whole intricacy of their movements to the on the forehead of the resolute and hardy simple and sublime agency of one com- artificer, who can lift his menacing voice manding principle. But he had too much against the priesthood, and, looking on the of the ballast of a substantial understanding Bible as a jugglery of theirs, can bid stout about him, to be thrown afloat by all this defiance to all its denunciations. Now, success among the plausibilities of wanton under all these varieties, we think that and unauthorized speculation. He knew there might be detected the one and unithe boundary which hemmed him. He knew versal principle which we have attempted that he had not thrown one particle of light to expose. The something, whatever it is, on the moral or religious history of these which has dispossessed all these people of planetary regions. He had not ascertained their Christianity, exists in their minds, in what visits of communication they received the shape of a position, which they hold to from the God who upholds them. But he be true, but which, by no legitimate eviknew that the fact of a real visit made to dence, they have ever realized--and a pothis planet, had such evidence to rest upon,sition which lodges within them as a wilthat it was not to be disposted by any aerial ful faney or presumption of their own, imagination. And when I look at the steady but which could not stand the touchand unmoved Christianity of this wonder-stone of that wise and solid principle, in ful man; so far from seeing any symptom virtue of which, the followers of Newton of dotage and imbecility, or any forgetful- give to observation the precedence over ness of those principles on which the fabric theory. It is a principle altogether worthy of his philosophy is reared; do I see that of being laboured-as, if carried round in in sitting down to the work of a Bible Com-faithful and consistent application among mentator, he hath given us their most these numerous varieties, it is able to break beautiful and most consistent exemplifica- up all the existing infidelity of the world. tion. But there is one other most important

I did not anticipate such a length of time, conclusion to which it carries us. It carand of illustration, in this stage of my ar-ries us, with all the docility of children, to gument. But I will not regret it, if I have the Bible; and puts us down into the attifamiliarised the minds of any of my readers tude of an unreserved surrender of thought to the reigning principle of this Discourse. and understanding, to its authoritative inWe are strongly disposed to think, that it formation. Without the testimony of an is a principle which might be made to ap-authentic messenger from heaven, I know ply to every argument of every unbeliever nothing of heaven's counsels. I never heard -and so to serve not merely as an anti-of any moral telescope that can bring to dote against the infidelity of astronomers, my observation the doings or the deliberabut to serve as an antidote against all infi-tions which are taking place in the sancdelity. We are well aware of the diversity of complexion which infidelity puts on. It looks one thing in the man of science and of liberal accomplishment. It looks another thing in the refined voluptuary. It looks still another thing in the common-place railer against the artifices of priestly domination. It looks another thing in the dark and unsettled spirit of him, whose every reflection is tinctured with gall, and who casts his envious and malignant scowl at all that stands associated with the established order of society. It looks another thing in the prosperous man of business, who has neither time nor patience for the details of the christian evidence-but who, amid the hurry of his other occupations, has gathered as many of the lighter petulances of the infidel writers, and caught from the perusal of them, as cóntemptuous a tone towards the religion of the New Testament, as to set him at large from all the decencies of religious observation, and to give him the disdain of an elevated complacency over all the follies of what he counts a vulgar superstition.

And, lastly, for infidelity has now got down among us to the humblest walks of life; may it occasionally be seen lowering

tuary of the Eternal. I may put into the registers of my belief, all that comes home to me through the senses of the outer man, or by the consciousness of the inner man. But neither the one nor the other can tell me of the purposes of God; can tell me of the transactions or the designs of his sublime monarchy; can tell me of the goings forth of Him who is from everlasting unto everlasting; can tell me of the march and the movements of that great administration which embraces all worlds, and takes into its wide and comprehensive survey the mighty roll of innumerable ages. It is true that my fancy may break its impetuous way into this lofty and inaccessible field; and through the devices of my heart, which are many, the visions of an ever-shifting theology may take their alternate sway over me; but the counsel of the Lord, it shall stand. And I repeat it, that if true to the leading principle of that philosophy, which has poured such a flood of light over the mysteries of nature, we shall dismiss every self-formed conception of our own, and wait in all the humility of conscious ignorance, till the Lord himself shall break his silence, and make his counsel known, by an act of communication. And now,

that a professed communication is before me, and that it has all the solidity of the experimental evidence on its side, and nothing but the reveries of a daring speculation to oppose it, what is the consistent, what is the rational, what is the philosophical use that should be made of this document, but to set me down like a schoolboy, to the work of turning its pages, and conning its lessons, and submitting the every exercise of my judgment to its information and its testimony? We know that there is a superficial philosophy, which casts the glare of a most seducing brilliancy around it; and spurns the Bible, with all

the doctrine, and all the piety of the Bible, away from it; and has infused the spirit of Antichrist into many of the literary establishments of the age; but it is not the solid, the profound, the cautious spirit of that philosophy, which has done so much to ennoble the modern period of our world; for the more that this spirit is cultivated and understood, the more will it be found in alliance with that spirit, in virtue of which all that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, is humbled, and all lofty imaginations are cast down, and every thought of the heart is brought into the captivity of the obedience of Christ.

DISCOURSE III.

On the Extent of the Divine Condescension.

"Who is like unto the Lord our God, who dwelleth on high? Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in heaven, and in the earth?"-Psalm cxiii. 5, 6.

In our last discourse we attempted to expose the total want of evidence for the assertion of the infidel astronomer-and this reduces the whole of our remaining controversy with him to the business of arguing But to press home the sentiment of the against a mere possibility. Still, however, text, it is not necessary to stretch the imthe answer is not so complete as it might agination beyond the limit of our actual disbe, till the soundness of the argument be at-coveries. It is enough to strike our minds tended to, as well as the credibility of the with the insignificance of this world, and of assertion-or, in other words, let us admit all who inhabit it, to bring it into measurethe assertion, and take a view of the reason-ment with that mighty assemblage of worlds, ing which has been constructed upon it. which lie open to the eye of man, aided as We have already attempted to lay before it has been by the inventions of his genius. you the wonderful extent of that space, When we told you of the eighty millions teeming with unnumbered worlds, which of suns, each occupying his own independmodern science has brought within the cir-ent territory in space, and dispensing his own cle of its discoveries. We even ventured to influences over a cluster of tributary worlds; expatiate on those tracts of infinity, which this world could not fail to sink into littlelie on the other side of all that eye or that ness in the eye of him who looked to all the telescope hath made known to us--to shoot magnitude and variety which are around afar into those ulterior regions which are it. We gave you but a feeble image of our beyond the limits of our astronomy-to im- comparative insignificance, when we said press you with the rashness of the imagina- that the glories of an extended forest would tion, that the creative energy of God had suffer no more from the fall of a single leaf, sunk exhausted by the magnitude of its ef- than the glories of this extended universe forts, at that very line, through which the would suffer, though the globe we tread, art of man, lavished as it has been on the "and all that it inherits, should dissolve." work of perfecting the instruments of vision, And when we lift our conceptions to Him has not yet been able to penetrate: and who has peopled immensity with all these upon all this we hazarded the assertion, wonders--who sits enthroned on the magthat though all these visible heavens were nificence of his own works, and by one subto rush into annihilation, and the besom of lime idea can embrace the whole extent of the Almighty's wrath were to sweep from that boundless amplitude, which he has the face of the universe, those millions, and filled with the trophies of his divinity: we millions more of suns and of systems, which cannot but resign our whole heart to the lie within the grasp of our actual observation Psalmist's exclamation of "What is man, that this event, which, to our eye, would that thou art mindful of him, or the son of leave so wide, and so dismal a solitude be- man, that thou shouldest deign to visit hind it, might be nothing in the eye of Him him!"

who could take in the whole, but the disappearance of a little speck from that field of created things, which the hand of his omnipotence had thrown around him.

be the right answer to this objection, let us previously observe, that it goes to strip the Deity of an attribute which forms a wonderful addition to the glories of his incomprehensible character. It is indeed a mighty evidence of the strength of his arm, that so many millions of worlds are suspended on it; but it would surely make the high attribute of his power more illustrious, if while it expatiated at large among the suns and the systems of astronomy, it could, at the very same instant, be impressing a movement and a direction on ail the minuter wheels of that machinery, which is working incessantly around us. It forms a noble demonstration of his wisdom, that he gives unremitting operation to those laws which uphold the stability of this great universe; but it would go to heighten that wisdom inconceivably, if while equal to the magnificent task of maintaining the order and harmony of the spheres, it was lavishing its inexhaustible resources on the beauties, and varieties, and arrangements, of every one scene, however humble, of every one field, however narrow, of the creation he had formed. It is a cheering evidence of the delight he takes in communicating happiness, that the whole of immensity should be so strewed with the habitations of life and of intelligence; but it would surely bring home the evidence, with a nearer and more affecting impression, to every bosom, did we know, that at the very time his be nignant regard took in the mighty circle of created beings, there was not a single family overlooked by him, and that every indi

Now mark the use to which all this has been turned by the genius of infidelity. Such a humble portion of the universe as ours, could never have been the object of such high and distinguishing attentions as Christianity has assigned to it. God would not have manifested himself in the flesh for the salvation of so paltry a world. The monarch of a whole continent, would never move from his capital, and lay aside the splendour of royalty, and subject himself for months, or for years, to perils, and poverty, and persecution; and take up his abode in some small islet of his dominions, which, though swallowed by an earthquake, could not be missed amid the glories of so wide an empire; and all this to regain the lost affections of a few families upon its surface. And neither would the eternal Son of God-he who is revealed to us as having made all worlds, and as holding an empire, amid the splendours of which the globe that we inherit, is shaded insignificance; neither would he strip himself of the glory he had with the Father before the world was, and light on this lower scene, for the purpose imputed to him in the New Testament. Impossible, that the concerns of this puny ball, which floats its little round among an infinity of larger worlds, should be of such mighty account in the plans of the Eternal, or should have given birth in heaven to so wonderful a movement, as the Son of God putting on the form of our degraded species, and sojourning among us, and sharing in all our infirmities, and crowning the whole scene of humiliation by the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyr-vidual in every corner of his dominions, dom.

was as effectually seen to, as if the object This has been started as a difficulty in of an exclusive and undivided care. It is the way of the Christian Revelation; and our imperfection, that we cannot give our it is the boast of many of our philosophical attention to more than one object at one infidels, that by the light of modern disco- and the same instant of time; but surely it very, the light of the New Testament is would elevate our every idea of the perfececlipsed and overborne; and the mischief tions of God, did we know, that while his is not confined to philosophers, for the argu- comprehensive mind could grasp the whole ment has got into other hands, and the amplitude of nature, to the very outerpopular illustrations that are now given to most of its boundaries, he had an attentive the sublimest truths of science, have widely eye fastened on the very humblest of its obdisseminated all the deism that has been jects, and pondered every thought of my grafted upon it; and the high tone of a decided heart, and noticed every footstep of my contempt for the Gospel, is now associated goings, and treasured up in his rememwith the flippancy of superficial acquire-brance every turn and every movement of ments: and, while the venerable Newton, my history. whose genius threw open those mighty fields of contemplation, found a fit exercise for his powers in the interpretation of the Bible, there are thousands and tens of thousands, who, though walking in the light which he holds out to them, are seduced by a complacency which he never felt, and inflated by a pride which never entered into his pious and philosophical bosom, and whose only notice of the Bible, is to depreciate, and to deride, and to disown it.

Before entering into what we conceive to

And, lastly, to apply this train of sentiment to the matter before us; let us suppose that one among the countless myriads of worlds, should be visited by a moral pestilence, which spread through all its people, and brought them under the doom of a law, whose sanctions were unrelenting and immutable; it were no disparagement to God, should he, by an act of righteous indignation, sweep this offence away from the universe which it deformed--nor should we wonder, though, among the multitude of

other worlds from which the ear of the Al-discovery, which should hasten our every mighty was regaled with the songs of conception of God, and humble us into the praise, and the incense of a pure adoration sentiment, that a Being of such mysterious ascended to his throne, he should leave the elevation is to us unfathomable, is to sit in strayed and solitary world to perish in the judgment over him, aye, and to pronounce guilt of its rebellion. But, tell me, oh! tell such a judgment as degrades him, and keeps me, would it not throw the softening of a him down to the standard of our own paltry most exquisite tenderness over the charac-imagination! We are introduced by modern ter of God, should we see him putting forth science to a multitude of other suns and of his every expedient to reclaim to himself other systems; and the perverse interpretathose children who had wandered away tion we put upon the fact, that God can from him--and, few as they were when diffuse the benefits of his power and of his compared with the host of his obedient goodness over such a variety of worlds, is, worshippers, would it not just impart to his that he cannot, or will not, bestow so much attribute of compassion the infinity of the goodness on one of those worlds, as a Godhead, that, rather than lose the single professed revelation from Heaven has anworld which had turned to its own way, nounced to us. While we enlarge the prohe should send the messengers of peace vinces of his empire, we tarnish all the glory to woo and to welcome it back again; and, of this enlargement, by saying, he has so if justice demanded so mighty a sacrifice, much to care for, that the care of every one and the law behoved to be so magnified province must be less complete, and less and made honourable, tell me whether it vigilant, and less effectual, than it would would not throw a moral sublime over the otherwise have been. By the discoveries goodness of the Deity, should he lay upon of modern science, we multiply the places his own Son the burden of its atonement, of the creation; but along with this, we that he might again smile upon the world, would impair the attribute of his eye being and hold out the sceptre of invitation to all in every place to behold the evil and the good; and thus, while we magnify one of his perfections, we do it at the expense of another; and to bring him within the grasp of our feeble capacity, would deface one of the glories of that character, which it is our part to adore, as higher than all thought, and as greater than all comprehension.

its families?

We avow it, therefore, that this infidel argument goes to expunge a perfection from the character of God. The more we know of the extent of nature, should not we have the loftier conception of him who sits in high authority over the concerns of so wide a universe? But, is it not adding to the The objection we are discussing, I shall bright catalogue of his other attributes, to state again in a single sentence. Since say, that, while magnitude does not over-astronomy has unfolded to us such a numpower him, minuteness cannot escape him, ber of worlds, it is not likely that God would and variety cannot bewilder him; and that, pay so much attention to this one world, at the very time while the mind of the and set up such wonderful provisions for its Deity is abroad over the whole vastness of benefit, as are announced to us in the Chriscreation, there is not one particle of matter, tian Revelation. This objection will have there is not one individual principle of ra- received its answer, if we can meet it by tional or of animal existence, there is not the following position:-that God, in adone single world in that expanse which dition to the bare faculty of dwelling on teems with them, that his eye does not dis- a multiplicity of objects at one and the cern as constantly, and his hand does not same time, has this faculty in such wonderguide as unerringly, and his spirit does not ful perfection that he can attend as fully watch and care for as vigilantly, as if it and provide as richly, and manifest all his formed the one and exclusive object of his attributes as illustriously, on every one of these objects, as if the rest had no existence, The thing is inconceivable to us, whose and no place whatever in his government miads are so easily distracted by a number or in his thoughts. For the evidence of this of objects; and this is the secret principle position, we appeal, in the first place, to the of the whole infidelity I am now alluding personal history of each individual among to. To bring God to the level of our own you. Only grant us, that God never loses comprehension, we would clothe him in the sight of any one thing he has created, and impotency of a man. We would transfer to that no created thing can continue either to his wonderful mind all the imperfection of be or to act independently of him; and then, our own faculties. When we are taught even upon the face of this world, humble by astronomy, that he has millions of worlds as it is on the great scale of astronomy, how to look after, and thus add in one direction widely diversified and how multiplied into to the glories of his character; we take many thousand distinct exercises, is the ataway from them in another, by saying, that each of these worlds must be looked after imperfectly. The use that we make of a

attention.

tention of God! His eye is upon every hour of my existence. His spirit is intimately present with every thought of my

access to, you witness a single indication of God sparing himself-of God reduced to languor by the weight of his other employments-of God sinking under the burden of that vast superintendence which lies upon him-of God being exhausted, as one of ourselves would be, by any number of concerns, however great, by any variety of them, however manifold? and do you not perceive, in that mighty profusion of wisdom and of goodness, which is scattered every where around us, that the thoughts of this unsearchable Being are not as our thoughts, nor his ways as our ways?

heart. His inspiration gives birth to every | wide monarchy. Tell me, then, if, in any purpose within me. His hand impresses a one field of this province, which man has direction on every footstep of my goings. Every breath I inhale, is drawn by an energy which God deals out to me. This body, which, upon the slightest derangement, would become the prey of death, or of woful suffering, is now at ease, because he at this moment is warding off from me a thousand dangers, and upholding the thousand movements of its complex and delicate machinery. His presiding influence keeps by me through the whole current of my restless and ever changing history. When I walk by the way side, he is along with me. When I enter into company, amid all my forgetfulness of him, he never forgets My time does not suffer me to dwell on me. In the silent watches of the night, when this topic, because, before I conclude, I my eyelids have closed, and my spirit has must hasten to another illustration. But sunk into unconsciousness, the observant when I look abroad on the wondrous scene eye of him who never slumbers, is upon that is immediately before me-and see, me. I cannot fly from his presence. Go that in every direction it is a scene of the where I will, he tends me, and watches me, most various and unwearied activity-and and cares for me; and the same being who expatiate on all the beauties of that garniis now at work in the remotest domains of ture by which it is adorned, and on all the Nature and of Providence, is also at my prints of design and of benevolence which right hand to eke out to me every moment abound in it-and think, that the same God, of my being, and to uphold me in the exer- who holds the universe, with its every syscise of all my feelings, and of all my faculties. tem, in the hollow of his hand, pencils Now, what God is doing with me, he is every flower, and gives nourishment to doing with every distinct individual of this every blade of grass-and actuates the world's population. The intimacy of his movements of every living thing-and is presence, and attention, and care, reaches not disabled, by the weight of his other to one and to all of them. With a mind un- cares, from enriching the humble departburdened by the vastness of all its other ment of nature I occupy, with charms and concerns, he can prosecute, without distrac- accommodations, of the most unbounded tion, the government and guardianship of variety-then, surely, if a message, bearevery one son and daughter of the species.-ing every mark of authenticity, should proAnd is it for us, in the face of all this experience, ungratefully to draw a limit around the perfections of God?-to aver, that the multitude of other worlds has withdrawn any portion of his benevolence from the one we occupy?-or that he, whose eye is upon every separate family of the earth, would not lavish all the riches of his unsearchable attributes on some high plan of pardon and immortality, in behalf of its countless generations?

fess to come to me from God, and inform me of his mighty doings for the happiness of our species, it is not for me, in the face of all this evidence, to reject it as a tale of imposture, because astronomers have told me that he has so many other worlds and other orders of beings to attend to-and, when I think that it were a deposition of him from his supremacy over the creatures he has formed, should a single sparrow fall to the ground without his appointment, But, secondly, were the mind of God so then let science and sophistry try to cheat fatigued, and so occupied with the care of me of my comfort as they may--I will not other worlds, as the objection presumes him let go the anchor of my confidence in God to be, should we not see some traces of ne--I will not be afraid, for I am of mon glect, or of carelessness, in his management value than many sparrows.

of ours? Should we not behold, in many a But thirdly, it was the telescope, that by field of observation, the evidence of its mas-piercing the obscurity which lies between ter being overcrowded with the variety of us and distant worlds, put infidelity in poshis other engagements? A man oppressed session of the argument, against which we by a multitude of business, would simplify and reduce the work of any new concern that was devolved upon him. Now, point out a single mark of God being thus oppressed. Astronomy has laid open to us so many realms of creation, which were before unheard of, that the world we inhabit shrinks into one remote and solitary province of his

are now contending. But, about the time of its invention, another instrument was formed, which laid open a scene no less wonderful, and rewarded the inquisitive spirit of man with a discovery, which serves to neutralize the whole of this argument. This was the microscope. The one led me to see a system in every star. The other