lence of the wind. Or let him pass to those cities that have been desolated by the plague, or to those scenes of Eastern torture, such as the Black Hole of Calcutta, where death in its most appalling shapes is slowly pressed into a mass of human beings. If he reverse the process of inquiry, he will find that while such scenes produce with some awe and submission, with others they generate a fierce and brutal despair. The scenes of lust and outrage on board the sinking San Francisco; of levity in Florence during the plague, as depicted by Boccaccio in his Decameron; of pillage in London and Philadelphia under similar circumstances, as described by De Foe and Charles Brockden Brown,―go to show that without some special spiritual influence, even the most awful of material phenomena would fail of their effect. While, therefore, the visible creation is made to bear its part in the aid of human probation, the work is not one of mechanical constraint, but room remains for the distinct and special introduction, under conditions consistent with probation, of Divine aid.

§ 100. e2. A written revelation, as a final educationary process, is a priori probable under such a dispensation.

God, we may assume from the phenomena of the material universe, is equally unlimited in His command of resources, and in His capacity for comprehensive as well as for particular government. The elaboration of the minutest atom, and the comfort of the humblest form of animal life, are no more below His providence than the pre-arrangement of the spheres above it. His administration, as has been further shown, is one of general laws written on the skies and earth. He has not thought it beneath Him to engrave

on the rocks, in letters which myriads of years have not effaced, the history of the successive miracles by which He filled the earth with organic life. It is not a priori improbable, therefore, that He should lay down laws for the moral government of a race for whose physical interests He has shown such a tender concern, nor that He should place these laws on record. He is like a father, whose children, emigrating we may suppose to a distant colony, where they must necessarily be dependent on their own energies for support, stand peculiarly in need of that advice which their father's superior wisdom can best give. What so likely as that such a father, knowing how fluctuating is memory, and how liable it is to be modified by passion or interest, should place in writing that information as to their history and ultimate destiny, and those precepts for their government, which their necessities require? And is not this presumption strengthened when we discover throughout the narrative of this father's relations to his children, the traces of a mind not only eminently systematic and law-loving, but prone to register for his children's study, even though a most complicated mechanism be required for the purpose, those laws and systems by which his own conduct is governed?

This view is strengthened when we turn toward the condition and constitution of man. He is, as has just been seen, incapable of self-renovation. The world in which he lives has been said to be a temple desecrated by sin; and if so, how sad must be his fate, who, as the sole moral agency in this world, stands as it were by the altar to which the aisles of this vast but sin-desolated pile converge. Inadequate to the work of restoring either himself or the splendid

ruin in which he dwells; not only corrupt himself but corrupting even the traditions of truth that he retains, what so natural as that the loving and Almighty Father who placed him here, that law-loving and law-recording Father,should not merely give him spiritual solace and instruction, but should so perpetuate that solace and instruction that they may be preserved uncorrupted and intact. That such a revelation, incorporating the laws necessary for the government of the human race, should be written, the analogies of man's nature seem to indicate. Men, in all their variations of race and family, resort to writing as the best means of giving permanency to their own laws, and recording their own thoughts. The dangers, which the experience of society proves, of the perversion or the loss of mere oral tradition, would enter into the governmental calculations of an intelligent observer, to say nothing of an omniscient God. What, then, would be more likely than for such a God, in speaking to such a race, to use such a medium as would be most consistent with His wisdom and tenderness, and their infirmities?

"But," it may be objected, "if this be true, a written revelation would have been coeval with the human race." But can we apply the tests of time to a being who is unconditioned by time? And is it not plain, if we are to judge from cosmical history, that the plan of the Divine Architect of the universe is to introduce successively improving periods. by terraces or grades, adopting neither on the one hand a simultaneous and complete production, nor on the other a gradual development? The earth was first created without form and void. Then a rough and drossy scum writhed

and quivered over the molten ocean beneath. Then, as this scum toughened into a crust, it was fractured by fissures through which burst volcanic fires showering upward torrents of fused rock and metal afterwards to harden into mountains. Thousands of years passed before the fat alluvial soil began to cover this skeleton of bone and iron; thousands of years more before life appeared in the flood or on the fast land; thousands of years more before we find the vestiges of man. It is not for us to seek a reason for this, to us, slow dignity in the march of the Divine purpose. It may be, it is true, that of the Almighty, to whom time and space are nothing, the patient majesty and the rising cycles of laws, may be an essential attribute in the progress of His own administration as well as in the education of His rational creatures.

ance.

But be this as it may, the analogy of God's dealings with the material creation leads us to suppose a priori that the dispensations by which He would communicate His solaces and directions to man would be in a progressive series, and not in a revelation complete at its first utterThe educational processes of revelation would be likely to correspond with those of natural religion in the terracelike ascents by which they would rise in completeness. Man as a race, as it is with man as an individual, would have several distinct class-books of instruction. At first he would receive, though with powers as yet incapable of precise perception, the communications of his God and Father speaking inarticulately at a period when the forms of language were unknown. Then we can suppose an era of tradition, until the moment when through the infirmities and corruptions of our nature these traditions would lose

their virtue. Then we can suppose an education by example and precept, not directly, for this would hamper moral agency, and be at variance with the analogy of civil society, but through a specific order or nation, who, favored with greater religious light, (as in all times there have been nations favored with greater intellectual light and geographical advantages,) could become a medium for the religious tuition and enlightenment of others. Then next we may suppose a written revelation. Such a series of dispensations would be at least not at variance with the divine polity as developed in cosmical history. And yet this series is no more than what we find in the Patriarchal, the Jewish, and the Christian economies.*

But, it may be further objected, that this position proves too much, for it goes to show that written revelation, like the dispensations of the material world, is subject to a gradual development, and hence that the Romish view of traditional and progressive interpretation is correct. But the answer to this is complete. If the analogy is worth anything, it goes to show that these dispensations rise, to carry out an illustration already given, not as a slope, but as a series of terraces. "It is a truth which I consider now as proved," says Agassiz,† "that the ensemble of organized beings was renewed not only in the interval of each of the great geological divisions which we have agreed to term formations, but also at the time of the deposition of each

* See on this point, post, ? 173.

Twelfth Report of British Association, p. 85. See also ante, ¿ 30-40.