.' Hence 
 in all the ages and countries of civilization Religion has 
 been the parent and fosterer of the Fine Arts, as of 
 Poetry, Music, Painting, &c. the common essence of 
 which consists in a similar union of the Universal and 
 the Individual. In this union, moreover, is contained 
 the true sense of the Ideal. Under the old Law the 
 altar, the curtains, the priestly vestments, and what- 
 ever else was to represent the Beauty of Holiness, 
 had an ideal character: and the Temple itself was- a 
 master-piece of Ideal Beauty. 
 
 There exists in the human being, at least in man 
 fully developed, no mean symbol of Tri-unity, in Reason, 
 Religion, and the Will. For each of the three, though a 
 distinct agency, implies and demands the other two, 
 and loses its own nature at the moment that from dis- 
 tinction it passes into division or separation. The perfect 
 frame of a man is the perfect frame of a state : and in 
 the light of this idea we must read Plato's Re- 
 public. For, if I judge rightly, this celebrated work is 
 to ' The History of the Town of Man-soul,' what 
 Plato was to John Bunyan. 
 
 The comprehension, impartiality, and far-sightedness 
 of Reason, (the Legislative of our nature) taken 
 singly and exclusively, becomes mere visionariness in 
 intellect, and indolence or hard-heartedness in morals. 
 It is the science of cosmopolitism without country, of 
 philanthropy without neighbourliness or consanguinity, 
 in short, of all the impostures of that philosophy of the 
 French revolution, which would sacrifice each to the 
 shadowy idol of All. For Jacobinism is monstrura 
 hybridum, made up in part of despotism, and in part 
 of abstract reason misapplied to objects that belong 
 
( viii ) 
 
 entirely to experience and the understanding. Its 
 instincts and mode of action are in strict corres- 
 pondence with its origin. In ail places, Jacobinism 
 betrays its mixt parentage and nature, by applying 
 to the brute passions and physical force of the multi- 
 tude (that is, to man as a mere animal,) in order 
 to build up government and the frame of society on 
 natural rights instead of social privileges, on the uni- 
 versal of abstract reason instead of positive institutions, 
 the lights of specific experience, and the modifications 
 of existing circumstances. Right in its most proper 
 sense is the creature of law and statute, and only in the 
 technical language of the courts has it any substantial 
 and independent sense. In morals, Right is a word 
 without meaning except as the correlative of Duty. 
 
 From all this it follows, that Reason as the science of 
 All as the Whole, must be interpenetrated by a Power, 
 that represents the concentration of All in Each — a 
 Power that acts by a contraction of universal truths 
 into individual duties, as the only form in which 
 those truths can attain life and reality. Now this is 
 Religion, which is the Executive of our nature, and 
 on this account the name of highest dignity, and the 
 symbol of sovereignty. 
 
 Yet this again — yet even Religion itself, if ever in 
 its too exclusive devotion to the specific and indivi- 
 dual it neglects to interpose the contemplation of the 
 universal, changes its being into Superstition, and 
 becoming more and more earthly and servile, as more 
 and more estranged from the one in all. goes wander- 
 ing at length with its pack of amulets, bead-rolls, 
 periapts, fetisches, and the like pedlary, on pilgrim- 
 ages to Loretto, Mecca, or the temple of Jaggernaut, 
 arm in arm with sensuality on one side and self-torture 
 
( « ) 
 
 on the other, followed by a motly group of friars, 
 pardoners, faquirs, gamesters, flagellants, mountebanks, 
 and harlots. 
 
 But neither can reason or religion exist or co-exist 
 as reason and religion, except as far as they are actuated 
 by the Will (the platonic 0w/xoc,) which is the sustain- 
 ing, coercive and ministerial power, the functions of 
 which in the individual correspond to the officers of war 
 and police in the ideal Republic of Plato. In its state of 
 immanence (or indwelling) in reason and religion, the 
 Will appears indifferently, as wisdom or as love : two 
 names of the same power, the former more intelligential, 
 the latter more spiritual, the former more frequent in the 
 Old, the latter in the New Testament. But in its utmost 
 abstraction and consequent state of reprobation, the 
 Will becomes satanic pride and rebellious self-idolatry in 
 the relations of the spirit to itself, and remorseless des- 
 potism relatively to others ; the more hopeless as the more 
 obdurate by its subjugation of sensual impulses, by its 
 superiority to toil and pain and pleasure ; in short, by 
 the fearful resolve to find in itself alone the one absolute 
 motive of action, under which all other motives from 
 within and from without must be either subordinated 
 or crushed. 
 
 This is the character which Milton has so philoso- 
 phically as well as sublimely embodied in the Satan of 
 his Paradise Lost. Alas! too often has it been em- 
 bodied in real life ! Too often has it given a dark and 
 savage grandeur to the historic page ! And wherever 
 it has appeared, under whatever circumstances of time 
 and country, the same ingredients have gone to its 
 composition ; and it has been identified by the same 
 attributes. Hope in which there is no Chearfulness ; 
 Stedfastness within and immovable Resolve, with out- 
 
( * ) 
 
 ward Restlessness and whirling Activity ; Violence 
 with Guile; Temerity with Cunning ; and, as the result 
 of all, Interminableness of Object with perfect Indif- 
 ference of Means; these are the qualities that have 
 constituted the Commanding Genius! these are the 
 Marks, that have characterized the Masters of Mischief, 
 the Liberticides, and mighty Hunters of Mankind, from 
 Nimrod to Napoleon. And from inattention to the 
 possibility of such a character as well as from ignorance 
 of its elements, even men of honest intentions too fre- 
 quently become fascinated. Nay, whole nations have 
 been so far duped by this want of insight i and reflection 
 as to regard with palliative admiration, instead of 
 wonder and abhorrence, the Molocks of human nature, 
 who are indebted, for the far larger portion of their 
 meteoric success, to their total want of principle, and 
 who surpass the generality of their fellow creatures 
 in one act of courage only, that of daring to say 
 with their whole heart, ' Evil, be thou my good !' — 
 All system so far is power ; and a systematic criminal, 
 self-consistent and entire in wickedness, who entrenches 
 villainy within villainy, and barricadoes crime by 
 crime, has removed a world of obstacles by the mere 
 decision, that he will have no obstacles, but those of 
 force and brute matter. 
 
 I have only to add a few sentences, in completion of 
 this note, on the Conscience and on the Under- 
 standing. The conscience is neither reason, religion, 
 or will, but an experience (sui generis) of the coin- 
 cidence of the human will with reason and religion. 
 It might, perhaps, be called a spiritual sensation ; but 
 that there lurks a contradiction in the terms, and that it 
 is often deceptive to give a common or generic name to 
 that, which being unique, can have no fair analogy. 
 
( Hi ) 
 
 Strictly speaking, therefore, the conscience is neither a 
 sensation or a sense; but a testifying state, best de- 
 scribed in the words of our liturgy, as the peace of 
 God that passeth all understanding. 
 
 Of this latter faculty considered in and of itself the 
 peripatetic aphorism, nihil in intellectu quod non prius 
 in sensu, is strictly true, as well as the legal maxim, de 
 rebus non apparentibus et non existentibus eadem est 
 ratio. The eye is not more inappropriate to sound, 
 than the mere understanding to the modes and laws of 
 spiritual existence. In this sense I have used the 
 term ; and in this sense I assert that " the under- 
 standing or experiential faculty, unirradiated by the 
 reason and the spirit, has no appropriate object but the 
 material world in relation to our worldly interests. The 
 far-sighted prudence of man, and the more narrow but 
 at the same time far less fallible cunning of the fox, are 
 both no other than a nobler. substitute for salt, in 
 order that the hog may not putrefy before its destined 
 hour ! ! Friend, p. 80. 
 
 It must not, however be overlooked, that this insu- 
 lation of the understanding is our own act and deed. 
 The man of healthful and undivided intellect uses his 
 understanding in this state of abstraction only as a tool 
 or organ : even as the arithmetician uses numbers, that 
 is, as the means not the end of knowledge. Our Shake- 
 spear in agreement both with truth and the philosophy 
 of his age names it " discourse of reason," as an instru- 
 mental faculty belonging to reason : and Milton opposes 
 the discursive to the intuitive, as the lower to the 
 higher, 
 
 " Differing but in degree, in kind the same!" 
 
 Of the discursive understanding, which forms for itself 
 general notions and terms of classification for the purpose 
 
( * ) 
 
 of comparing and arranging phenomena, the Cha- 
 racteristic is Clearness without Depth. It contemplates 
 the unity of things in their limits only, and is conse- 
 quently a knowledge of superficies without substance. 
 So much so indeed, that it entangles itself in contra- 
 dictions in the very effort of comprehending the idea 
 of substance. The completing power which unites 
 clearness with depth, the plenitude of the sense with 
 the comprehensibility of the understanding, is the 
 imagination, impregnated with which the understand- 
 ing itself becomes intuitive, and a living power. The 
 reason, (not the abstract reason, not the reason as 
 the mere organ of science, or as the faculty of 
 scientific principles and schemes a priori; but reason) 
 as the integral spirit of the regenerated man, reason 
 substantiated and vital, ' one only, yet manifold, over- 
 seeing all, and going through all understanding; the 
 breath of the power of God, and a pure influence from the 
 glory of the Almighty ; which remaining in itself regene- 
 rateth all other powers, and in all ages entering into holy 
 souls maketh them friends of God and prophets ;' 
 (Wisdom of Solomon, c.vii.) the Reason without being 
 either the Sense, the Understanding or the Imagi- 
 nation contains all three within itself, even as the mind 
 contains its thoughts, and is present in and through them 
 all ; or as the expression pervades the different features 
 of an intelligent countenance. Each individual must bear 
 witness of it to his own mind, even as he describes life 
 and light : and with the silence of light it describes 
 itself, and dwells in us only as far as we dwell in it. It 
 cannot in strict language be called a faculty, much less 
 a personal property, of any human mind ! He, with 
 whom it is present, can as little appropriate it, whether, 
 totally or by partition, as he can claim ownership in 
 
( m ) 
 
 the breathing air or make an inclosure in the cope of 
 heaven. 
 
 The object of the preceding discourse was to recom- 
 mend the Bible, as the end and center of our reading 
 and meditation. I can truly affirm of myself, that my 
 studies have been profitable and availing to me only so 
 far, as I have endeavoured to use all my other knowledge 
 as a glass enabling me to receive more light in a wider 
 field of vision from the word of God. If you have 
 accompanied me thus far, thoughtful reader! Let it 
 not weary you if I digress for a few moments to another 
 book, likewise a revelation of God — the great book of 
 his servant Nature. That in its obvious sense and 
 literal interpretation it declares the being and attributes 
 of the Almighty Father, none but the fool in heart has 
 ever dared gainsay. But it has been the music of gentle 
 and pious minds in all ages, it is the poetry of all 
 human nature, to read it likewise in a figurative sense, 
 and to find therein correspondencies and symbols of the 
 spiritual world. 
 
 I have at this moment before me, in the flowery 
 meadow, on which my eye is now reposing, one 
 of its most soothing chapters, in which there is no 
 lamenting word, no one character of guilt or anguish- 
 For never can I look and meditate on the vegetable 
 creation without a feeling similar to that with which we 
 gaze at a beautiful infant that has fed itself asleep at its 
 mother's bosom, and smiles in its strange dream of 
 obscure yet happy sensations. The same tender and 
 genial pleasure takes possession of me, and this pleasure 
 is checked and drawn inward by the like aching melan- 
 choly, by the same whispered remonstrance, and made 
 restless by a similar impulse of aspiration. It seems as 
 if the soul said to herself": from this state hast thou 
 fallen ! Such shouldst thou still become, thy Self all 
 
( xiv ) 
 
 permeable to a holier power ! thy Self at once hidden 
 and glorified by its own transparency, as the accidental 
 and dividuous in this quiet and harmonious object is 
 subjected to the life and light of nature which shines 
 in it, even as the transmitted power, love and wisdom, 
 of God over all fills, and shines through, nature ! But 
 what the plant is, by an act not its own and uncon- 
 sciously — that must thou make thyself to become I must 
 by prayer and by a watchful and unresisting spirit, 
 join at least with the preventive and assisting grace 
 to make thyself, in that light of conscience which 
 inflameth not, and with that knowledge which puffeth 
 not up. 
 
 But further, and with particular reference to that 
 undivided Reason, neither merely speculative or merely 
 practical, but both in one, which I have in this annotation 
 endeavoured to contra-distinguish from the Under- 
 standing, I seem to myself to behold in the quiet objects, 
 on which I am gazing, more than an arbitrary illustra- 
 tion, more than a mere simile, the work of my own 
 Fancy ! I feel an awe, as if there were before my eyes 
 the same Power, as that of the Reason — the same 
 Power in a lower dignity, and therefore a symbol 
 established in the truth of things. I feel it alike, 
 whether I contemplate a single tree or flower, or medi- 
 tate on vegetation throughout the world, as ore of the 
 great organs of the life of nature. Lo! — with the rising 
 sun it commences its outward life and enters into open 
 communion with all the elements, at once assimilating 
 them to itself and to each other. At the same moment 
 it strikes its roots and unfolds its leaves, absorbs and 
 respires, steams forth its cooling vapour and finer fra- 
 grance, and breathes a repairing spirit, at once the food 
 and tone of the atmosphere, into the atmosphere that 
 feeds it. Lo ! — at the touch of light how it returns an 
 
( xv ) 
 
 air akin to light, and yet with the same pulse effectuates 
 its own secret growth, still contracting to fix what 
 expanding it had refined. Lo ! — how upholding the 
 ceaseless plastic motion of the parts in the profoundest 
 rest of the whole it becomes the visible organismus 
 of the whole silent or elementary life of nature and, 
 therefore, in incorporating the one extreme becomes 
 the symbol of the other ; the natural symbol of that 
 higher life of reason, in which the whole series (known 
 to us in our present state of being) is perfected, in 
 which, therefore, all the subordinate gradations recur, 
 and are re-ordained " in more abundant honor" We 
 had seen each in its own cast, and we now recognize 
 them all as co-existing in the unity of a higher form, the 
 Crown and Completion of the Earthly, and the Mediator 
 of a new and heavenly series. Thus finally, the vegetable 
 creation, in the simplicity and uniformity of its internal 
 structure symbolizing the unity of nature, while it repre- 
 sents the omniformity of her delegated functions in its 
 external variety and manifoldness, becomes the record 
 and chronicle of her ministerial acts, and inchases the 
 vast unfolded volume of the earth with the hieroglyphics 
 of her history. 
 
 O ! — if as the plant to the orient beam, we would but 
 open out our minds to that holier light, which ' being 
 compared with light is found before it, more beautiful 
 than the sun, and above all the order of stars,' (Wisdom 
 of Solomon, vii. 29.) ungenial, alien, and adverse to our 
 very nature would appear the boastful wisdom which, 
 beginning in France, gradually tampered with the taste 
 and literature of all the most civilized nations of Chris- 
 tendom, seducing the understanding from its natural 
 allegiance, and therewith from all its own lawful claims, 
 titles, and privileges. It was placed as a ward of 
 
( xvi ) 
 
 honour in the courts of faith and reason ; but it chose 
 to dwell alone, and became an harlot by the way-side. 
 The commercial spirit, and the. ascendancy of the ex- 
 perimental philosophy which took place at the close of 
 the fourteenth century, though both good and beneficial 
 in their own kinds, combined to foster its corruption. 
 Flattered and dazzled by the real or supposed dis- 
 coveries, which it had made, the more the under- 
 standing was enriched, the more did it become debased ; 
 till science itself put on a selfish and sensual character, 
 and immediate utility^ in exclusive reference to the 
 gratification of the wants and appetites of the animal, 
 the vanities and caprices of the social, and the ambi- 
 tion of the political, man was imposed as the test of all 
 intellectual powers and pursuits. Worth was degraded 
 into a lazy synonyme of value ; and value was exclu- 
 sively attached to the interest of the senses. But though 
 the growing alienation and self-sufficiency of the under- 
 standing was perceptible at an earlier period, yet it seems 
 to have been about the middle of the last century, under 
 the influence of Voltaire, D'Alembert, Diderot, say 
 generally of the so-called Encyclopaedists, and alas ! — 
 of their crowned proselytes and disciples, Frederick, 
 Joseph, and Catharine, that the Human Understanding, 
 and this too in its narrowest form, was tempted to throw 
 off all show of reverence to the spiritual and even to the 
 moral powers and impulses of the soul ; and usurping 
 the name of reason openly joined the banners of Anti- 
 christ, at once the pander and the prostitute of sensuality, 
 and whether in the cabinet, laboratory, the dissecting 
 room, or the brothel, alike busy in the schemes of vice 
 and irreligion. Well and truly might it, thus personified 
 in our fancy, have been addressed in the words of the 
 evangelical prophet, which I have once before quoted. 
 
( xvii ) 
 
 " Thoil hast said, none is my overseer! — thy wisdom and 
 thy knowlege, it hath perverted thee ! — and thou hast 
 said in thy heart, I am, and there is none besides me ! 
 (Isaiah, xlvii. 10.) 
 
 Prurient, bustling, and revolutionary, this French 
 wisdom has never more than grazed the surfaces of 
 knowledge. As political economy, in its zeal for the 
 increase of food it habitually overlooked the qualities 
 and even the sensations of those that were to feed on it. 
 As ethical philosophy, it recognized no duties which it 
 could not reduce into debtor and creditor accounts on 
 the ledgers of self-love, where no coin was sterling 
 which could not be rendered into agreeable sensations. 
 And even in its height of self-complacency as chemical 
 art, greatly am I deceived if it has not from the very 
 beginning mistaken the products of destruction, ca- 
 davera rerum, for the elements of composition : and 
 most assuredly it has dearly purchased a few brilliant 
 inventions at the loss of all communion with life and 
 the spirit of nature. As the process, such the result ! a 
 heartless frivolity alternating with a sentimentality as 
 heartless — an ignorant contempt of antiquity — a neglect 
 of moral self-discipline — a deadening of the religious 
 sense, even in the less reflecting forms of natural piety— 
 a scornful reprobation of all consolations and secret re- 
 freshings from above — and as the caput mortuum of 
 human nature evaporated, a French nature of rapacity, 
 levity, ferocity, and presumption. 
 
 Man of understanding,, canst thou command the 
 stone to lie, canst thou bid the flower bloom, where 
 thou hast placed it in thy classification?— Canst thou per- 
 suade the living or the inanimate to stand separate 
 even as thou hast separated them ? — And do not far 
 rather all things spread out before thee in" glad 
 
 b 
 
( xviii ) 
 
 confusion and heedless intermixture, even as a lightsome 
 chaos on which the Spirit of God is moving? — 
 Do not all press and swell under one attraction, and live 
 together in promiscuous harmony, each joyous in its own 
 kind, and in the immediate neighbourhood of Myriad 
 others that in the system of thy understanding are 
 distant as the Poles? — If to mint and to remember 
 names delight thee, still arrange and classify and pore 
 and pull to pieces, and peep into Death to look for 
 Life, as monkies put their hands behind a looking-glass! 
 Yet consider, in the first sabbath which thou imposest on 
 the busy discursion of thought, that all this is at 
 best little more than a technical memory: that like can 
 only be known by like: that as Truth is the correlative 
 of Being, so is the act of Being the great organ of 
 Truth : that in natural no less than in moral science, 
 quantum sumus, scimus. 
 
 That, which we find in ourselves, is (gradu mutato) 
 the substance and the life of all our knowledge. With- 
 out this latent presence of the * I am,' all modes of 
 existence in the external world would flit before us 
 as colored shadows, with no greater depth, root, or 
 fixture, than the image of a rock hath in a gliding, 
 stream or the rain-bow on a fast-sailing rain-storm. 
 The human mind is the compass, in which the laws and 
 actuations of all outward essences are revealed as the 
 dips and declinations. (The application of Geometry 
 to the forces and movements of the material world is 
 both proof and instance.) The fact therefore, that the 
 mind of man in its own primary and constituent forms 
 represents the laws of nature, is a mystery which of 
 itself should suffice to make us religious: for it is a 
 problem of which God is the only solution, God, the 
 one before all, and of all, and through all ! — ' True 
 
( xix ) 
 
 natural philosophy is comprized in the study of the 
 science and language of symbols. The power dele- 
 gated to nature is all in every part : and by a symbol I 
 mean, not a metaphor or allegory or any other figure of 
 speech or form of fancy, but an actual and essential part 
 of that, the whole of which it represents. Thus our 
 Lord speaks symbolically when he says that ' the eye 
 is the light of the body.' The genuine naturalist is a 
 dramatic poet in his own line : and such as our myriad- 
 minded Shakespear is, compared with the Racines and 
 Metastasios, such and by a similar process of self-trans- 
 formation would the man be, compared with the 
 Doctors of the mechanic school, who should construct 
 his physiology on the heaven-descended, Know Thyself. 
 
 Even ' the visions of the night' speak to us of powers 
 within us that are not dreamt of in their day-dream of 
 philosophy. The dreams, which we most often remem- 
 ber, are produced by the nascent sensations and inward 
 motiunculae (the fluxions) of the waking state. Hence, 
 too they are more capable of being remembered, 
 because passing more gradually into our waking; 
 thoughts they are more likely to associate with our first 
 perceptions after sleep. Accordingly, when the nervous 
 system is approaching to the waking state, a sort of 
 under-consciousness blends with our dreams, that in all, 
 we imagine as seen or heard, our own self is the ven- 
 triloquist, and moves the slides in the magic-lanthorn. 
 We dream about things ! 
 
 But there are few persons of tender feelings and 
 reflecting habits, who have not, more or less often 
 in the course of their lives, experienced dreams of a 
 very different kind, and during the profoundest sleep 
 that is compatible with after-recollection — States, of 
 which it would be scarcely too bold to say that we 
 b2 
 
( xx ) 
 
 dream the things themselves ; so exact, minute, and 
 vivid beyond all power of ordinary memory is the 
 portraiture, so marvellously perfect is our brief me- 
 tempsychosis into the very being, as it were, of the 
 person who seems to address us. If I may be allowed 
 to quote from myself, (Friend, No. 8>) ' the dullest 
 wight is at times a Shakespear in his dreams.' Not 
 only may we expect, that men of strong religious feel- 
 ings, but little religious knowledge will occasionally 
 be tempted to regard such occurrences as supernatural 
 visitations ; but it ought not to surprize us, if such 
 dreams should sometimes be confirmed by the event, as 
 though they had actually possessed a character of divi- 
 nation. For who shall decide, how far a perfect remi- 
 niscence of past experiences, (of many perhaps that 
 had escaped our reflex consciousness at the time) — who 
 shall determine, to what extent this reproductive ima- 
 gination, unsophisticated by the will, and undistracted 
 by intrusions from the senses, may or may not be 
 concentered and sublimed into foresight and presenti- 
 ment ?— There would be nothing herein either to foster 
 superstition on the one hand, or to justify contemptuous 
 disbelief on the other. Incredulity is but Credulity seen 
 from behind, bowing and nodding assent to the Habitual 
 and the Fashionable. 
 
 To the touch (or feeling) belongs the proximate ; 
 to the eye, the distant. Now little as I might be dis- 
 posed to believe, I should be still less inclined to 
 ridicule, the conjecture that in the recesses of our nature, 
 and undeveloped, there might exist an inner sense, (and 
 therefore appertaining wholly to Time,) — -a sense hitherto 
 ' without a name/ Which as an higher Third combined 
 and potentially included both the former. Thus gra- 
 vitation combines and includes the powers of attractioa 
 
( xxi ) 
 
 and repulsion, which are the constituents of matter, as 
 distinguished from body. And thus, not as a com' 
 pound, but as a higher Third, it realizes matter (of 
 itself ens fiuxionale et praefiuum) and constitutes it 
 body. Now suppose, that this nameless inner sense 
 stood to the relations of Time as the power of gravitation 
 to those of Space ? A priori, a presence to the Future 
 is not more mysterious or transcendent, than a presence 
 to the Distant : than a power equally immediate to the 
 most remote objects, as it is to the central mass of its 
 own body, toward which it seems, as it were, enchant- 
 ing them: for instance, the gravity in the sun and 
 moon to the spring tides of our ocean. The true reply 
 to such an hypothesis would be, that as there is nothing 
 to be said against its possibility, there is, likewise, 
 nothing to be urged for its reality; and that the facts 
 may be rationally explained without it. 
 
 It has been asked why knowing myself to be the 
 object of personal slander, (slander as unprovoked as it 
 is groundless, unless acts of kindness are provocation) 
 I furnish this material for it, by pleading in palliation 
 of so chimerical a fancy. With that half-playful 
 sadness, which at once sighs and smiles, I answered: 
 why not for that very reason ? — Viz. in order that my 
 calumniator might have, if not a material, yet some 
 basis for the poison-gas of his invention to combine 
 with? — But no, — pure falsehood is often for the time 
 the most effective ; for how can a man confute what he 
 can only contradict? — Our opinions and principles 
 cannot prove an alibi. Think only what your feelings 
 would be if you heard a wretch deliberately perjure 
 himself in support of an infamous accusation, so 
 remote from all fact, so smooth anc| homogenous 
 ia its untruth, such a round robin of mere lies, 
 
( xxii ) 
 
 that you knew not which to begin with ? — What could 
 you do, but look round with horror and astonishment, 
 pleading silently to human nature itself, — and perhaps 
 (as hath really been the case with me) forget both the 
 slanderer and his slander in the anguish inflicted *by the 
 passiveness of your many professed friends, whose cha- 
 racters you had ever been as eager to clear from the 
 least stain of reproach as if a coal of fire had been on 
 your own skin ? — But enough of this which would not 
 have occured to me at all, at this time, had it not been 
 thus suggested. 
 
 The feeling, that in point of fact chiefly influenced 
 me in the preceding half apology for the supposition of 
 a divining power in the human mind, arose out of the 
 conviction, that an age, or nation, may become free 
 from certain prejudices, beliefs, and superstitious prac- 
 tices in two ways. It may have really risen above 
 them ; or it may have fallen below them, and become 
 too bad for their continuance. " The rustic would 
 have little reason to thank the philosopher, who should 
 give him true conceptions of ghosts, omens, dreams, 
 and presentiments at the price of abandoning his 
 faith in Providence and in the continued existence 
 of his fellow-creatures after their death. The teeth of 
 the old serpent sowed by the Cadmuses of French 
 literature under Lewis xv. produced a plenteous crop 
 of such philosophers and truth-trumpeters in the reign 
 of his ill-fated successor. They taught many facts, 
 historical, political, physiological, and ecclesiastical, 
 diffusing their notions so widely that the very ladies 
 and hair-dressers of Paris became fluent encyclo- 
 pedists ; and the sole price, which their scholars paid 
 for these treasures of new light, was to believe Chris- 
 tianity an imposture, the Scriptures a forgery, the 
 
( xxiii ) 
 
 worship of God superstition, hell a fable, heaven a 
 dream, our life without Providence, and our death 
 without hope. What can be conceived more natural 
 than the result : that self-acknowledged beasts should 
 first act, and next suffer themselves to be treated as 
 beasts? " (Friend, p. 41.) 
 
 Thank heaven ! — notwithstanding the attempts of 
 Mr. Thomas Payne and his compeers, it is not so bad 
 with us. Open infidelity has ceased to be a means even 
 of gratifying vanity : for the leaders of the gang them- 
 selves turned apostates to Satan, as soon as the number of 
 their Proselytes became so large, that Atheism ceased to 
 give distinction. Nay, it became a mark of original 
 thinking to defend the Belief and the Ten Command- 
 ments : so the strong minds veered round, and religion 
 came again into fashion. But still I exceedingly doubt, 
 whether the superanuation of sundry superstitious 
 fancies be the result of any real diffusion of sound 
 thinking in the nation at large. For instance, there 
 is now no call for a Picus Mirandula to write seven 
 books against Astrology. It might seem, indeed, that 
 a single fact like that of the loss of Kemperfelt and his 
 crew, or the explosion of the L'Orient, would prove to 
 the common sense of the most ignorant, that even if 
 Astrology could be true, the Astrologers must be false : 
 for if such a science were possible it could be a science 
 only for gods. Yet Erasmus, the prince of sound 
 common sense, is known to have disapproved of his 
 friend's hardihood, and did not himself venture beyond 
 scepticism : and the immortal Newton, to whom more 
 than to any other human being Europe owes the purifi 
 cation of its general notions concerning the heavenly 
 bodies, studied Astrology with much earnestness and 
 did not reject it till he had demonstrated the falsehood 
 of all its pretended grounds and principles. The 
 
( xxiv ) 
 
 exit of two or three superstitions is no more a proof 
 of the entry of good sense, than the strangling of a 
 Despot at Algiers or Constantinople is a symptom of 
 freedom. If therefore not the mere disbelief, but 
 the grounds of such disbelief, must decide the question 
 of our superior illumination, I confess that I could 
 not from my own observations on the books and 
 conversation of the age vote for the affirmative 
 without much hesitation. As many errors are despised 
 by men from ignorance as from knowledge. Whether 
 that be not the case with regard to divination, is a 
 query that rises in my mind (notwithstanding my fullest 
 conviction of the non-existence of such a power) as 
 often as I read the names of the great statesmen and 
 philosophers, which Cicero enumerates in the intro- 
 ductory paragraphs of his work de Divinatione. — 
 Socrates, omnesque Socratici, plurimisque locis gravis 
 Auctor Pemocritus, Cratippusque, familiaris noster, 
 quem ego parem summis Peripateticis judico, (fee. &c. — 
 praesensionem rerum futurarum comprobarunt. Of all 
 the theistic philosophers, Xenophanes was the only one 
 who wholly rejected it. ' A Stoicis degenerat Panaetius, 
 nee tamen ausus est negare, vim esse divinandi, sed 
 dubitare se dixit." Nor was this a mere outward 
 assent to the opinions of the state. Many of them 
 subjected the question to the most exquisite arguments, 
 and supported the affirmative not merely by experience, 
 but (especially the Stoics, who of all sects most culti- 
 vated psychology) by a minute analysis of human 
 nature and its faculties : while on the mind of Cicero 
 himself fas on that of Plato with regard to a state 
 of retribution after death) the universality of the 
 faith in all times and countries appears to have made 
 the deepest impression. ' Gentem quidem nullam 
 video, neque tarn humanam atque doctram, neque tarn 
 
( XXV ) 
 
 immanem tamque barbaram, quae non significan futura, 
 et a quibusdam inte'lligi praedicique posse censeat.' 
 
 I fear, that the decrease in our feelings of reverence 
 towards mankind at large, and our increasing aversion 
 to every opinion not grounded in some appeal to 
 the senses, have a larger share in this our emancipation 
 from the prejudices of Socrates and Cicero, than 
 reflection, insight, or a fair collation of the facts and 
 arguments. For myself, I would far rather see the 
 English people at large believe somewhat too much 
 than merely just enough, if the latter is to be produced, 
 or must be accompanied, by a contempt or neglect of 
 the faith and intellect of their forefathers. For not to 
 say what yet is most certain, that a people cannot 
 believe just enough, and that there are errors which 
 no wise man will treat with rudeness, while there 
 is a probability that they may be the refraction of 
 some great truth as yet below the horizon ; it remains 
 most worthy of our serious consideration, whether a 
 fancied superiority to their ancestors' intellects must 
 not be speedily followed in the popular mind by 
 disrespect for their ancestors' institutions Assuredly 
 it is not easy to place any confidence in a form of 
 church or state, of whose founders we have been 
 taught to believe, that their philosophy was jargon, 
 and their feelings and notions rank superstition. 
 Yet are we never io grow wiser ? — Are we to be 
 credulous by birth-right, and take ghosts, omens, 
 visions, and witchcraft, as an heir-loom? — God forbid! — 
 A distinction must be made, and such a one as shall 
 be equally availing and profitable to men of all ranks. 
 Is this practicable? — Yes! — it exists. It is found in the 
 study of the Old and New Testament, if only it 
 be combined with a spiritual partaking of the Redeemer's 
 
( xxvi ) 
 
 Blood, of which, mysterious as the symbol may be, 
 the sacramental Wine is no mere or arbitrary, me- 
 mento. This is the only certain, and this is the 
 universal preventive of all debasing superstitions ; this 
 is the true H^EMONY, (aifia, blood : oivoq, wine) which 
 our Milton has beautifully allegorized in a passage 
 strangely overlooked by all his commentators. Bear 
 in mind, Reader ! the character of a militant christian, 
 and the results (in this life and in the next) of the 
 Redemption by the Blood of Christ ; and so peruse the 
 passage ! 
 
 Amongst the rest a small unsightly root, 
 
 But of divine effect, he culled me out : 
 
 The leaf was darkish, and had prickles on it, 
 
 But in another country, as he said, 
 
 Bore a bright golden flower, but not in this soil I 
 
 Unknown and like esteem'd, and the dull swain 
 
 Treads on it daily with his clouted shoon ;' 
 
 And yet more med'cinal is it than that moly 
 
 That Hermes once to wise Ulysses gave. 
 
 He called it H^emony and gave it me, 
 
 And bad me keep it as of sovr'an use 
 
 'Gainst all inchantments, mildew, blast, or damp, 
 
 Or ghastly furies' apparition. Milton's Comus. 
 
 These lines might be employed as an amulet against 
 delusions : for the man, who is indeed a Christian, will 
 as little think of informing himself concerning the 
 future by dreams or presentiments, as of looking for a 
 distant object at broad noon-day with a lighted taper 
 in his hand. 
 
 But whatever of good and intellectual Nature worketh 
 in us, it is our appointed task to render gradually our 
 own work. For all things that surround us, and all 
 things that happen unto us, have (each doubtless its 
 own providential purpose, but) all one common final 
 
( xxvii ) 
 
 cause : namely, the increase of Consciousness, in such 
 wise, that whatever part of the terra incognita of our 
 nature the increased consciousness discovers, our will 
 may conquer and bring into subjection to itself under 
 the sovereignty of reason. 
 
 The leading differences between mechanic and vital 
 philosophy may all be drawn from one point : namely, 
 that the former demanding for every mode and act of 
 existence real or possible visibility, knows only of 
 distance and nearness, composition (or rather juxta- 
 position) and decomposition, in short the relations of 
 unproductive particles to each other ; so that in every 
 instance the result is the exact sum of the component 
 quantities, as in arithmetical addition. This is the 
 philosophy of death, and only of a dead nature can it 
 hold good. In life, much more in spirit, and in a 
 living and spiritual philosophy, the two component 
 counter-powers actually interpenetrate each other, and 
 generate a higher third, including both the former, 
 ita tamen ut sit alia et major. 
 
 To apply this to the subject of this present Essay. 
 The elements (the factors, as it were) of Religion are 
 Reason and Understanding. If the composition stopped 
 in itself, an understanding thus rationalized would lead 
 to the admission of the general doctrines of natural 
 religion, the belief of a God, and of immortality; and 
 probably to an acquiescence in the history and ethics 
 of the Gospel. But still it would be a speculative faith, 
 and in the nature of a Theory; as if the main object 
 of religion were to solve difficulties for the satisfaction 
 of the intellect. Now this state of mind, which alas 
 is the state of too many among our self-entitled 
 rational religionists, is a mere balance or compromise 
 of the two powers, not that living and generative inter- 
 penetration of both which \vould give being to essential 
 
( xxviii ) 
 
 Religion — to the Religion, at the birth of which ' we 
 receive the spirit of adoption, whereby we cry Abba, 
 Father ; the Spirit itself bearing witness with our spirit, 
 that we are the children of God." (Rom. viii. 15, 16.) 
 In Religion there is no abstractions. To the unity and 
 infinity of the Divine Nature, of which it is the par- 
 taker, it adds the fullness, and to the fullness the grace 
 and the creative overflowing. That which intuitively 
 it at once beholds and adores, praying always, and 
 rejoicing always — that doth it tend to become. In all 
 things and in each thing — for the Almighty Goodness 
 doth not create generalities or abide in abstractions — in 
 each, the meanest, object it bears witness to a mystery of 
 infinite solution. Thus < beholding as in a glass the glory 
 of the Lord, it is changed into the same image from glory 
 to glory.' (2 Cor. iii. 18.) For as it is born and not made, 
 so must it grow. As it is the image or symbol of its great 
 object, by the organ of this similitude, as by an eye, it 
 seeth that same image throughout the creation ; and 
 from the same cause sympathizeth with all creation in 
 its groans to be redeemed. ( For we know that the 
 whole creation groaneth and travaileth in earnest ex- 
 pectation' (Romans viii. 20 — 23) of a renewal of its 
 forfeited power, the power, namely, of retiring into 
 that image, which is its substantial form and true life, 
 from the vanity of Self, which then only is when for 
 itself it hath ceased to be. Even so doth Religion 
 finitely express the unity of the infinite Spirit by being 
 a total act of the soul. And even so doth it represent 
 his fullness by its depth, by its substantiality, and by 
 an all-pervading vital warmth which — relaxing the 
 rigid consolidating the dissolute, and giving cohesion 
 to that which is about to sink down and fall abroad, 
 as into the dust and cr amble of the Grave — is a life 
 within life, evermore organizing the soul anew. 
 
( xxix ) 
 
 Nor doth it express the fullness only of the 
 Spirit. It likewise represents his Overflowing by its 
 communicativeness, budding and blossoming forth in 
 all earnestness of persuasion, and in all words of sound 
 doctrine: while, like the Citron in a genial soil and 
 climate, it bears a golden fruitage of good-worksat the 
 same time, the example waxing in contact with the 
 exhortation, as the ripe orange beside the opening 
 orange-flower. Yea, even his Creativeness doth it 
 shadow out by its own powers of impregnation and 
 production, (' being such a one as Paul the aged, and 
 also a prisoner for Jesus Christ, who begat to a lively 
 hope his son Onesimus in his bonds') regenerating in 
 and through the Spirit the slaves of corruption, and 
 fugitives from a far greater master than Philemon. 
 The love of God, and therefore God himself who 
 is Love, Religion strives to express by Love, and 
 measures its growth by the increase and activity of 
 •its Love. For Christian Love is the last and divinest 
 birth, the harmony, unity, and god-like transfiguration 
 of all the vital, intellectual, moral, and spiritual 
 powers. Now it manifests itself as the sparkling 
 and ebullient spring of well-doing in gifts and in labors; 
 aud now as a silent fountain of patience and long- 
 suffering, the fullness of which no hatred or persecution 
 can exhaust or diminish ; a more than conqueror in the 
 persuasion, 'that neither death, mor life, nor angelg, 
 nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor 
 things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other 
 creature, shall be able to separate it from the Love of 
 God which is in Christ Jesus the Lord.' (Rom. viii. 
 38, 39.) 
 
 From God's Love through his Son, crucified for us 
 from the beginning of the World, Religion begins: and 
 m Love towards God and the creatures of God it hath 
 
( XXX ) 
 
 its end and completion. O how heaven-like it is to sit 
 among brethren at the feet of a minister who speaks 
 under the influence of Love and is heard under the 
 same influence ! For all abiding and spiritual know- 
 ledge, infused into a grateful and affectionate fellow- 
 christian, is as the child of the mind that infuses it. 
 The delight which he gives he receives ; and in that 
 bright and liberal hour the gladdened preacher can 
 scarce gather the ripe produce of to-day without dis- 
 covering and looking forward to the green fruits and 
 embryons, the heritage and reversionary wealth of the 
 days to come ; till he bursts forth in prayer and thanks- 
 giving — The harvest' truly is plenteous, but the labourers 
 few. O gracious Lord of the harvest, send forth 
 labourers into thy harvest ! There is no difference be- 
 tween the Jew and the Greek. Thou, Lord over all, 
 art rich to all that call upon thee. But how shall they 
 call on him in whom they have not believed? and 
 how shall they believe in him of whom they have not 
 heard ? and how shall they hear without a preacher ? 
 and how shall they preach except they be sent ? And 
 O ! how beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of 
 him that bringeth good tidings, that publisheth peace, 
 that bringeth glad tidings of good things, that pub- 
 lisheth salvation ; that saith unto the captive soul, Thy 
 God reigneth ! God manifested in the flesh hath re- 
 deemed thee! O Lord of the harvest, send forth 
 labourers into thy harvest ! ! 
 
 Join with me, Reader! in the fervent prayer, that we 
 may seek within us, what we can never find elsewhere, 
 that we may find within us what no words can put there, 
 that one only true religion, which elevateth Knowing 
 into Being, which is at once the Science of Being, the 
 Being and the Life of all genuine Science, 
 
( xxxi ) 
 
 (D.) 
 
 In all ages of the Christian church, and in the 
 later period of the Jewish (that is, as soon as from 
 their acquaintance first with the Oriental and afterwards 
 with the Greek philosophy the precursory and prepara- 
 tive influences of the Gospel began to work) there have 
 existed individuals (Laodiceans in spirit, Minims in 
 faith, and nominalists in philosophy) who mistake out- 
 lines for substance, and distinct images for clear con- 
 ceptions ; with whom therefore not to be a thing is 
 the same as not to be at all. The contempt, in which 
 such persons hold the works and doctrines of all 
 theologians before Grotius, and of all philosophers before 
 Locke and Hartley (at least before Bacon and Hobbes) 
 is not accidental, nor yet altogether owing to that epi- 
 demic of a proud ignorance occasioned by a diffused 
 sciolism, which gave a sickly and hectic shewiness to 
 the latter half of the last century. It is a real instinct 
 of self-defence acting offensively by anticipation. For 
 the authority of all the greatest names of antiquity is 
 full and decisive against them ; and man, by the very 
 nature of his birth and growth, is so much the creature 
 of authority, that there was no way of effectually re- 
 sisting it, but by undermining the reverence for the 
 past in toto. Thus, the Jewish Prophets have, forsooth, 
 a certain degree of antiquarian value, as being the 
 only specimens extant of the oracles of a barbarous 
 kibe ; the Evangelists are to be interpreted with a 
 due allowance for their superstitious prejudices con- 
 cerning evil spirits, and St. Paul never suffers them to 
 forget that he had been brought up at the feet of a 
 Jewish Rabbi ! The Greeks indeed were a fine people 
 in works of taste ; but as to their philosophers ! the 
 writings of Plato are smoke and flash from the witch « 
 
( xxxii ) 
 
 cauldron of a disturbed imaginatioff ! — Aristotle's works 
 a quickset hedge of fruitless and thorny distinctions ! 
 and all the Philosophers before Plato and Aristotle 
 fablers and allegorizers ! 
 
 But these men have had their day: and there are 
 signs of the times clearly announcing that that day is 
 verging to its close. Even now there are not a few, 
 on whose convictions it will not be uninfluencive to 
 know, that the power, by which men are led to the 
 truth of things, instead of the appearances, was deemed 
 and entitled the living and substantial Word of God by 
 the soundest of the Hebrew Doctors ; that the eldest 
 and most profound of the Greek philosophers de- 
 manded assent to their doctrine, mainly as ao^ia. 
 $E07rapaS6Toe, i. e. a traditionary wisdom that had its 
 origin in inspiration ; that these men referred the samo 
 power to the nop adfaov vtto hoiKovvroQ AOrOT ; and 
 that they were scarcely less express than their scholar 
 Philo Judaeus, in their affirmations of the Logos, as no 
 mere attribute or quality, no mode of abstraction, no. 
 personification, but literally and mysteriously Deus 
 alter et idem. 
 
 When education has disciplined the minds of our 
 gentry for austerer study ; when educated men will be 
 ashamed to look abroad for truths that can be only 
 found within ; within themselves they will discover, 
 intuitively will they discover, the distinctions between 
 " the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the 
 world " and the understanding, which forms the pecu- 
 lium of each man, as different in extent and value 
 from another man's understanding, as his estate may 
 be from his neighbour's estate. The words of St. John, 
 from the 7th to the 12th verse of his first chapter, 
 are in their whole extent interpretable of the Under- 
 standing, which derives its rank and mode of being in 
 
( xxxiii ) 
 
 the human race (that is, as far as it may be contrasted 
 with the instinct of the dog or elephant, in all, which 
 constitutes it human understanding) from the universal 
 Light. This Light therefore comes as to its own. Being 
 rejected,^ leaves the understanding to a world of dreams 
 and darkness : for in it alone is life and the life is the 
 light of men. What then but apparitions can remain 
 to a Philosophy, which strikes death through all things 
 visible and invisible ; satisfies itself then only when it can 
 explain those abstractions of the outward senses, which 
 by an unconscious irony it names indifferently facts and 
 phenomena, mechanically — that is, by the laws of 
 Death ; and brands with the name of Mysticism every 
 solution grounded in Life, or the powers and intuitions 
 of Life? 
 
 On the other hand, if the light be received by faith, 
 to such understandings it delegates the privilege to 
 become Sons of God (ityvoiav), expanding while it 
 elevates, even as the beams of the sun incorporate with 
 the mist, and make its natural darkness and earthly 
 nature the bearer and interpreter of their own glory. 
 
 'Eav fifi Tri<zivffrjT£, oh fxrj ffvvfjre. 
 
 The very same truth is found in a fragment of the 
 Ephesian Heraclitus, preserved by Stobaeus, and in 
 somewhat different words by Diogenes Laertius. Bvv 
 voo) Xiyovrae Icr^ypi^ea^ai 'xprj rj> fyvui iravTwv' rpicbovrai 
 yap ttclvtzq 61 avSpwTnvQi root V7r6 kroe tov Beiov (Aoyov) 
 KpaTei yap roaovrov okooov e-SeXet, kol k^apKii traai icac 
 
 Trtpiyivtrac Translation : — To discourse rationally 
 (=if we would render the discursive understanding 
 " discourse of reason"} it behoves us to derive strength 
 from that which is common to all men : (= the light 
 that lighteth every man.) For all human understand- 
 ings are nourished by the one Divine Word, whose 
 
( xxxiv ) 
 
 power is commensurate with his will, and is sufficient 
 for all and overfl oweth (= shineth in darkness, and is not 
 Contained therein, or comprehended by the darkness.) 
 
 This was Heraclitus, whose book is nearly six 
 hundred years older than the Gospel of St. John, and 
 Who was proverbially entitled the Dark (6 aKoreivoc'^ 
 But it was a darkness which Socrates would not con- 
 demn, and which would probably appear to enlight- 
 ened Christians the darkness of prophecy, had the 
 work, which he hid in the temple, been preserved to 
 us. But obscurity is a word of many meanings. It 
 may be in the subject; it may be in the author ; or it 
 may be in the reader ;— and this again may originate 
 in the state of the reader's heart ; or in that of his capa- 
 city ; or in his temper ; or in his accidental associa- 
 tions. Two kinds are especially pointed out by the 
 divine Plato in his Sophistes. The Beauty of the 
 Original is beyond my reach. On my anxiety to give the 
 fulness of the Thought, I must ground my excuse for 1 
 construing rather than translating. The fidelity of the 
 Version may well atone for its harshness in a passage 
 that deserves a meditation beyond the ministry of 
 words, even the words of Plato himself, though iu 
 them, or no where, are to be heard the sweet sounds, 
 that issued from the Head of Memnon at the Touch of 
 Light.— " One thing is the Hardness-to-be-understood 
 of the Sophist, another that of the Philosopher. The 
 former retreating into the obscurity of that which hatk 
 not true Being, (jov p) ovtoq) and by long intercourse 
 accustomed to the same, is hard to be known on account 
 of the duskiness of the place. But the philosopher by 
 contemplation of pure reason evermore approximating 
 to the idea of true Being (jov 6Vroc) is by no means easy 
 to be seen on account of the splendor of that region. For 
 
( XXXV ) 
 
 the intellectual eyes of the Many flit, and are incapable 
 of looking fixedly toward the God-like." 
 
 There are, I am aware, persons who willingly ad- 
 mit, that not in articles of Faith alone, but in the heights 
 of Geometry, and even in the necessary first principles 
 of Natural Philosophy, there exist truths of apodictic 
 force in Reason, which the mere Understanding strives 
 in vain to comprehend. Take, as an instance, the 
 ascending series of Infinites in every Finite, a position 
 which involves a contradiction for the Understanding, 
 yet follows demonstrably from the very definition of 
 Body, as that which fills a space. For wherever there 
 is a space filled, there must be an extension to be* 
 divided. When therefore Maxims generalized from: 
 Appearances (Phenomena) are applied to Substances ; 
 when Rules, abstracted or deduced from the Forms in 
 Time and Space, are used as measures of Spiritual 
 Being, yea even of the Divine Nature which cannot be 
 compared or classed ; (" For my thoughts are not your 
 thoughts, nor are my ways your ways, saith the Lord." 
 Isaiah lv. 8.) such Professors cannot but protest 
 against the whole Process, as grounded on a gross 
 Metathesis kg a\\o yevog. Yet still they are disposed 
 to tolerate it as a sort of sanative counter-excitement, 
 that holds in check the more dangerous disease of 
 Methodism. But I more than doubt of both the po- 
 sitions. I do not think Methodism, Calvinistic or 
 Wesleian, the more dangerous disease ; and even if it 
 were, I should deny that it is at all likely to be coun- 
 teracted by the rational Christianity of our modern 
 Alogi (\6yog 7ri?e&>c aXoyog !) who, mistaking Unity for 
 Sameness, have been pleased by a misnomer not less 
 contradictory to their own tenets than intolerant to 
 those of Christians in general, to entitle themselves 
 
 eg 
 
( xxxvi ) 
 
 Unitarians. The two contagions attack each a 
 wholly different class of minds and tempers, and each 
 tends to produce and justify the other, according as 
 the predisposition of the patient may chance to be. If 
 Fanaticism be as a fire in the flooring of the church, 
 the Idolism of the unspiritualized Understanding is the 
 dry; rot in its beams and timbers. T/3piv xpv afltwvtiv 
 fiaXKov y jFypjcairw : says Heraclitus. It is not the sect 
 of Unitarian Dissenters, but the spirit of Unitarianism 
 in the members of the Established Church that alarms 
 me. To what open revilings, and to what whispered 
 slanders, I subject my name, by this public avowal, I 
 well know : aizigovg yap rtvag elvai kirigvywv 'Hjod/cXftroe, 
 driaiv, aKovaai ovk e-m^afxivovg ovd' enrelp' aXXa ical, kvveq 
 <£»£, fiav'Covaiv bv av fifj ■ywu/vKwcri. 
 
 (E.) 
 
 The term, Idea, is an instance in point ; and I hazard 
 this assertion, together with the preceding sentences, 
 in the full consciousness, that they must be unintelligi- 
 ble to those who have yet to learn, that an Idea is 
 equi-distant in its signification from Sensation, Image, 
 Fact, and Notion : that it is the antithesis not the syno- 
 nyme of eiSwXov. The • magnificent son of Cosmo was 
 wont to discourse with Ficino, Politian, and the princely 
 Mirandula on the Ideas of Will, God, and Immortality. 
 The accomplished author of the Arcadia, the star of 
 serenest brilliance in the glorious constellation of 
 Elizabeth's court, our England's Sir Philip Sydney ! 
 He the paramount gentleman of Europe, the poet, 
 warrior, and statesman, held high converse with Spencer 
 on the Idea of Supersensual beauty; on all " earthly, 
 fair and amiable," as the Symbol of that Idea ; and on 
 Music and Poesy as its living Educts ! With the same 
 
{ xxxvii ) 
 
 genial reverence did the younger Algernon commune 
 with Harrington and Milton on the Idea of a perfect 
 state ; and in what sense it is true, that the men 
 (i. e. the aggregate of the inhabitants of a country at 
 any one time) are made for the state, not the state 
 for the men. But these lights shine no longer, or for a 
 few. Exeunt: and enter in their stead Holofernes 
 and Costard' masked as Metaphysics and Common- 
 sense. And these too have their Ideas ! The former has 
 an Idea, that Hume, Hartley, and Condillac have ex- 
 ploded all Ideas, but those of sensation ; he has an 
 Idea that he was particularly pleased with the fine 
 idea of the last-named Philosopher, that there is no 
 absurdity in asking, What color Virtue is of? inasmuch 
 as the proper philosophic answer would be black, blue, 
 or bottle-green, according as the coat, waistcoat and 
 smallclothes might chance to be of the person, the 
 .series of whose motions had excited the sensations, 
 which formed our idea of virtue. The latter has no 
 idea of a better-flavored haunch of venison than he 
 dined off at the Albion, he admits that the French have 
 an excellent Idea of cooking in general, but holds 
 that their best cooks have no more Idea of dressing a 
 turtle than the gourmands themselves, at Paris, have 
 of the true taste and color of the fat ! 
 
 It is not impossible that a portion of the high value 
 attached of late years to the Dates and Margins of our 
 old Folios and Quartos, may be transferred to their 
 Contents. Even now there exists a shrewd suspicion in 
 the minds of reading men, that not only Plato and 
 Aristotle, but even Scotus Erigena, and the schoolmen 
 from Peter Lombard to Duns Scotus, are not such 
 mere blockheads, as they pass for with those who 
 have never perused a line of their writings, What the. 
 
( xxxviii ) 
 
 results may be, should this ripen into conviction, I oan 
 but guess. But all History seems to fay or the persuasion, 
 I entertain, that in every age the speculative Philosophy 
 in general acceptance, the metaphysical opinions that 
 happen to be predominant, will influence the Theo- 
 logy of that age. Whatever is proposed for the Belief, as 
 true, must have been previously admitted by Reason 
 as possible, as involving no contradiction to the uni- 
 versal forms (or laws) of Thought, no incompatibility 
 in the terms of the proposition ; and the determination 
 on this head belongs exclusively to the science of Meta- 
 physics. In each article of Faith embraced on convic- 
 tion, the mind determines, first intuitively on its logical 
 possibility ; secondly, discursively, on its analogy to 
 doctrines already believed, as well as on its corres- 
 pondencies to the wants and faculties of our nature ; 
 and thirdly, historically, on the direct and indirect 
 evidences. But the probability of an event is a part 
 of its historic evidence, and constitutes its presumptive 
 proof, or the evidence a priori. Now as the evidence a 
 posteriori, requisite in order to a satisfactory proof of 
 the actual occurrence of any Fact stands, in an inverse 
 ratio to the strength or weakness of the evidence a 
 priori (that is, a fact probable in itself may be believed 
 on slight testimony) it is manifest that of the three 
 Factors, by which the mind is determined to the ad- 
 mission or rejection of the point in question, the last 
 must be greatly influenced by the second, and that 
 both depend on the first, not indeed as their cause or 
 preconstituent, but as their indispensable condition ; 
 so that the very inquiry concerning them is preposterous 
 (=ffd^i<r)ua tov Yzepov ITpoVfpov) as long as the first re- 
 mains undetermined. Again : the history of human 
 opinions (ecclesiastical and philosophical history) 
 
( xxxix ) 
 
 confirms by manifold instances, what attentive con- 
 sideration of the position itself might have authorized 
 us to presume, namely, that on all such subjects 
 as are out of the sphere of the senses, and therefore 
 incapable of a direct proof from outward experience, 
 the question whether any given position is logically 
 impossible (incompatible with Reason) or only in- 
 comprehensible (i. e. not reducible to the forms of 
 Sense, namely, Time and Space, or those of the Un- 
 derstanding, namely Quantity, Quality, and Relation — ) 
 in other words, the question, whether an assertion be in 
 itself inconceivable, or only by us unimaginable, will 
 be decided by each individual according to the posi- 
 tions assumed as first principles in the metaphysical 
 system which he had previously adopted. Thus the 
 existence of a Supreme Reason, the Creator of the 
 material Universe, involved a contradiction for a dis- 
 ciple of Epicurus, who had convinced himself that 
 causative thought was tantamount to something out of 
 nothing or substance out of shadow, and incompatible 
 with the axiom Nihil ex nihilo : While on the contrary, 
 to a Platonist the position is necessarily pre-supposed 
 in every other truth, as that without which every fact 
 of experience would involve a contradiction in Reason. 
 Now it is not denied that the Framers of our Church 
 Liturgy, Homilies and Articles, entertained metaphy- 
 sical opinions irreconcileable in their first principles 
 with the system of speculative philosophy which has 
 been taught in this country, and only not universally 
 received, since the asserted and generally believed 
 defeat of the Bishop of Worcester (the excellent Stil- 
 lingfleet) in his famous controversy with Mr. Locke. 
 Assuredly therefore it is well worth the consideration 
 of our Established Clergy whether it is at all pro- 
 
( *1 ) 
 
 bable in itself, or congruous with experience, that 
 the disputed Articles of our Church de revelatis et 
 credendis should be adopted with singleness of heart, 
 and in the light of knowlege, when the grounds and 
 first philosophy, on which the Framers themselves 
 rested the antecedent credibility (may we not add even 
 the revelability ?} of the Articles in question, have been 
 exchanged for principles the most dissimilar, if not 
 contrary ? It may be said and truly, that the Scrip- 
 tures, and not metaphysical systems, are our best and 
 ultimate authority. And doubtless, on Revelation must 
 we rely for the truth of the Doctrines. Yet what is 
 held incapable of being conceived as possible, will be 
 deemed incapable of having been revealed as real : 
 and that philosophy has hitherto had a negative voice, 
 as to the interpretation of the Scriptures in high and 
 doctrinal points, is proved by the course of argument 
 adopted in the controversial volumes of all the orthodox 
 Divines from Origen to Bishop Bull, as well as by the 
 very different sense attached to the same texts by the 
 disciples of the modern Metaphysique, wherever they 
 have been at liberty to form their own creeds according 
 to their own expositions. 
 
 I repeat the question then : is it likely, that the faith 
 of our ancestors will be retained when their philosophy 
 is rejected ? rejected a priori, as baseless notions not 
 worth inquiring into, as obsolete errors which it would 
 be " slaying the slain " to confute ? Should the answer 
 be in the negative, it would be no strained inference 
 that the Clergy at least, as the Conservators of the 
 national Faith, and the accredited Representatives of 
 Learning in general amongst us, might with great ad- 
 vantage to their own peace of mind qualify themselves 
 to judge for themselves concerning the comparative 
 
( *li ) 
 
 worth and solidity of the two schemes. Let them make 
 the experiment, whether a patient re-hearing of their 
 predecessors' cause, with enough of predeliction for 
 the men to counterpoise the prejudices against their 
 system, might not induce them to move for a new 
 trial — a result of no mean importance in my opinion, 
 were it on this account alone, that it would recall cer- 
 tain ex-dignitaries in the Book-republic from their long 
 exile on the shelves of our public libraries to their old 
 familiar station on the reading desks of our theological 
 students. However strong the presumption were in 
 favor of principles authorized by names that must 
 needs be so dear and venerable to a Minister of the 
 Church of England, as those of Hooker, Whitaker, 
 Field, Donne, Selden, Stillingfleet, (masculine 
 intellects, formed under the robust discipline of an age 
 memorable for keenness of research, and iron industry!) 
 yet no undue preponderance from any previous weight 
 in this scale will be apprehended by minds capable of 
 estimating the counter-weights, which it must first bring 
 to a balance in the scale opposite! The obstinacy of 
 opinions that have always been taken for granted ! opi- 
 nions unassailable even by the remembrance of a doubt ! 
 the silent accrescence of belief from the un watched 
 depositions of a general, never-contradicted, hearsay 
 the concurring suffrage of modern books, all pre-sup- 
 posing or re-asserting the same principles with the same 
 confidence, and with the same contempt for all prior 
 . systems ! — and among these, Works of highest autho- 
 rity, appealed to in our Legislatures, and lectured on 
 at our Universities; the very books, perhaps, that 
 called forth our own first efforts in thinking ! the solu- 
 . tions and confutations in which must therefore have 
 appeared tenfold more satisfactory from their having 
 given us our first information of the difficulties to be 
 
solved, of the opinions to be confuted! — Verily, a 
 Clergyman's partiality towards the tenets of his fore* 
 lathers must be intense beyond all precedent, if it can 
 more than sustain itself against antagonists so strong in 
 themselves, and with such mighty adjuncts ! 
 
 ]Nor in this enumeration dare I (though fully aware 
 .of the obloquy to which I am exposing myself) omit 
 •the noticeable fact, that we have attached a portion 
 even of our national glory (not only to the system it- 
 self, that system of disguised and decorous epicurean- 
 ism, which has been the only orthodox philosophy of 
 the last hundred years ; but also, and more emphati- 
 cally) t,o the name of the assumed father of the system, 
 who raised it to its present " pride of place," and al- 
 most universal acceptance throughout Europe. And 
 how was this effected? Extrinsic ally, by all the 
 causes, consequences, and accompaniments of the Re- 
 volution in 1688 : by all the opinions, interests, and 
 passions, which counteracted by the sturdy prejudices 
 of the mal-contents with the Revolution ; qualified by 
 jthe compromising character of its chief conductors ; 
 not more propelled by the spirit of enterprize and ha- 
 zard in our commercial towns, than held in check by 
 the characteristic vis inertle of the peasantry and 
 landholders ; both parties cooled and lessoned by the 
 equal failure of the destruction, and of the restoration, 
 of monarchy ; it was effected extrinsically, I say, by 
 the same influences, which, (not in and of them- 
 selves, but with all these and sundry other modifica- 
 tions) combined under an especial controul of Provi- 
 dence to perfect and secure the majestic Temple of the 
 British Constitution ! — But the very same which in 
 France, without this providential counterpoise, over- 
 threw the motly fabric of feudal oppression to build up 
 
( xliii ) 
 
 in its stead the madhouse of jacobinism ! Intrinsic ally ■> 
 and as far as the philosophic scheme itself is alone 
 concerned, it was effected by the mixed policy and 
 bon hommie, with which the author contrived to 
 retain in his celebrated work whatever the system 
 possesses of soothing for the indolence, and of flattering 
 for the vanity, of men's average understandings: 
 while he kept out of sight all its darker features, 
 that outraged the instinctive faith and moral feelings of 
 mankind, ingeniously threading-on the dried and 
 shrivelled, yet still wholesome and nutritious fruits, 
 plucked from the rich grafts of ancient wisdom, to the 
 barren and worse than barren fig tree of the mechanic 
 philosophy. Thus, the se?isible Christians " the 
 angels of the church of Laodicea" with the numerous 
 and mighty Sect of their admirers, delighted with the 
 discovery that they could purchase the decencies and the 
 creditableness of religion at so small an expenditure 
 of faith, extolled the work for its pious conclusions : 
 while the Infidels, wiser in their generation than the 
 children (at least than these nominal children) of light, 
 eulogized it with no less zeal for the sake of its principle? 
 and assumptions, and with the foresight of those obvious 
 and only legitimate conclusions, that might and would 
 be deduced from them. Great at all times and almost 
 incalculable are the influences of party spirit in exagge- 
 rating contemporary reputation ; but never perhaps 
 " from the first syllable of recorded time" were they 
 exerted under such a concurrence and conjunction of 
 fortunate accidents, of helping and furthering events 
 and circumstances, as in the instance of Mr. Locke* 
 
 I am most fully persuaded, that the principles both 
 of taste, morals, and religion taught in our most 
 popular compendia of moral and political philosophy, 
 
( xliv ) 
 
 natural theology, evidences of Christianity, &c. are false, 
 injurious, and debasing. But I am likewise not less 
 deeply convinced, that all the well-meant attacks on 
 the writings of modern infidels and heretics, in support 
 either of the miracles or of the mysteries of the 
 Christian religion, can be of no permanent utility, 
 while the authors themselves join in the vulgar appeal 
 to common sense as the one infallible judge in matters, 
 which become subjects of philosophy only, because 
 they involve a contradiction between this common 
 sense and our moral instincts, and require therefore an 
 arbiter, which containing both (eminenter) must be 
 higher than either. We but mow down the rank 
 misgrowth instead of cleansing the soil, as long as we 
 ourselves protect and manure, as the pride of our 
 garden, a tree of false knowledge, which looks fair 
 and shewy and Variegated with fruits not its own, 
 that hang from the branches which have at various 
 times been ingrafted on its stem ; but from the roots of 
 which under ground the runners are sent off, that shoot 
 up at a distance and bring forth the true and natural 
 crop. — I will speak plainly, though in so doing I must 
 bid defiance to all the flatterers of the folly and foolish 
 self-opinion of the half-instructed many. The articles 
 of our Church, and the true principles of government 
 and social order, will never be effectually and con^ 
 sistently maintained against their antagonists till the 
 champions have themselves ceased to worship the same 
 Baal with their enemies, till they have cast out the 
 common Idol from the recesses of their own con- 
 victions, and with it the whole service and ceremonial 
 of Idolism. While all parties agree in their abjuration 
 of Plato and Aristotle, and in their contemptuous neglect 
 of the schoolmen and the scholastic logic, without 
 
( xlV- ) 
 
 which the excellent Selden (that genuine English Mind 
 whose erudition, broad, deep, and manifold as it was, 
 is yet less remarkable than his robust healthful common 
 sense) affirms it (see his Table Talk) impossible for 
 a Divine thoroughly to comprehend or reputably to 
 defend the whole undiminished and unadulterated 
 scheme of Catholick faith : while all alike pre-assume, 
 with Mr. Locke, that the Mind contains only the re- 
 liques of the Senses, and therefore proceed with him to 
 explain the substance from the shadow, the voice 
 from the echo : they can but detect, each the others 
 inconsistencies. The champion of orthodoxy will vic- 
 toriously expose the bald and staring incongruity of the 
 Socinian scheme with the language of Scripture, and with 
 the final causes of all revealed religion : — : the Socinian 
 will retort on the orthodox the incongruity of a belief 
 in mysteries with his own admissions concerning the 
 origin, and nature of all tenable ideas, and as trium- 
 phantly expose the pretences of believing in a form of 
 words, to which the believer himself admits that he can 
 attach no consistent meaning. Lastly, the godless 
 materialist, as the only consistent because the only 
 consequent reasoner, will secretly laugh at both. — 
 If these sentiments should be just, the consequences are 
 so important, that every well-educated man, who has 
 given proofs that he has at least patiently studied the 
 subject, deserves a patient hearing. Had I not the 
 authority of the greatest and noblest intellects for at 
 least two thousand years on my side, jet from the vital 
 interest of the opinions themselves, and their natural, 
 unconstrained, and (as it were) spontaneous coalescence 
 with the faith of the Catholick church, (they being, 
 moreover, the opinions of its most eminent fathers) 
 I might appeal to all orthodox Christians, whether they 
 
( xlvi ) 
 
 adhere to the faith only or both to the faith and 
 forms of the established Church, in the words of 
 my motto : Ad isthaec quaeso vos, qualiacunque primo 
 videantur aspectu, adtendite ut qui vobis forsan insanire 
 videar, saltern quibus insaniam rationibus cognoscatis. 
 
 There are still a few, however, young men of 
 loftiest minds, and the very stuff out of which the 
 sword and shield of truth and honor are to be made, 
 who will not withdraw all confidence from the writer, 
 although 
 
 'Tis true, that passionate for ancient Truths 
 And honoring with religious love the Great 
 Of elder times, he hated to excess, 
 With an unquiet and intolerant Scorn, 
 The hollow Puppets of an hollow Age 
 Ever idolatrous, and changing ever 
 Its worthless Idols ! 
 
 a few there are, who will still less be indisposed to 
 follow him in his milder mood, whenever their Friend, 
 
 Piei*cing the long-neglected holy Cave, 
 The haunt obscure of Old Philosophy, 
 Shall bid with lifted Torch its starry walls 
 Sparkle, as erst they sparkled to the flame 
 Of odrous lamps tended by saint and sage ! 
 
 I have, hinted, above, at the necessity of a Glossary, 
 and I will conclude these supplementary remarks with 
 a nomenclature of the principal terms that occur in the 
 elements of speculative philosophy, in their old and 
 rightful sense, according to my belief; at all events 
 the sense in which I have myself employed them. — 
 The most general term (genus summun) belonging 
 
( xlvii ) 
 
 to the speculative intellect, as distinguished from 
 acts of the will, is Representation, or (still better} 
 Presentation. 
 
 A conscious Presentation, if it refers exclusively to 
 the Subject, as a modification of his own state of Being 
 is = Sensation. 
 
 The same if it refers to an Object, is == Per- 
 ception. 
 
 A Perception, immediate and individual is = an 
 Intuition. 
 
 The same, mediate, and by means of a character or 
 mark common to several things, is = a Conception. 
 
 A Conception, extrinsic and sensuous, is = a 
 Fact, or a Cognition. 
 
 The same, purely mental and abstracted from the 
 forms of the Understanding itself == a Notion. 
 
 A Notion may be realized, and becomes Cognition ; 
 but that which is neither a Sensation or a Percep- 
 tion, that which is neither individual (i. e. a sensible 
 . Intuition) nor general (i. e. a conception) which neither 
 refers to outward Facts nor yet is abstracted from the 
 Forms of perception contained in the Understanding ; 
 but which is an educt of the Imagination actuated by the 
 pure Reason, to which there neither is or can be an ade* 
 quate correspondent in the world of the senses — this and 
 this alone is = an Idea. Whether Ideas are regulative 
 only, according to Aristotle and Kant; or likewise 
 Constitutive, and one with the power and Life of 
 Nature, according to Plato, and Plotinus (ev \6jm £wrj 
 jyv, rat i] £wi) 7}v to <pu>Q tS)v avS'pwTrwv) is the highest 
 problem of Philosophy, and not part of its nomenclature. 
 
 FINIS. 
 
4»t£ 
 
 Printed by S. Curtis, Southampton Place, Camberwell. 
 

 
 :l> 
 
 
 \