lied in its
appropriate field of enquiry, would be found incompatible with the great
argument of an intelligent Cause, and would throw the whole subject of
theology out of the range of human knowledge. It would be superfluous
for us to re-state that argument; and our readers would probably be more
displeased to have presented before them a hostile view of this subject,
though for the purpose only of controversy, than they would be edified
by a repetition of those reasonings which have long since brought
conviction to their minds. We will content ourselves, therefore, with
this protest, and with adding--as a fact of experience, which, in
estimating a law of development, may with peculiar propriety be insisted
on--that hitherto no such incompatibility has made itself evident.
Hitherto science, or the method of thinking, which its cultivation
requires and induces, has not shown itself hostile to the first great
article of religion--that on which revelation proceeds to erect all the
remaining articles of our faith. If it is a fact that, in rude times,
men began their speculative career by assigning individual phenomena to
the immediate causation of supernatural powers, it is equally a fact
that they have hitherto, in the most enlightened times, terminated their
inductive labours by assigning that _unity_ and _correlation_ which
science points out in the universe of things to an ordaining
intelligence. We repeat, as a matter of experience, it is as rare in
this age to find a reflective man who does not read _thought_ in this
unity and correlation of material phenomena, as it would have been, in
some rube superstitious period, to discover an individual who refused to
see, in any one of the specialities around him, the direct interference
of a spirit or demon. In our own country, men of science are rather to
blame for a too detailed, a puerile and injudicious, manner of treating
this great argument, than for any disposition to desert it.

Contenting ourselves with this protest, we proceed to the consideration
of the _new law_. That there is, in the statement here made of the
course pursued in the development of speculative thought, a measure of
truth; and that, in several subjects, the course here indicated may be
traced, will probably, by every one who reads the foregoing extracts, be
at once admitted. But assuredly very few will read it without a feeling
of surprise at finding what (under certain limitations) they would have