an imposing, that is, being false. As to our
own countries, it occupies our language, it meets us at every turn in our
literature, it is the secret assumption, too axiomatic to be distinctly
professed, of all our writers; nor can we help assuming it ourselves,
except by the most unnatural vigilance. Whoever philosophizes, starts with
it, and introduces it, when he will, without any apology. Bacon, Hooker,
Taylor, Cudworth, Locke, Newton, Clarke, Berkeley, and Butler, and it
would be as easy to find more, as difficult to find greater names among
English authors, inculcate or comment upon it. Men the most opposed, in
creed or cast of mind, Addison and Johnson, Shakespeare and Milton, Lord
Herbert and Baxter, herald it forth. Nor is it an English or a Protestant
notion only; you track it across the Continent, you pursue it into former
ages. When was the world without it? Have the systems of Atheism or
Pantheism, as sciences, prevailed in the literature of nations, or
received a formation or attained a completeness such as Monotheism? We
find it in old Greece, and even in Rome, as well as in Judea and the East.
We find it in popular literature, in philosophy, in poetry, as a positive
and settled teaching, differing not at all in the appearance it presents,
whether in Protestant England, or in schismatical Russia, or in the
Mahometan populations, or in the Catholic Church. If ever there was a
subject of thought, which had earned by prescription to be received among
the studies of a University, and which could not be rejected except on the
score of convicted imposture, as astrology or alchemy; if there be a
science anywhere, which at least could claim not to be ignored, but to be
entertained, and either distinctly accepted or distinctly reprobated, or
rather, which cannot be passed over in a scheme of universal instruction,
without involving a positive denial of its truth, it is this ancient, this
far-spreading philosophy.

10.

And now, Gentlemen, I may bring a somewhat tedious discussion to a close.
It will not take many words to sum up what I have been urging. I say then,
if the various branches of knowledge, which are the matter of teaching in
a University, so hang together, that none can be neglected without
prejudice to the perfection of the rest, and if Theology be a branch of
knowledge, of wide reception, of philosophical structure, of unutterable
importance, and of supreme influence, to what conclusion are we b