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expressed, which are inconsistent with that rational LETTER creation which the Scriptures reveal to us. He makes the fixed stars divine animals, and the Earth the first generated Deity," and inculcates a belief in the accounts of the ancients, manifestly alluding to those which Hesiod put into his hexameter verses. Whether he believed or not in all he wrote, still it went to the world as from his pen, and partook of the influence which his works obtained.34

What was rational in the ideas of Socrates on this grand subject, did not descend, in their truth and simplicity, to the schools and philosophers who were formed from him; but was so spoilt and nullified by the heterogeneous matter which was mingled with it,

'Mel. In none. By all that is sacred, not in one.' Plato, Arox. 9. They were obviously here alluding to different things; Melitus to the established divinities; Socrates to his purer Theism; and yet his last words were, as stated by Plato, O Crito! Esculapius. Render this, and do not forget it.' answered Crito; 'do you wish any thing else?' spoke no more.-Plat. Phed. c. 49.

we owe a cock to 'This shall be done,' But the dying sage

33 Such of the stars as were inerratic, were generated, which are divine animals. But He fabricated the earth, the common nourisher of our existence, which is the guardian and artificer of night and day, and is the first and most ancient of the Gods, which are generated within the heavens.' Plat. Tim. 472.

34 Thus it is necessary in this case to believe in ancient men, who, being the progeny of the Gods, as they themselves assert, must have a clear knowlege of their parents. It is impossible therefore not to believe in the children of the Gods, tho they should speak without probable or necessary arguments. It is proper that, complying with the law, we should assent to their tradition.'

He then states from them the generation of these Gods.' Ocean and Tethys were the progeny of Heaven and Earth. From hence Phoreys, Saturn and Rhea, and such as subsist with these, were produced; Jupiter and Juno, and all such as are called their brethren, descended from Saturn and Rhea, &c. When they were all generated, the Artificer of the Universe thus addressed them: 'Gods of Gods! of whom I am the demiurgus and father,' &c. &c. p. 472. Such a medley was Plato's most serious tuition.

LETTER that it made no impression on the general mind.

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From the same cause the Pythagoreans, who had also many valuable notions or fragments of the true system of the universe, made no beneficial use of them, and advanced no further. The Romans followed the Greeks, but only to favour or to adopt opposing speculations. Their most enlightened portion on the subject of Deity was the Stoics, who had many noble ideas, but defeated their proper effect by joining with them Plato's suggestion, that the earth was a living. animal, and a God, which exposed them to the Epicureans' sarcastic question, How their Deity liked to have his back cut by the plough, or torn by their harrows; to be burnt in the torrid zone, and frozen into ice in the arctic regions.35 Cicero, who at times could reason admirably on the intelligent construction of the world, and was the most informed of all his countrymen, yet was so paralysed in his own judgment by the chaos of the opinions he found started on this topic, that, in his most elaborate work upon it, he contents himself first with stating one series of opinions, and then the contrary, and closes his theme by ingeniously arguing against all, and apparently recommending a neutralizing uncertainty and indecision. Thus, until Christianity spread, it

35 Velleius taunts Balbus with those sarcasms in the Natura Deorum. It is a pity that so great a man as Kepler should revive so absurd a notion. Yet in 1619, in his mature years, he published his Harmonics, in which work he expounds his notions of astrology; and while he strongly condemns the absurdities of the vulgar belief, attempts to substitute a system of celestial influences, in which he seriously represents the Earth as an enormous living animal, the tides being its act of respiration, and its vital sympathies being excited by the configurations of the planets.' Powell's Hist. Nat. Phil. p. 154.

36 Cicero's first book of the Natura Deorum details, in the person of Velleius, the Epicurean attacks on all the theories of Deity, which

the

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never became a settled opinion at all in the world LETTER that the Earth was the planned and deliberate creation of an intelligent God. Nor does any one seem to have conceived it to have been so, in that clear and full meaning, sublimity and certainty with which the Hebrew writers inculcate the momentous truth. Take up the Timæus, or any other work of Plato, which treats on God and Nature, or what fragments of antiquity remain about them, and compare these with the passages in the Genesis and Deuteronomy of Moses; with those in the Book of Job, which is peculiarly splendid in many parts on this subject ; with others in some of the Psalms of David, in the majestic and unequalled Isaiah, and in several of the other Jewish prophets; and I think you will feel, with me, that Christianity, by diffusing the Jewish Scriptures, or sacred writings, and by its own as sacred additions, imparted a new intellect to mankind on all that concerns Divine Philosophy. A sun of mind then rose on our world which has never set. Its beams consumed the popular Paganism, and spread a purifying light over those who chose not to forsake their ancient favourite." It has rescued the civilized world

the ancient phisosophers had devised as well as on the popular one. The second book contains the argument of Balbus, the stoick, in defence of his opinions, spoiling what were really good and wise, by the absurd tenet that the world was an animated being, the incorporated Divinity.

The last book exbibits Cotta as the academic, reviewing at times with much derision the arguments of both, but criticising them as inconclusive; 'not,' he adds, 'that I mean to take the Divinity away, but to show how obscure and difficult the subject is;' and all that Cicero himself adds, as his final sentence, is, 'The argument of Balbus seems to me to be ad veritatis similitudinem propensior'—rather more probable.

37 This effect may be traced in the valuable writings of Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus, and at times in those of Seneca. The same influence

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LETTER from those phantoms which once degraded it; and now, in friendly association with the science, taste and virtues which are peculiarly congenial with it, and which it has always fostered, and especially in our own enlightened country, we may hope that both superstition and atheism are generally banished or are departing from us for ever; and that, as they are both noxious to society, and very apt to create each other, that neither will, as knowlege advances and judgment improves, be attached to the mind of any educated, philanthropic or well-meaning individual.

influence roused the later Platonists of the Alexandrian School, and even Porphyry and Julian to make many improvements, both in the theory and practice of the Pagan worship, which they endeavoured to uphold.

LETTER III.

ON THE LAWS OF NATURE-WHAT THEY REALLY ARE-
THEIR DIVINE ORIGIN, AND OPERATION.

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By steadily regarding all things as the designed LETTER and purposed creation of God, we shall form juster notions than we commonly do on what are called the Laws of Nature; and as these are what are almost only taken into consideration, in the modern writings on the physical sciences, as the causes of the phenomena they describe, it will be important to our due comprehension of the Sacred History of the World, that we should endeavour to establish in our minds a correct perception of what they really are; especially if we desire to avoid attaching to them any atheistical signification, or wish not to use them as mere words or forms of phrase. Both of these applications would be unworthy of an intellectual man. Whoever values rightness of thought or advancement of knowlege, will not willingly make use of any terms without a distinct and clear meaning in his own mind when he chuses the verbal expressions by which he denotes and imparts it. Nothing more perpetuates error than the repetition of words of course, without just ideas being connected with them.

The Laws of Nature have been stated to be the properties of material things; the modes of their mutual action and the rules of their causations:'

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'Laws of Nature. In this phrase are included all properties of the portions of the material world; all modes of action and rules of causation

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