RICHARD WHATELY.

RICHARD WHATELY, Archbishop of Dublin, born A.D. 1787, died 1863, author of Elements of Logic, Elements of Rhetoric, Historic doubts regarding Napoleon Buonaparte, etc.

SCIENCE AND SCRIPTURE.

SOME persons have imagined that we are bound to take our notions of astronomy and other physical sciences from the Bible. And when astronomers discovered and proved that the earth turns round its axis, and that the sun does not move round the earth, some one cried out against this as profane, because Scripture speaks of the sun's rising and setting. And this, probably, led some astronomers to reject the Bible, because they were taught that if they received that as a divine revelation, they must disbelieve truths which they had demonstrated.

So also some have thought themselves bound to believe, if they receive Scripture at all, that the earth, and all the plants and animals that ever existed on it, were created within six days, of exactly the same length as our present days. And this even before the sun, by which we measure our days, is recorded to have been created. Hence the discoveries made by geologists, which seem to prove that the earth, and various races of animals must have existed a very long time before man existed, have been represented as inconsistent with any belief in Scripture.

Now, it is important to lay down the principle on which the Bible, or any other writing or speech ought to be studied and understood, namely, with a reference to the object proposed by the writer or speaker.

For example, if we bid anyone proceed in a straight line from one place to another, and to take care to arrive before the sun goes down, he will rightly and fully understand us, in reference to the practical object we had in view. We know that there cannot be a really straight line on the surface of the earth; and that the sun does

not really go down, only one portion of the earth is turned from it. But whether the other party knows all this or not, matters nothing to our present object, which was not to teach him mathematics or astronomy, but to make him conform to our directions, which are equally intelligible to the learned and the unlearned.

The object of the Scripture revelation is to teach men, not astronomy or any other physical science, but religion. Its design was to inform men, not in what manner the world was made, but who made it, and to lead them to worship Him, the Creator of the heavens and the earth, instead of worshipping his creatures, the heavens and earth themselves, which is what the heathen actually did. Although, therefore, Scripture gives very scanty and imperfect information respecting the earth and the heavenly bodies, and speaks of them in the language and according to the ideas of people in a rude age, still it fully effects the objects for which it was given, when it teaches that "God created the heavens and the earth,” and that it is He who has made the various tribes of living creatures, and also man. But as for astronomy and geology, and other sciences, men were left, when sufficiently civilized to be capable of improving themselves, to make discoveries in them by the exercise of their own faculties.

ISAAC TAYLOR.

ISAAC TAYLOR, a voluminous writer on theology and mental philosophy, was born A.D. 1789, and died in 1865. The titles of some of his works are, Spiritual Despotism, Loyola and Jesuitism, Wesley and Methodism, Restoration of Belief, The Natural History of Enthusiasm, etc.

NATURAL CAUSES OF THE ANCHORITIC LIFE.

THAT quiescent under-action of the mind to which we apply the term meditation, is a habit of thought that has been engrafted upon the European intellect by the recep

tion of Christianity. It is a product almost as proper to Asia as are the aromatics of Arabia, or the spices of India. Persia and India were the native soils of the contemplative philosophy, as Greece was the source of the ratiocinative. The immense difference between the Asiatic and the European turn of mind becomes conspicuous, if some pages of the logic or ethics of Aristotle are compared with what remains of the sentiments of the Gnostics.

The influence of Christianity on the moderns has been to temper the severity of the ratiocinative taste with a taste for contemplation, contemplation by so much the better than that of the Oriental sages, as it takes range in the heart, not in the imagination. If the Scriptures had been confined to the East, as, in fact, they have been almost confined to the West, the modern nations of Europe would perhaps have known as little of the compass of the meditative faculty as did the Romans in the age of Sylla.

The Greeks, being near to Asia geographically, and near by similarity of climate, and near by the importations of Eastern philosophy, imbibed something of the spirit of tranquil abstraction, yet was it foreign to the genius of that restless and reasoning people. Pythagoras probably, and certainly Plato, whose mind was almost as much Asiatic as Grecian, and whose writings are anomalous in Greek literature, effected a partial amalgamation of the Oriental with the Western style of thought. Yet the foreign mixture would probably have disappeared if Christianity had not afterwards diffused Eastern sentiments through the West. The combination was again cemented by the writings of those fathers who, after having studied Plato, and taught the rhetoric and philosophy of Greece, devoted their talents to the service of the Gospel.

But though the nations of the West have acquired a taste for this species of thought, it is the distinction of the Asiatic to meditate, as it is to reason and to act, the glory of the European. To withdraw the soul from the

senses, to divorce the exterior from the inner man, to detain the spirit within its own circle, and to accustom it to find there its bliss; to penetrate the depths and concealments of the heart; to repose during long periods upon a single idea without a wish for progression or change; or to break away from the imperfections of the visible world, to climb the infinite, to hold converse with superior beauty and excellence: these are the prerogatives and pleasures of the intellectualist of Asia, and this is a happiness which he enjoys in a perfection altogether unknown to the busy, nervous, and frigid people of the north. If, by favour of a peculiar temperament, the Oriental frees himself from the solicitation of voluptuous indulgence; if the mental tastes are vivid enough to counteract the appetites; then he finds a life of inert abstraction, of abstemiousness, and of solitude, not merely easy but delicious.

The lassitude which belongs to his constitution and climate, more than suffices to reconcile the contemplatist to the want of those enjoyments which are to be obtained only by toil. A genial temperature and a languid stomach, reduce the necessary charges of maintenance to an amount that must seem incredibly small to the well-housed, wellclothed, and highly-fed people of Northern Europe. The slenderest revenues are therefore enough to free from all the cares of the present life. He has only to renounce married life, with its claims and its burdens, and then the skeleton machinery of his individual existence may be impelled in its daily round of sluggish movement, by air, and water, and a lettuce.

The Asiatic character is in no inconsiderable degree affected by the habits which result from the insufferable fervour of the sun at noon, and which compels a suspension of active employments during the broad light of day. The period of venial indolence easily extends itself through all the hours of sultry heat, if necessity does not exact labour. And then the quiescence in which the day has been passed lends an elasticity of mind to the hours of night, when the effulgent magnificence of

the heavens kindles the imagination, and enhances meditation to ecstasy. How little beneath the lowering, and chilly, and misty skies of Britain, can we appreciate the power of these natural excitements of mental abstraction.

In an enumeration of the natural causes of the anchoritic life, the influence of scenery should by no means be overlooked. As the gay and multiform beauties of a broken surface, teeming with vegetation (when seconded by favouring circumstances), generate the soul of poetry, so (with similar aids) the habit of musing in pensive vacuity of thought is cherished by the aspect of boundless wastes and arid plains, or of enormous piles of naked mountains; and to the spirit that has turned with sickening or melancholy aversion from the haunts of man, such scenes are not less grateful nor less fascinating than are the most delicious landscapes to the frolic eye of joyous youth. The wilderness of the Jordan, the stony tracts of Arabia, the precincts of Sinai, and the dead solitudes of sand traversed but not enlivened by the Nile, offered themselves therefore as the natural birthplaces of monachism; and skirting, as they did, the forces of religion, long continued (indeed, they have never wholly ceased) to invite numerous desertions from the ranks of common life.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY, born A.D. 1800, first attracted notice by his critical and historical essays published in the Edinburgh Review. The Lays of Ancient Rome appeared in 1842, and subsequently he issued, at intervals, his History of England from the Accession of James II., which he left incomplete. He was raised to the Peerage, for his literary gifts, in 1857, and died in 1859.

TRIAL OF WARREN HASTINGS.

THE place was worthy of such a trial. It was the great hall of William Rufus, the hall which had resounded with