y gainful centuries which we are
following, the life of the world lay as a nursling babe. Remember,
in their successive order,--of monks, St. Jerome, St. Augustine, St.
Martin, St. Benedict, and St. Gregory; of kings,--and your national
vanity may be surely enough appeased in recognizing two of them for
Saxon,--Theodoric, Charlemagne, Alfred, Canute, and the Confessor. I
will read three passages to you, out of the literal words of three
of these ten men, without saying whose they are, that you may compare
them with the best and most exalted you have read expressing the
philosophy, the religion, and the policy of to-day,--from which I
admit, with Dean Stanley, but with a far different meaning from his,
that they are indeed separate for evermore. I give you first, for an
example of Philosophy, a single sentence, containing all--so far as I
can myself discern--that it is possible for us to know, or well for us
to believe, respecting the world and its laws.

"OF GOD'S UNIVERSAL PROVIDENCE, RULING ALL, AND COMPRISING ALL.

"Wherefore the great and mighty God; He that made man a reasonable
creature of soul and body, and He that did neither let him pass
unpunished for his sin, nor yet excluded him from mercy; He that gave,
both unto good and bad, essence with the stones, power of production
with the trees, senses with the beasts of the field, and understanding
with the angels; He from whom is all being, beauty, form, and number,
weight, and measure; He from whom all nature, mean and excellent,
all seeds of form, all forms of seed, all motion, both of forms and
seeds, derive and have being; He that gave flesh the original beauty,
strength, propagation, form and shape, health and symmetry; He
that gave the unreasonable soul, sense, memory, and appetite; the
reasonable, besides these, fantasy, understanding, and will; He,
I say, having left neither heaven, nor earth, nor angel, nor man,
no, nor the most base and contemptible creature, neither the bird's
feather, nor the herb's flower, nor the tree's leaf, without the true
harmony of their parts, and peaceful concord of composition:--It is
in no way credible that He would leave the kingdoms of men and their
bondages and freedom loose and uncomprised in the laws of His eternal
providence."[5]

[Footnote 5: From St. Augustine's 'Citie of God,' Book V., ch. xi.
(English trans., printed by George Eld, 1610.)]

This for the philosophy.[6] Next, I take for example of the Religion