e, that this laxity of faith has no real logical
connexion with the scientific results with which he is occupied, we ought
not to inflict on _them_ any portion of our suspicion or distrust. We
shall always protest against confounding the legitimate attempts of
science with the erroneous principles of certain schools of metaphysics,
which may or may not be connected with them. If there is atheism in the
world, we know whence it comes; we know well it is in a very different
laboratory than that of the chemist that it has been distilled.

The unknown author before us, repeatedly protests against being numbered
amongst atheistic philosophers; on our own part, we are thoroughly
convinced that no formula of physical science could possibly interfere
with a rational belief in the power and wisdom of God; what remains, then,
but to treat his book purely in a scientific point of view?

To reduce to a system the acts of creation, or the development of the
several forms of animal life, no more impeaches the authorship of
creation, than to trace the laws by which the world is upheld and its
phenomena perpetually renewed. The presumption naturally rises in the
mind, that the same Great Being would adopt the same mode of action in
both cases. If, for instance, the nebular hypothesis, to which we have
already alluded, should be received as a scientific account of the
proximate origin of our planetary system, this, as Mr Whewell has shown in
his "Bridgewater Treatise," would serve only to enlighten and elevate our
conception of the power of God. And indeed to a mind accustomed--as is
every educated mind--to regard the operations of Deity as essentially
differing from the limited, sudden, evanescent impulses of a human agent,
it is distressing to be compelled to picture to itself the power of God as
put forth in any other manner than in those slow, mysterious, universal
laws, which have so plainly an eternity to work in; it pains the
imagination to be obliged to assimilate those operations, for a moment, to
the brief energy of a human will, or the manipulations of a human hand.
Does not the language even of a Christian poet, when he speaks of God as
_launching_ from his ample palm the rolling planets into space, in some
measure offend us? Do we not avoid as much as possible all such
similitudes, as being derogatory to our notions of the Supreme?

There are still, indeed, some men of narrow prejudices who look upon every
fresh attempt to