should contain many truths as yet undiscovered, for all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investigation, from which such great discoveries in natural knowledge have been made in the present and past age, were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand years before ;" and for a similar reason we may equally well believe that increasing light will be thrown on the difficulties which meet us, and meet us no less in the investigation of the Works than in the study of the Word of God.

Both the Works and the Word of God are indeed inexhaustible both in beauties and in mysteries; fraught with every element designed to educate the whole man and amongst the rest, with a few "hard sayings" for a diligent reason to investigate, and a few harder still, for a docile faith to receive without fully comprehending at all.

However, my dear youth, ponder, I beg you, my words, and see whether any one of the three alternatives I have laid before you is not more rational (as I believe it is) than the rash alternative you talk so lightly about.

You will observe that these remarks apply only to- what I understand you to be troubled with the apparent "discrepancies" which you find in Scripture. If you mean much more than this;—if, when you pretend to see no discrepancy, you choose to refuse credence to a fact because it is "mysterious," or transcends your comprehension, why, there is, of course, no end to that sort of objection; and you might as well doubt whether there is such a thing as the union of body and soul;-for that is as much above your comprehension as anything in Scripture; in short, your creed will be speedily reduced to― zero.

If you urge that the first theory of the "discrepancies" requires to be cautiously applied, that it will be apt to yield different results in different hands,- that it seems a somewhat slippery place for a foothold, I grant it; but you will observe that I do not think it is the most philosophical or modest of the three. Still I am sure that it (and still more the others) is modesty, sense, philosophy itself, compared with that Curtiuslike leap into the gulf of infidelity which you propose to take !

Sure I am that if a man apply even the first theory, with honest and rigorous candour, restricting it to the petty details in which the paraded "discrepancies" are found, he will reject only infinitesimal quantities; while millions have acquiesced in the second and third with perfect tranquillity to their faith. NayChristians in general must have done so; since no one pretends to be able to reconcile all these discrepancies.

And thus if you think that they are ever likely to be of any weight as against Christianity, let facts confute you. Not only, as I have said, do the majority even of those who most vehemently contend for the presence of minute error in the Scriptures, tell you that they do not therefore dream of its being necessary to abandon Christianity itself, and that you are consequently wrong in your conclusion; but the incessant repetition from age to age of the very same class of difficulties does not make the smallest appreciable impression on the Christian world at large! If, therefore, the hope of Infidelity be founded on such "discrepancies," never, surely, was hope more delusive. As I was recently obliged to remind a young contemporary of yours (who pleads for undisguised Deism), experience has fully proved that nothing can be expected from the perpetual parade of these “discrepancies." Somehow each generation of Infidels imagines it is saying something new and to the purpose when it urges them. They have been tried, over and over again; and against the vast fabric of Christian evidence, and the general conviction of its truth, they produce no more effect than firing pop-guns against granite. In fact, we find the mass of the people will not heed them. Take, for example, that "discrepancy" on which you lay so much stress in your last. Why, it has been reproduced in every age. It was insisted on by Celsus; by Porphyry; by Collins; by Bolingbroke; it was again iterated by Voltaire; it duly reappears in Strauss; in short, in almost every infidel writer but it is of no avail whatever against the impression produced by the general evidence. The case is much as in every difficult trial in a court of justice; there is sure to be some point —often several-which no man can make anything of, which

nobody can clear up; everybody wants satisfaction thereon, and no one can give it ; meantime, everybody is convinced by the general stream and convergency of the evidence; and with the exception of a crotchety "Infidel" here and there, the prisoner is acquitted or hanged with the all but unanimous verdict of the community.

I have had a talk with your young relative, and you may set your mind at rest on one point. He is no Atheist nor Pantheist. He is a great admirer, indeed, of the theory of the "Vestiges;" but then, much as you and I recoil from the theory there propounded (as everybody else will in a dozen years), that theory does not necessarily involve Atheism-which its author, in fact, expressly disavows. He has been often charged, it is true, with holding views favourable to Atheism; and it must be confessed, that the first editions of his work were greatly calculated to justify the notion; yet we cannot, and ought not, to doubt, unless he be a very hypocrite of hypocrites, that he means what he says in the successive éclaircissements which he has given to the world of his doctrines. When he tells us, therefore, that he believes in an intelligent and conscious Personality who has "developed" the universe out of the firemist, for my own part, after this, I must believe him a Theist though as to the "fire-mist," I rather think it is all "moonshine" of the author's fancy.

Nor indeed, as has been well remarked by several writers, can

:

any such theory really affect the question of Theism at all; if, indeed, such rare "transformations" and "transmutations," and "developments" of organised beings, as it supposes (were there but any proof of them), ought not rather to enhance the proofs of divine power and intelligence. Surely such transmutations not less require power and intelligence than the received hypothesis of successive creations; for even if the elements of the material universe, if matter itself, be supposed eternal, it can never be proved that the properties and laws in virtue of which it has been "developed" into such wondrous results inherently belong to it; or that if some properties did belong to it, a chance-medley combination or blindly necessary application of them would make such a symmetrical and harmonious universe!

All the usual arguments for Theism, therefore, remain unaffected by any such hypothesis; the indications of order, of design, -the inferences from effect to cause, which, let hyper-metaphysical brains do what they will to invalidate, men in general, a million out of every million and one, will cling to and repose in,

are just what they were; they are no more affected by any such hypothesis as that of the "Vestiges," however irrational and fantastical it may be on other grounds, than is the argument for the intelligent fabrication of our bodies by the fact that we all had fathers, or for that of a butterfly by the fact that it came out of a chrysalis! The mere number, subtlety, and duration of the phenomena of "transmutation" make no difference in this argument, so long as the several parts of the series, one and all, are marked by the same characteristics of "design;" rather, the inference is (as already said) but strengthened and multiplied at each remove. If A, B, and C be all stamped by their respective signatures of design, it were strange to suppose that that inference is invalidated because C came from B and B from A. Let the pedigree of these phenomena be long or short, the arguments for Theism remain just where they were.

Not, of course, that I think the theory on that account harmless; a muddle-headed youth, no doubt, may easily abuse it to Atheism; for if he can but relegate the phenomena in question to a sufficiently

remote antiquity-reduce the universe to a very fine "fire-mist," and interpose a sufficient number of changes and "transformations" between the present complexity of the universe and the first touch, next-to-nothing (!), which set all a-going, and he is apt to think, not as he ought, that the wisdom and power which evolved all things from such an infinitesimal germ and pre-arranged the evolution and march of all these stupendous "developments" are the more worthy of admiration; but that he has got rid of the necessity of a Deity altogether, for that truly a Deity must have had next to nothing to do.

I have no fear, however, that this theory ever will or can make Atheists; for if it be but understood, that is impossible.

In point of philosophy, it is worthless; because it is a perfectly gratuitous, fantastical departure, under the mask of philosophising, from all the cardinal doctrines of Baconian induction.

It is a species of very bad poetry; the imagination is allowed absolute license, and we are taught to believe things, not because it is proved they are, but because we don't know but what possibly they may have been! Thus we are told, for example, that though instances of the "transmutation" of species cannot be produced, - though all the facts throughout the entire range of authentic history are against it, though we never see any indications of monkeys turning into men, or fishes into birds (though I will not say that we have not sometimes the initial process by which young philosophts promise to "develop" into puppies), yet that such things may have been fifty millions of years ago; that the whole term and sphere of our observation are too limited to allow of such spectacles, but that we do not know what twenty or a hundred millions of years might do! What sort of philosophy is it which tells us that we may infer something, because we do not know that, in fifty millions of years or so, something of which we have not the slightest proof that it ever did occur, might not occur! How would Bacon have felt abashed and insulted, if he had been told that these, his professed disciples, who are ever pleading and profaning his name, would argue that we are to consider such and such conclusions probable, not because we know what is or