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of manufacture, of land travel, of navigation, and of naval warfare. Little did the Italian physician Galvani think, while experimenting on frogs with his metallic plates, that he was laying the foundations of a science which, at no distant period, would be applied to the instantaneous transmission of intelligence between the most remote points, and, perhaps, to the purposes of machinery and navigation. Stil! less, we are quite sure, did the simpleminded Italian suspect that the notable science of animal magnetism would be built up on this discovery! Little did the first inventors of the noble art of printing imagine the amazing progress which their simple invention would soon make in the world, and the wonders to be achieved by the steam and the power-press. And little did any among the earlier harbingers of science dream of the beautiful discovery of Daguerre, by which the rays of the sun are caught in their rapid progress towards the earth, and are made to subserve the purposes of the pictorial art, without the aid of either the brush, the pencil, or the coloring material of the painter !

All these, and many others, are the triumphs of modern art and science And yet, as we have already said, we are not content with our present improvements. We rush forward in the career of discovery with the speed of one of our own steamboats or locomotives; and we make almost as much noise, and give out almost as much smoke, in our progress. Puff! puff!! puff!!! is our watch-word, and the token of our progress. This is the age of puffing, no less than of progress. With us every thing goes by steam. The steam engine is the characteristic and the most appropriate emblem of our age. We have made amazing progress in every thing; we know it and feel it; and we wish others to know it and to feel it as well. And if others should not know it and feel it, it will surely be for no want of boasting on our parts. Our Fourth-of-July orators and itinerant lecturers; our pulpit orators and our rostrum haranguers; our journalists and our reviewers, have heralded forth this fact so often and so loudly, that surely the world must be very deaf and stupid indeed not to have found out by this time, that we are a great and enlightened people, and that ours is peculiarly the age of enlightenment. Never, since the world began, has the saying of the inspired apostle been more fully or more strikingly verified; · SCIENTIA INFLAT—knowledge puffeth up." At no former period was the accompanying warning of the apostle more appropriate or more needed : "If any man thinketh that he knoweth any thing, he hath not yet known as he ought to know." Our knowledge is great, but our self-glorification is greater. Our science is inflated and vain-glorious in the extreme. We have not yet learned the noble modesty of Socrates, who, after having devoted a long life and a vigorous intellect to moral and scientific pursuits, said when near the close of his career: "Hoc unum scio, me scire nihil — this one thing do I know, that I know nothing."

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Now, we do not at all object to this spirit of progress, so characteristic of our age; we applaud it rather, if it be kept within its appropriate limits. We merely rebuke its extravagances and its excesses. These

1 Corinth. viii 1. 2

are mainly reducible to two classes: first, an application of the doctrine of progress to religion and to heavenly things; and secondly an almost total forgetfulness of religion and of heaven, in the all-absorbing interest which the mind is made to take in things of this earth. We will devote this paper to a brief consideration of these two leading errors of modern society; and if our humble efforts should contribute even ever so little to the awakening of public attention to a subject of vast and paramount importance, and if they should even slightly contribute to the more healthy development of the great principle of progress, we shall not have labored wholly in vain. We will endeavor, then, to show that modern society is grievously wrong in both of two ways:

1. IN ITS APPLICATION OF THE DOCTRINE OF PROGRESS TO RELIGION AND TO HEAVENLY THINGS.

2. IN ITS ALMOST TOTAL FORGETFULNESS OF RELIGION and of HEAVENLY THINGS, IN THE ALL-ABSORBING INTEREST WHICH IT TAKES IN THE COMPARA. TIVELY PALTRY CONCERNS OF THIS EARTH.

1. That there is in our age a strong tendency to bring down the noble and sublime truths of religion to the low level of mere earthly knowledge, we think no impartial and philosophic observer of the signs of our times will or can deny. That this tendency is entirely wrong; that it is founded on very imperfect or erroneous notions of religion; and that it debases and degrades this heavenly science, we think equally undeniable. That it is fraught with danger, and that it has already produced the most lamentable results, a mere glance at the leading features of modern society will be sufficient to prove. We can not in any other way explain the extensive prevalence of unbelief among us; nor can we otherwise account for the mischievous theories which have been broached and received with favor, if not with avidity, by large masses of our population. There is surely something grievously wrong some where; and we will endeavor briefly to point out the wrong and its remedy.

The wrong lies precisely where we have located it:in the vain attempt to estimate heavenly things by a merely earthly standard; the remedy consists in a counter movement, embracing a return to sounder principles of reasoning. Religion is something apart from, and immeasur ably above, mere human speculation and knowledge; it treats of God, of heavenly things, of eternity. It is the embodiment of divine wisdom; of principles and truths unfolding the nature and attributes of God himself, and His revelations in time to His creatures. To know and to estimate aright the things of God, we must have God himself for our teacher, or at least some one authorized and commissioned by Him to teach us in His name, and with His unerring truth. Any other teacher would be wholly incompetent to the task; because any other might be mistaken and might mislead us fatally. The truths of religion rest not on mere human speculation, or theory, or science; they rest on a fact; that God himself has so declared and so spoken in His revelation to man. The Lord hath spoken; let the earth be silent, and let men listen

with reverent awe:- such is the principle upon which alone we can learn religion aright and with certainty. To attempt to learn it in any other manner, would betray a woful ignorance of the first elements of religion, and would mislead us in a thousand ways.

To pretend that we can find out what religion is by mere unaided human reason, is about as wise as would be the declaration of the mountebank, hat he could light up the heavens of a dark night with a mere rushlight! Such a pretension forcibly reminds us of the beautiful allegorical incident related by St. Augustine. This greatest man of his age

tells us that, when he was once walking on the sea shore, he observed a man very busily engaged in dipping up the water of the sea, and pouring it into a small basin which he had excavated in the sand of the beach. To the holy Doctor's inquiry as to the object which prompted this singular conduct, the simple peasant replied, that he meant to dry up the sea by emptying its waters into the cavity! St. Augustine smiled at his simplicity, but turned the incident to account in his writings against the Manicheans and other unbelievers of his day.

Our modern philosophers are attempting to do precisely what that foolish peasant fancied he could accomplish ; - they would fain make the immense, boundless, and unfathomable ocean of God's truth pass through the narrow and shallow basin of their own reason! They apply the principles of human science to religion, with as much confidence as they apply algebra to geometry. With them, religion is to be estimated only by human knowledge. The inflated doctrine of human progress is the starting point; religion is the conclusion reached. Science is everything; religion is almost nothing: at least, science is the principal thing; religion is but a secondary consideration—an adjunct, a corollary.

In religion those things are readily admitted, which human science can understand or demonstrate; those are rejected which human science is pleased to reject. Whatsoever doctrines of revelation appear to them to promote human knowledge and to aid human progress, are received with applause and hailed with delight; whatever wars against human pride, is painful to human sensuality, or is humbling to human reason, is rejected with scorn. Mysteries can not be fathomed or understood; therefore mysteries must be rejected. It matters not, that there are thousands of mysteries in this lower world, both around and within us, - mysteries which all agree in admitting, without being able to understand or explain them; it matters not how strong may be the evidence which establishes the fact, that God, who can neither deceive nor be deceived, has revealed those same mysteries; they will not believe them, because they cannot understand them! Thus, certain astronomers could not prove the existence of God mathematically; therefore, they sagely concluded the existence of God is at best but problematical! Thus, also, certain learned Christian philosophers can not, for the life of them, understand the nature or utility of the great revealed doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Atonement, the Real Presence, &c.; therefore, al' these must go by the board! These

wise men might as well blot out the n.yriads of twinkling stars from the firm ament, under the pretence that they cannot understand the utility of so many bodies in our system! And they might exclaim with their prototype Judas Iscariot: "Ut quid perditio hæc," why this sad waste of light? There is something radically wrong in all this line of reasoning. Those who adopt it begin at the wrong end of the argument, and reason backwards. Instead of reasoning from high to low from heaven to earth, they reason from low to high-from earth to heaven. Instead of raising up the earth to the lofty standard of heaven, they would fain bring down heaven to the low standard of earth. Puffed up with the pride of learning and with the windy spirit of the age, they would, like Lucifer of old, raise themselves up to the very heavens of God, and either seek to place themselves on a level with the Eternal himself, or to bring down the Eternal to their own abject position. With Lucifer they say, in the pride of their hearts: "I will ascend into heaven, and I will exalt my throne above the stars of God. . . . . I will ascend above the clouds; I will be like the Most High." Would that they did remember Lucifer's fall; and they might learn to beware! Would that they did but place a lower and more truthful estimate on themselves, and a higher estimate on God and on heavenly things! Weak, erring, and short-sighted as they are, would that they could but learn a little more modesty in inquiring into things infinitely above themselves, and entirely beyond the range of their imperfect vision! In a word, would that the emphatic language of the great apostle of the gentiles were not fully verified in them: "Pro~ fessing themselves to be wise, they became fools! ""2

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But alas! Such a hope were almost idle in our vain-glorious age! The great ones of the earth never learn anything. The experience of the past, the striking lights of history with its fearful lessons, the teachings of a sounder philosophy, are all thrown away on them. In spite of all that can be alleged, they persist in being "vain in their thoughts, evanuerunt in cogitationibus suis."" Like the builders in the plains of Shinar, they have foolishly sought to erect a tower which shall reach to the very heavens; but like them too, their speech has been confounded. The inflated philosophy of the day is a modern Babel; a sad jumble of contradictory theories and speculations. As in the days of Cicero, there is no absurdity whatever, which the soi-disant philosophers of the age have not broached and idolized. Atheists, deists, materialists, pantheists, rationalists, eclectics, transcendentalists, perfectionists, Fourierists, Millerites, Mormons, socialists, mesmerists, neurologists, &c., &c., &c., what a conglomeration of jarring elements, or rather absurdities! And, as if we had not already absurdities enough, new ones are daily starting into existence; and it is a sad thing that nothing new can be broached, no matter how shocking or absurd, which does not gain proselytes! Alas for our enlightened age!

Perhaps the most fashionable absurdities of the day are pantheism,

Isaiah xiv, 13, 14.

2 Rom. i, 22.

3 Ibid. v, 21

eclecticism, and transcendentalism. These three systems if systems they may be called-are but a revival, under new and more witching forms, of very old systems of pagan philosophy, long since consigned to the tomb of the Capulets. Pantheism is but a new form of the ancient Platonism; a system peculiarly acceptable to our modern philosophers, because it deified the world, made matter an object of idolatry, worshiped the creature, and forgot the Creator. The modern, like the ancient eclectic

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in the days of Cicero, prided himself in the assumption, that he has succeeded in extracting the quintessence of all that is best in all other systems of philosophy, and in harmonizing together the truths thus extracted; whereas, the truth is, that he has only succeeded in showing his own inconsistency and absurdity, in the attempt to harmonize contradictions. The transcendentalist steps gallantly forth to the rescue of the pantheist and of the eclectic, when these are pressed by the stringent logic of the Christian philosopher; and he dexterously conceals the true position, or covers the retreat of his allies, with a cloud of grandiloquent, but unmeaning verbiage. His motto is that of Horace's poetaster: "ex igne dare fumum"-to smother the brightly burning fire of truth with a heavy superincumbent mass of smoke! You know not where to have him; for his panoply is-smoke. His real position was very appropriately defined by the Scotch highlander, who, when asked the definition of metaphysics, replied: "When a man dinna know what another man says, and the other man dinna know what himself says, that's metaphysics!"

It is a sad and a sober fact, that the intellectual and philosophic atmosphere of our age has become hazy and foggy to such an extent, that the bright sun of truth is almost wholly concealed from the eyes of the simpleminded beholder. Those who are content to become little children for Christ's sake, really know more of sound philosophy, though they boast less, than the proudest philosophers of them all.

These men tell us, as an apology for their never-ending and ever-changing theories, that this is an age of enlightenment and of progress. Nonsense. Is the heaping of absurdity on absurdity, and the adding of vagary to vagary, any evidence of enlightenment or of progress? They tell us that this is the age of mental liberty and of free inquiry in every thing, from things in the humblest walks of life up to those in the highest regions of philosophy and religion. Nonsense. Is there, then, no difference between rational liberty, trammeled only by the fetters of sober reason and by the golden bonds of obedience to a divinely constituted and clearly ascertained divine religion, and that licentiousness of intellect which knows and acknowledges no restraint whatever, human or divine? Must we become sons of Belial, and shake off all restraints of every kind, in order to be free? If liberty can be attained only on such conditions, and at such cost, then away with liberty; we have had too much of it already. We pant for no higher freedom than that of which Jesus spoke, when he said: "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free." We want

1 St. John viii, 32.

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