h man finds his
safeguards in sober prayer and his guide through the wilderness of
visionary doubt, invents systems compared to which the mysteries of
theology are simple. Suppose any man of strong, plain understanding had
never heard of a Deity like Him whom we Christians adore, then ask this
man which he can the better comprehend in his mind, and accept as a
natural faith,--namely, the simple Christianity of his shepherd or the
Pantheism of Spinoza? Place before an accomplished critic (who comes
with a perfectly unprejudiced mind to either inquiry), first, the
arguments of David Hume against the gospel miracles, and then the
metaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself. This subtle philosopher,
not content, with Berkeley, to get rid of matter,--not content, with
Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind,--proceeds to a miracle greater
than any his Maker has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being then alive
and in the act of writing, gets rid of himself altogether. Nay, he
confesses he cannot reason with any one who is stupid enough to think he
has a self. His words are: 'What we call a mind is nothing but a heap
or collection of different perceptions or objects united together by
certain relations, and supposed, though falsely, to be endowed with
perfect simplicity and identity. If any one, upon serious and candid
reflection, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess
I can reason with him no longer.' Certainly I would rather believe all
the ghost stories upon record than believe that I am not even a ghost,
distinct and apart from the perceptions conveyed to me, no matter
how,--just as I am distinct and apart from the furniture in my room,
no matter whether I found it there or whether I bought it. If some old
cosmogonist asked you to believe that the primitive cause of the
solar system was not to 'be traced to a Divine Intelligence, but to
a nebulosity, originally so diffused that its existence can with
difficulty be conceived, and that the origin of the present system of
organized beings equally dispensed with the agency of a creative mind,
and could be referred to molecules formed in the water by the power
of attraction, till by modifications of cellular tissue in the gradual
lapse of ages, one monad became an oyster and another a Man,--would you
not say this cosmogony could scarce have misled the human understanding
even in the earliest dawn of speculative inquiry? Yet such are the
hypotheses to which th