mainspring of the whole inquiry, which it is possible to conceive. Let us examine this first principle a little more closely. Is this duty of inquiry one without any limit? The duty of seeking for unknown truth must imply the prior duty of holding fast some truth already known; but the duty of searching for unknown truth and holding fast known truth both involve the same condition, a power to discriminate between truth and falsehood; both in the case of known and unknown truth, the duty to hold fast and to acquire implies two things, a faculty of discernment by which we may distinguish truth from falsehood, and a capacity of growth, by which we may enlarge the sphere of our knowledge, and contract the range of our ignorance. Thus, the first principle, when developed, implies three great germinant principles—(1) That man is a moral creature, subject to a law of duty, and bound to use aright the faculties of discernment and investigation that God has given. (2) That he is a knowing or intelligent creature, who is capable of discriminating truth from falsehood. (3) That he is a creature capable of indefinite progress, of adding to his treasury of known truth, and of detecting falsehood and separating it as dross from the truth with which it had been mingled. conditions then under which the duty of truth in religion can alone take effect? be inquired into are the existence, the attributes of the first Great Cause, the vast scheme of universal Providence, and our own place in connection with it, whether of hope of good to come, or fear of future evil, or of duties and obligations towards God, our fellow-men and ourselves.

What are the inquiring after The truths to character and

There can be no duty in the case of one who is blind to attempt to trace out all the mazy pathways and jungles of that infinite forest-the universe. The duty

of inquiry can belong only to a moral being who has not put out the eyes of his own soul, or had them blinded by sensuality and vice, who has some firm standing for his feet upon clear and definite truth, and something like a pathway open before him in which progress is possible. These conditions are all expressly taught us by "the great Teacher" who is the Truth. "The light of the body is the eye: if thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light." "While ye have light, walk in the light, that ye may be children of light." "He that walketh in darkness knoweth not whither he goeth."

REAL AND FICTITIOUS INQUIRY AFTER TRuth.

The duty of inquiry or search after religious truth, or truth of any kind, is one of three connected duties which cannot be sundered from each other. (1) The first is the duty to retain and hold fast truth already known. (2) The second is to discriminate that truth from adherent falsehood, to reject all that is false and untrue, as well as to retain the true. (3) The third is to seek for the knowledge of truths before unknown. The first is the protection against indefinite instability and change, in which the master passion is the love of novelty and not the love of truth; the second is the protection against indefinite credulity, building up a heterogeneous compound of truth and falsehood; the third is the antidote to moral and intellectual stagnation. Wherever there is life there must be growth; the only condition under which truth which we have, can be retained as a real possession, is that of seeking to add to it by the accession of further truth. "The wellspring of wisdom is as a flowing brook," and he who

holds partial truth without seeking to add to it, changes the flowing brook into a stagnant marsh, liable to be covered with a thick slime of superstitious folly, and to breed by its stagnation a moral pestilence. Whately says: "It makes all the difference in the world whether we place truth in the first place or in the second place;" but our author, in quoting this caution, has committed the very fault against which it warns us.

Sir William Hamilton has said (after Lessing), that if any one offered him truth with one hand, and inquiry after truth with the other, he would prefer the second. By this one remark he forfeits his claim to the title of a philosopher, and proclaims himself a mere philo-athlete: a lover of intellectual exercise rather than a lover of truth and wisdom. It is not surprising that such a starting-point should lead to no better issue than St Paul has described in his last Epistle, of those who are "ever learning and never able to come to a knowledge of the truth," and whom Cowper has pithily described as "Dropping buckets into empty wells, and growing old in drawing nothing up." What are the three prominent features of this famous writer, I cannot call him a philosopher after his own confession, though he has had a large school of admiring disciples? The first is a malignant attack on the moral character of the leading heroes of the great Reformation, which brought upon him the keen and indignant rebuke of Archdeacon Hare. The second is a persistent and bitter depreciation of Cambridge University, the parent and nurse of the greatest intellectual names of modern times. The third is a like depreciation of mathematical study, the only field of thought where pure, certain, and demonstrable truth is widely accessible to men, without the help of Divine revelation, and their previous extrication, at least in part, from the deflecting power of moral evil within.

What have been the practical fruits of this preference of the intellectual hunting-field to truth itself, of this contempt for the chosen instruments of the Spirit of God in the great work of extricating the church from its Babylonian captivity to superstition, and of the University of Bacon, Newton, Barrow, Hooker, Joseph Mede, Thomas More and Cudworth? this contempt of that one field of thought where even in a world in which the higher regions of truth have all been obscured and clouded by the prevalence of moral evil, clear and certain truth has been and is still attained through successive generations of mankind, from Euclid onward, till it has become a stately and imposing structure, the basis of all concrete physical science and also an earnest and pledge that truth and assured certainty are attainable when sought in due order, and under the needful moral conditions, in the higher fields of Ethical Science, Theology, and that Knowledge of the Most Holy, which is the truest and highest wisdom? What have been the practical fruits of this pretentious "philosophy of the unconditioned1?" The only results I know of are first, a principle which makes all real revelation of Himself by the true God to finite creatures strictly impossible, and fixes a great gulf across which no ray of real light can pass between the most Holy God and the whole world of His creatures; secondly, an exposition of one word in the inscription on the Athenian altar, which contradicts the whole passage where it occurs and the discourse of St Paul himself, based upon it. A third result is a tissue of contradictions with regard to the Absolute, the Infinite and the Unknowable, made up of the wildest chimeras that ever passed through the brain of man. That the Unknowable may be defined as a genus containing two species, the Absolute and the Infinite; that all the Know'See "Scripture Doctrine of Creation."

able lies as a mean between them; that reason teaches that one of these two extremes must exist, and leaves it uncertain which, so that one of the two must be a synonym for the only true God, and the other denote an impossible mental fiction; but that which of the two is a name of a worthless and impossible fiction, and which a synonym of the God of glory, the great and eternal Jehovah, must remain for ever unknown. A fourth and last result, is the logical invention of the quantification of the predicate. The author's contempt for mathematics has here avenged itself by leading him to corrupt his own favourite science, with a strange addition, which would put every process of reasoning into masquerade, encumbering every statement of known truth with an added alternative of something wholly unknown. The real process of reasoning is thus confused and obscured. Thus, if I say 'All philosophers are wise'-this known truth has for its shadowy attendant this alternative, either 'Philosophers are the only wise beings'—or, 'There are some other wise beings besides them.' Or again, the truth 'All men are mortal'-has the attendant shadow, either, 'Men are the only mortal existences,' or, 'There are some other mortal things besides.' The “quantification of the predicate" requires us, in all our reasoning, to cut the living child in two, and suspend the two halves on the horns of this dilemma. A more retrogade step from clear reasoning into confusion and mental darkness, was never taken than in Sir W. Hamilton's pseudo-mathematical improvement on the Logic of Aristotle. While such have been the negative results of Sir W. Hamilton's preference of intellectual gymnastics to truth itself, what fruits have accrued from the study he loads with contempt in the University which he has followed with persistent calumny? It has extended the boundaries of the Solar system nearly