THE history of the human mind is that of a perpetual struggle for freedom of thought and freedom of action. It is a history of the conflict of reason and conscience with innumerable enemies from without and from within-with the dark enchantments of the external world with the secret treason of fancy, and with the open rebellion of uncontrolled and uncontrollable appetite. Like all other long continued conflicts, this has had its changes; and though it may be difficult at any given time, to make a right estimate of the measure of success on either side, yet undoubtedly there are to be found periods in which decisive results are discoverable, the effects of which have been permanent, and felt sensibly for weal or woe, through all succeeding ages. The creation of civil government out of the wild chaos of savage life-the dawn of science on the dark and cold ground of fable and tradition the infusion of a spiritual religion, and its long delayed, yet thorough digestion through that huge frame of animated matter and carnalized imagination, which constituted mankind before the days of Christianity -the sublime outbreak of this mighty spirit at the Reformation, when, at last, it shook, and shattered, and remoulded the mass with which it had been so long a mingling, and those awful effects

of this revolution on the knowledge and power of the human race, which it is our own lot to witness;-these, assuredly, are epochs of whose character none can be doubtful; events, the magnitude and certainty of whose effects are matter of every day's experience and observation.

Considered as means of advancing the knowledge and power of mankind, the great events, just now noticed, plainly owe their efficacy to their having, by the application of external forces, established between the mental faculties a proportion, to the maintenance of which the mind is of itself unequal. Civil government has put a control on appetites, to the restraint of which conscience is inadequate; science systematically taught, has confined within certain limits, and allured into certain paths that wandering fancy which reason could not manage; invisible objects, whose nature is to awaken faith, and love, and fear, being made, it matters not how, but made present to the conception and belief of men, have added a strong force upon the side of conscience; and the recognized infallible authority of a volume, addressed to the understanding of man, as its recognized, yet accountable judge, and professing to contain the moral history of the world, has still further bound down, or sobered,

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the fancy of the enthusiastic and the ludicrous. The effect, then, of these changes has been to give a predominance to reason and conscience, as compared with other principles of the human mind, or rather, perhaps, to lessen the predominance which those other principles had usurped.

That in the contemplation of the knowledge and power of mankind-a contemplation forced upon all by the astonishing results of both, which are every where before them-men should reflect little on the means by which they have been acquired, and through which they have scope for operation; this, however surprising as a matter of speculation, is too much of a piece with the general temper and conduct of our race, to excite much wonder as a matter of fact. In enjoyment of the triumph of humanity, we are content to forget the causes to which it is due; and the more inclined we might be to suspect that those causes not only are external, but operate in the way of involuntary constraint, the less inclined would be our proud spirits to ascertain the fact. To the internal strength and dignity of his nature, independent of external force, man is ready to attribute his advancement in knowledge and power, and too often to lay what remains of imperfection in both, at the door of those very causes to which the advance of both is really owing. It is thus, that the imperfections of civil government, and injudicious restraints which from time to time it has imposed, have been made a handle for effecting, not reform, but revolution; the defects of systematic education and discipline, a pretence for substituting licentious inquiry and unregulated speculation; the obscurity and unequal evidence of religion, or the faults of its professors, a reason for throwing off its trammels; and that fanatic respect for holy writ which would dethrone reason from its proper tribunal, an excuse for denying the infallible authority of that volume which addresses reason as its interpreter and moral judge.

Over and above that pride which disinclines men to look out of them selves for the causes of their improvement, there is something in the operation of those causes which is calculated to keep them out of view and observation. Their effect is discernible

rather on the body of society than on its particular members; rather on what Wordsworth (we believe) calls "the universal mind of the species," than on the individual mind. In some their force is hardly felt at all, in different persons in very different degrees, and in very few directly, while the whole operation is yet of great extent and efficacy. Now, this seems the more worth observation, because of the contempt with which one every day finds treated those external means and occasions of union through which men are, in fact, bound together in society. These things may often be very obnoxious to ridicule, when considered in themselves; but, if union is to subsist at all, they must on their removal be replaced by others as ridiculous, and altogether destitute of that mighty authority which taste and habit have stamped on the more ancient. If men must be armed, it is idle to laugh at the fashion of their armour, so it be effective, or supply its place by armour of another fashion, which they have not proved. The operation of external causes always supposes the intervention of some sensible instrument, through which they work upon the mind, and as men are naturally adapted to the operation of external causes, so they are determined by different circumstances or situations to the very different forms through which causes altogether similar operate on similarly constituted minds. Toquarrel with those outward forms to which habit or fashion have inured us, is, in general, about as wise as it would be to quarrel with our own mother tongue, on pretence of a superior excellence in some outlandish dialect of language. However, as the intervention of these instruments has a tendency to divert the attention from the causes of which they are the instruments, so their absurdity or unreasonableness, as viewed in themselves, confirms men in the flattering thought that their knowledge and power is of their own achieving, and the still more dangerous error, that those artificial links of society are so many impediments to their progress. In seeking to establish the independence of the human mind, and to make it the divinity of its own worship, men sever the ties by which mind is bound to mind, and with the union, cannot but destroy the science and power to which it has given

birth. But what will it avail us to have built our Babel to the skies, and gotten us a name that reaches to heaven, if, after all, this mighty work be marred by a wild dispersion of the labourers, by a confusion in which none shall understand or recognize his brother.

It is a spirit of this kind, or something wilder than this, which seems to be the very spirit of the age in which we live. Reason and the rights of man,' is the common watchword of what is called the movement party throughout Europe, and in the different lines of conduct which, to suit the diversities of national character, that party has in different countries adopted, may be traced their common design-the overthrow, that is, of those artificial restraints, which have, in some degree, compensated the defects and infirmity of our moral nature, and the total disruption of that union to which mankind owes its present greatness. It is thus, that, under the common pretence of reason, the sensuality of France, the selfishness of Britain, the imaginativeness of Germany, are lured to the unlimited gratification of individual appetite, the irrespective pursuit of private interest, or some unintelligible combination of both in the transcendental form of self-duty and self-worship. The monstrousness of the first plan we may judge of by experiment— the conversion of the sensualists of the French revolution into beasts of human shape; the monstrousness of the last by that shock which its very statement, though supported by all the wit and eloquence of a distinguished author, has given to the common sense, not yet enough illuminated, of England; and well were it for us, if we would perceive that the plans of our own revolutionaries are but modifications of the same system suited to our peculiar tastes, but working on the same principles, and tending to the same end. Man's real advancement in knowledge and power supplies the plausible ground on which the revolutionaries of all countries base their systems to attribute this advancement to the strength and dignity of man's nature is their common principle; their common aids are the neglect of inquiry into its true causes, and human pride; their common aim is to lead man to the assertion of his independence in the gratification of his various passions; and here only do their plans

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differ, just because the tastes of different countries differ; while, in all the course of action recommended, is the samethe reckless destruction of existing restraints, the revolution of civil government, the overthrow of academic discipline, the downfall of the Christian Church, and the rejection of the Bible.

The opinion of man's independence, in whatever shape that opinion may be entertained, strikes at the root of all religion. If in the resources of man's internal constitution there be the means of all knowledge, and of using that knowledge for the supply of all his wants and wishes, what is there that should ever induce him so much as to think of God, much less to pay Him the homage of love and worship? As it is, those mighty effects of human knowledge and power which we witness, that may lead us to overrate our own dignity: so that argument for religion, which out of those very effects shall educe its truth; which, taking the principles of all science and all art for its subject, shall shew them to be the result of an adaptation of the universe to the human mind, in virtue of which the mind is as subject to the influence of external things, as is the external world to the laws of mind, and that it is only when

wedded to the goodly universe In holy love and passion, that the discerning intellect of man can reach its perfection; that as for the individual, so neither is it good for the universal man to be alone, and that by a

greater and designing Mind has a help meet for him been provided-This argument for religion would, of all others, seem best fitted for the present time, and of this nature is the argument in the volumes before us.

In the knowledge of God, his creator, consists the eternal or spiritual life of the creature, man. A man is then said to live naturally, when the presence of external objects is followed by a perception of them, a consequent exercise of various faculties about those perceptions, and a consciousness of various desires. Things sensible are, as respects us, fleeting and transitory; so far as each of us is concerned, they shall ere long cease to exist; the gratifications which they supply to our natural desires are extinct long before the desires, of which they are the proper, but inadequate objects, have had their fill. Man

needs something infinite and eternal, about which his faculties may be employed, some infinite and eternal object of his affections; that something is God: and thus, to know God-to have the faculties employed about God, and the affections cleaving to God-is eternal life.

God, their creator, has in his wisdom so disposed sensible things, and so suited this disposition to the nature of man, that the perception of them has a natural tendency to lead him to the knowledge of the Creator. The whole world of sense is a cipher, of which man's fancy is the key, and man's reason the interpreter. The faculties intermediate between sense and reason supply means of translating the sensible language of the universe into the spiritual language of truth, which is the proper object of reason; and thus, in the mystery of creation, has the wisdom of God addressed itself to the wisdom of man, The invisible things of Him, from the creation of the world, are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made.'

Man's nature having become corrupt, his understanding darkened, and his will depraved, Reason fails of discover ing the secret of God, in the mystery of his providence. In the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knows not God.' The Bible affords light by which this secret is revealed. It explains how human nature was originally fitted for its discovery-on what account it has failed of discovering it and the important end which its discovery serves. What goes by the name of natural religion, is but the showing of the relation between the secret thus supernaturally revealed, and the constitution of man, considered apart from the disordered state in which we find it. And thus-not, indeed, without the aid of revelation, but without using it as the instrument of proof-it may be shown that the human mind is naturally fitted to discover, in the works of creation, the character and existence of the Creator-knowing to love, and through that conformity of wills, which is the effect of love, to enjoy life and immortality. In this consists the use of natural religion, as distinct from, and preparatory to the proofs of revelation; a real use, though it be quite true that natural religion

owes all this to the Christian revelation-a revelation absolutely needed by human nature in its degraded state, to that mystery of godliness, whereby, not now in the boundless universe alone, but in the narrow span of our own manhood, God Almighty may be discerned, and in the form of man, making the guilty capable of union, and actually uniting them with himself.

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That true wisdom of which knowledge was designed to be the key, and in the attainment of which consists man's perfection-the supremacy of reason and conscience in love--or that conformity of the human with the divine will-whereby almighty power and infinite love do, as it were, enlarge and give effect to the orderly impulses of man's power and affection— that wisdom which is freedom and immortality, could have been naturally attainable only through an intellectual process in the subordinate grades of which are attainable the power and enjoyment of physical manconsidered as himself a part of that mystery of which he is the moral observer too. This process depends at every step, on the harmony between human nature and the external world. Man's physical power consists in the application of those laws which regulate the world, and which are discoverable through an adaptation of external objects, to the human mind, whereby reason is enabled to interpret the impressions made by those objects on the senses. But though, for all the purposes of power, the actual application of the science thus derived depends on the actual existence of objects in those very relations which constitute the matter of science-yet is the science itself

the same science-as truly and undoubtedly applicable to objects imagined in such relations. The results of such relations which science predicts will be as certain as are the experienced results which it predicts-if there really do exist objects such as those whose existence we imagine or suspect. this, indeed, is founded the whole use of probability, which always supposes something certain that which is doubtful, is the existence of matters of factthat which is certain, is the result of their existence, if, indeed, they do exist.

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