tion. The study of the natural laws which govern the material world is, indeed, the grandest in which the mind of man can be engaged; it is such, that to grapple with it successfully, the vast intellect of a Newton, and all the inductive prudence of a Bacon, are required. But, with men of their mental calibre, we need neither fear that atheism will be engendered, or that revelation will be impugned. On the contrary, they are, of all men, the readiest to bear testimony to the inscrutable dignity of creative power, and to rest satisfied with what the Scriptures tell us of the invisible God, and of the redemption of fallen man. Still, not even these faithful witnesses must be allowed to put us off our guard. There are others, as we have seen, who continue to tempt us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil; men, too, of considerable weight in the scientific world, whose visionary speculations, it is to be feared, may spread from the professorial chair to the pulpit. However disposed, therefore, we may be to sympathise with so single-hearted and good a man as Cowper, when he remarks, "that the fields, the woods, the gardens, have each their concert, and that the ear of man is for ever regaled by creatures who seem only to please themselves; that even the ears that are deaf to the Gospel are continually entertained, though without knowing it, by sounds for which they are solely indebted to its author;" and however ready to smile at his simplicity, rather than to frown at his presumption, when he proceeds to say, "There is somewhere in infinite space a world that does not roll within the precincts of mercy, and, as it is reasonable and even scriptural to suppose

that there is music in heaven, in those dismal regions, perhaps, the reverse of it is found; tones so dismal as to make woe itself more insupportable, and to acuminate even despair;"*—yet it is quite otherwise when we come to compare with the signs of the times we have been contemplating such a coincidence as the following, for I deem it not a little remarkable that, on the occasion of. the late Fast-day, March 21, 1855, the eloquent preacher at St. Margaret's, Westminster, should have allowed such inconsiderate words as the following to have fallen from him. He was preaching from 1 Kings viii. 44, 45, and commenting on the words, "Hear thou in heaven their prayer," and on the privilege of having access to God in prayer there where He is manifested in the splendour of His Divine Majesty; whereupon he adds, as if bitten by Sir David Brewster, "there was not the inhabitant of any one of those bright worlds, with which immensity was thronged, who was admitted to a nobler audiencechamber than ourselves."

"The

But I quote from the report of a newspaper, Times," of March 22, 1855. If his words have been rightly reported, I hope that this admirable and eloquent preacher may be called upon to explain them, so that they may not have the effect of countenancing the visionary doctrines of some modern astronomical philosophers.

* Hayley's Cowper, vol. iii. p. 287,

CHAPTER IV.

MARIOLATRY.

It was the shrewd observation of the celebrated Paley, that one well established fact will tend to keep the mind right in the pursuit of truth, whether moral, religious, or philosophical.

When the law of gravitation was established as a fact in Newton's mind, he not only never lost sight of it, but he made it his polar star, till by degrees he was able to deduce from it that wonderful illustration of the laws of the solar system displayed in his "Principia." Had he' been an infidel prior to his own discoveries, the single fact of the fall of an apple to the ground would have led him to the Being of a God.

Galen, it has been said, was an infidel till, by contemplating the mechanism of the human hand, he became assured that such an instrument must have had a contriver and maker of infinite goodness, wisdom, and power. was no longer possible to remain an atheist, after this single fact had beamed, as a glorious truth, upon his mind.*

It

* Early Years, vol. ii. p. 250.

Divine agency is every where discernible, and may be as surely demonstrated from a survey of the structure of the smallest insect as from that of the most perfect of God's creatures, man, where the evidence bursts upon us not only in the mechanism of the hand, or of the eye, but in that of the minutest portion of the skin, in the horny and almost senseless nail, as well as in the stupendous mass of the brain, the functions of which are of so subtle and mysterious a nature, yet so inherent apparently in the mass itself, as to have led materialists to the conclusion that it was self-sufficient for all the purposes of man, without the intervention of an immaterial principle.

In reality, the human body is not less a machine than the steam-engine; and as steam is necessary to set that agoing, so, without the living principle, the animal machine would be alike inert. But the analogy does not stop here. They equally require a directing mind; and it would be perfectly incongruous to say that the independent character of that mind is lessened by its being incorporated in a living, material fabric, or that it is rendered thereby incapable of holding communion with the world of spirits, even with the Father of Spirits Himself, in whose image man was created.

A belief short of this is infidelity; and yet this is not all we are required to believe, if we would name the name of Christ aright. It may instruct us to exclaim, with the natural theologian, that "the heavens declare the glory of God," but it is incapable of exalting us to the throne of a Triune Deity. It tells us of a Maker, but not of a Redeemer or Sanctifier. It leaves fallen man in the labyrinth of a discordant world, without a clue to find his way through

it, an enigma to himself. Whither, then, but to the Bible, is he to fly?" In human philosophy, fragments of purer metal are scattered amidst abundance of dross and impure ore. In the Scriptures, the same vein of purity runs throughout the whole book. Hence it has been called 'the form of sound words,' where no trucksters have been allowed to meddle and mix their own inventions. They contain the Magna Charta of heaven; a proclamation of good-will from God to man.'

These are what the Church of Rome prohibits. Into this Magna Charta of their rights she does not permit her servile followers to look; and thus, veiled in darkness, she not only extends her affirmative sanction to uninspired tradition, and places her spurious miracles on a footing with those of Christ and His Apostles, but countenances that grossest of all apostacies from the true faith," the not honouring Christ as our sole Intercessor." It is well known that Mariolatry, or the worship of the Blessed Virgin, constitutes the great charm of the Roman apostacy. With the Church of Rome it matters nothing that the Scriptures tell us emphatically that there is but one Intercessor between God and man. That apostate church maintains the contrary; and, not content with placing the Virgin Mary at the head of the glorious company of saints, she addresses her as the queen of heaven, and mother of God; thus identifying herself with Antichrist, inasmuch as every tyro in Christianity knows that when God, in the second person of the Trinity, took our nature

Stillingfleet's Origines Sacræ, 7th ed., fol. 1702. Camb.