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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Probabilities, by Martin Farquhar Tupper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Probabilities
+       The Complete Prose Works of Tupper, Volume 6 (of 6)
+
+Author: Martin Farquhar Tupper
+
+Release Date: October 13, 2005 [EBook #16857]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROBABILITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jonathan Ingram, Janet Blenkinship and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PROBABILITIES;
+
+
+
+
+AN AID TO FAITH.
+
+
+
+
+BY
+
+Martin Farquhar Tupper, A.M., F.R.S.
+
+THE AUTHOR OF
+
+"PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY."
+
+
+"ALMOST THOU PERSUADEST ME TO BE A CHRISTIAN."
+
+
+
+
+HARTFORD:
+
+PUBLISHED BY SILAS ANDRUS & SON.
+
+1851.
+
+
+
+
+
+PROBABILITIES.
+
+
+
+
+AN AID TO FAITH.
+
+
+The certainty of those things which most surely are believed among us,
+is a matter quite distinct from their antecedent probability or
+improbability. We know, and take for facts, that Cromwell and Napoleon
+existed, and are persuaded that their characters and lives were such as
+history reports them: but it is another thing, and one eminently
+calculated to disturb any disbeliever of such history, if a man were
+enabled to show, that, from the condition of social anarchy, there was
+an antecedent likelihood for the use of military despots; that, from the
+condition of a popular puritanism, or a popular infidelity, it was
+previously to have been expected that such leaders should have the
+several characteristics of a bigoted zeal for religion, or a craving
+appetite for worldly glory; that, from the condition liable to
+revolutions, it was probable to find such despots arising out of the
+middle class; and that, from the condition of reaction incidental to all
+human violences, there was a clear expectability that the power of such
+military monarchs should not be continued to their natural heirs.
+
+Such a line of argument, although in no measure required for the
+corroboration of facts, might have considerable power to persuade _a
+priori_ the man, who had not hitherto seen reason to credit such facts
+from posterior evidence. It would have rolled away a great stone, which
+to such a mind might otherwise have stood as a stumbling-block on the
+very threshold of truth. It would have cleared off a heavy mist, which
+might prevent him from discerning the real nature of the scene in which
+he stood. It would have shown him that, what others know to be fact, is,
+even to him who does not know it, become antecedently probable; and that
+Reason is not only no enemy to Faith, but is ready and willing to
+acknowledge its alliance.
+
+Take a second illustration, by way of preliminary. A woodman, cleaving
+an oak, finds an iron ball in its centre; he sees the fact, and of
+course believes; some others believing on his testimony. But a certain
+village-pundit, habitually sceptical of all marvels, is persuaded that
+the wonder has been fabricated by our honest woodman; until the parson,
+a good historian, coming round that way, proclaims it a most interesting
+circumstance, because it was one naturally to have been expected; for
+that, here was the spot where, two hundred years ago, a great battle had
+been fought: and it was no improbability at all that a carbine-bullet
+should have penetrated a sapling, nor that the tree should thereafter
+have grown old with the iron at its heart. How unreasonable then would
+appear the pundit's incredulity, if persisted in: how suddenly
+enlightened the rational faith of the rustic: how seasonable would be
+felt the useful learning of him, whose knowledge well applied can thus
+unfetter truth from the bandages of ignorance.
+
+Illustrations, if apt, are so well adapted to persuade towards a
+particular line of argument, that, at the risk of diffuseness, and
+because minds being various are variously touched, one by one thought
+and one by another, I think fit to add yet more of a similar tendency:
+in the hope that, by a natural induction, such instances may smoothe our
+way.
+
+When an eminent living geologist was prosecuting his researches at
+Kirkdale cave, Yorkshire, he had calculated so nicely on the antecedent
+probabilities, that his commands to the labourers were substantially
+these: "Take your mattocks, and pick up that stone flooring; then take
+your basket, and fill it--with the bones of hyaenas and other creatures
+which you will find there." We may fancy the ridicule wherewith
+ignorance might have greeted science: but lo, the triumph of philosophy,
+when its mandate soon assumed a bodily shape in--bushels of bones gnawed
+as by wild beasts, and here and there a grinning skull that looked like
+a hyaena's! Do we not see how this bears on our coming argument? Such a
+deposit was very unlikely to be found there in the eyes of the
+unenlightened: but very likely to the wise man's ken. The real
+probabilities were in favour of a strange fact, though the seeming
+probabilities were against it.
+
+Take another. We are all now convinced of the existence of America; and
+so, some three or four hundred years back, was Christopher Columbus--but
+nobody else. Alone, he proved that mighty continent so probable, from
+geometrical measurements, and the balance of the world, and tides, and
+trade-winds, and casual floatsams driven from some land beneath the
+setting sun, that he was antecedently convinced of the fact: and it
+would have been a shock to his reason, as well as to his faith, had he
+found himself able to sail due west from Lisbon to China, without having
+struck against his huge probability. I purposely abstain from applying
+every illustration, or showing its specific difference regarding our
+theme. It is better to lead a mind to think for itself than to endeavour
+to forestall every notion.
+
+Another. A Kissoor merchant in Timbuctoo is told of the existence of
+water hard and cold as marble. All the experience of his nation is
+against it. He disbelieves. However, after no long time, the testimony
+of two native princes who have been _feted_ in England, and have seen
+ice, shakes his once not unreasonable incredulity: and the additional
+idea brought soon to his remembrance, that, as lead cools down from hot
+fluidity to a solid lump, so, in the absence of solar heat, in all
+probability would water--corroborates and makes acceptable by analogous
+likelihood the doctrine simultaneously evidenced by credible witnesses.
+
+Yet one more illustration for the last. Few things in nature appear more
+unlikely to the illiterate, than that a living toad should be found
+prisoned in a block of limestone; nevertheless, evidence goes to prove
+that such cases are not uncommon. Now, if, instead of limestone, which
+is a water-product, the creature had been found embedded in granite,
+which is a fire-product; although the fact might have been from
+eye-sight equally unimpeachable, how much more unlikely such a
+circumstance would have appeared in the judgment of science. To the
+rustic, the limestone case is as stout a puzzle as the granite one; but
+_a priori_, the philosopher--taking into account the aqueous fluidity of
+such a matrix at a period when reptiles were abundant, the torpid
+qualities of the toad itself, and the fact that time is scarcely an
+element in the absence of air--arrives at an antecedent probability,
+which comforts his acceptance of the fact. The granite would have
+staggered his reason, even though his own experience or the testimony of
+others were sufficient, nay, imperative, to assure his faith: but in the
+case of limestone, Reason even helps Faith; nay, anticipates and leads
+it in, by suggesting the wonder to be previously probable. How truly,
+and how strongly this bears upon our theme, let any such philosophizing
+mind consider.
+
+But enough of illustrations: although these, multipliable to any amount,
+might bring, each in its own case, some specific tendency to throw light
+upon the path we mean to tread: it is wiser perhaps, as implying more
+confidence in the reader's intellectual powers, to leave other analogous
+cases to the suggestion of his own mind; also, not to vex him in every
+instance with the intrusive finger of an obvious application.
+Meanwhile, it is a just opportunity to clear the way at once of some
+obstructions, by disposing of a few matters personal to the writer; and
+by touching upon sundry other preliminary considerations.
+
+1. The line of thought proposed is intended to show it probable that any
+thing which has been or is, might, viewed antecedently to its existence,
+by an exercise of pure reason, have by possibility been guessed: and on
+the hypothesis of sufficient keenness and experience, that this idea may
+be carried even to the future. Any thing, meaning every thing, is a word
+not used unadvisedly; for this is merely a suggestive treatise, starting
+a rule capable of infinite application: and, notwithstanding that we
+have here and now confined its elucidation to some matters of religious
+moment only, as occupying a priority of importance, and at all times
+deserving the lead; still, if knowledge availed, and time and space
+permitted, I scarcely doubt that a vigorous and illuminated intellect
+might so far enlarge on the idea, as to show the antecedent probability
+of every event which has happened in the kingdoms of nature, providence,
+and grace: nay, of directing his guess at coming matters with no
+uncertain aim into the realms of the immediate future. The perception of
+cause in operation enables him to calculate the consequence, even
+perhaps better than the prophecy of cause could in the prior case enable
+him to suspect the consequence. But, in this brief life, and under its
+disturbing circumstances, there is little likelihood of accomplishing in
+practice all that the swift mind sees it easy to dream in theory: and if
+other and wiser pens are at all helped in the good aim to justify the
+ways of God with man, and to clear the course of truth, by some of the
+notions broadcast in this treatise, its errand will be well fulfilled.
+
+2. Whether or not the leading idea, so propounded, is new, or is new in
+its application as an auxiliary to Christian evidences, the writer is
+unaware: to his own mind it has occurred quite spontaneously and on a
+sudden; neither has he scrupled to place it before others with whatever
+ill advantage of celerity, because it seemed to his own musings to shed
+a flood of light upon deep truths, which may not prove unwelcome nor
+unuseful to the doubting minds of many. It is true that in this, as in
+most other human efforts, the realization of idea in concrete falls far
+short of its abstract conception in the mind: there, all was clear,
+quick, and easy; here, the necessity of words, and the constraints of an
+unwilling perseverance, clog alike the wings of fancy and the feet of
+sober argument: insomuch that the difference is felt to be quite
+humiliating between the thoughts as they were thought, and the thoughts
+as they are written. Minerva, springing from the head of Jove, is not
+more unlike the heavily-treading Vulcan.
+
+3. Necessarily, that the argument be (so to speak) complete, and on the
+wise principle that no fortresses be left untaken in the rear, it must
+be the writer's fate to attempt a demonstration of the anterior
+probability of truths, which a child of reason can not only now never
+doubt as fact, but never could have thought improbable. Instance the
+first effort, showing it to have been expectable that there should, in
+any conceived beginning, have existed a Something, a Great Spirit, whom
+we call God. To have to argue of the mighty Maker, that HE was an
+antecedent probability, would appear a most needless attempt; if it did
+not occur as the first link in a chain of arguments less open to
+objection by the thoughtless. With our little light to try to prove _a
+priori_ the dazzling mystery of a Divine Tri-unity, might (unreasonably
+viewed) be assailed as a presumptuous and harmful thing; but it is our
+wise prerogative, if and when we can, to "Prove all things." Moreover,
+we live in a world wherein Truth's greatest enemy is the man who shrinks
+from endeavouring at least to clear away the mists and clouds that veil
+her precious aspect; and at a time when it behooves the reverent
+Christian to put on his panoply of faith and prayer, and meet in
+argument, according to the grace and power given to him--not indeed the
+blaspheming infidel, for such a foe is unreasonable and unworthy of an
+answer, but--the often candid, anxious, and involuntary doubter; the
+mind, which, righteously vexed with the thousand corruptions of truth,
+and sorely disappointed at the conduct of its herd of false disciples,
+from a generous misconception is embracing error: the mind, never enough
+tenderly treated, but commonly taunted as a sceptic which yet with a
+natural manliness asserts the just prerogative of thinking for itself:
+fairly enough requiring, though rarely finding, evidence either to prop
+the weakness of a merely educational faith, or to argue away the
+objections to Christianity so rife in the clashing doctrines and unholy
+lives of its pseudo-sectaries. One of our poets hath said, "He has no
+hope who never had a fear:" it is quite as true (and take this saying
+for thy comfort, any harassed misbelieving mind), He has no faith, who
+never had a doubt. There is hope of a mind which doubts, because it
+thinks; because it troubles itself to think about what the mass of
+nominal Christians live threescore years and die of very mammonism,
+without having had one earnest thought about one difficulty, or one
+misgiving: there is hope of a man, who, not licentious nor scornful,
+from simple misconception, misbelieves; there is just and reasonable
+hope that (the misconception once removed) his faith will shine forth
+all the warmer for a temporary state of winter. To such do I address
+myself: not presumptuously imagining that I can satisfy by my poor
+thoughts all the doubts, cavils and objections of minds so keen and
+curious; not affecting to sail well among the shoals of metaphysics, nor
+to plumb unerringly the deeper gulphs of reason; but asking them for
+awhile to bear with me and hear me to the end patiently; with me,
+convinced of what ([Greek: kat' exochen]) is Truth, by far surer and
+stronger arguments than any of the less considerations here expounded as
+auxiliary thereto; to bear with me, and prove for themselves at this
+penning of my thoughts (if haply I am helped in such high enterprise),
+whether indeed those doctrines and histories which the Christian world
+admit, were antecedently improbable, that is, unreasonable: whether, on
+the contrary, there did not exist, prior to any manifestation of such
+facts and doctrines, an exceeding likelihood that they would be so and
+so developed: and whether on the whole, led by reason to the threshold
+of faith, it may be worth while to encounter other arguments, which have
+rendered probabilities now certain.
+
+4. It is very material to keep in memory the only scope and object of
+this essay. We do not pretend to add one jot of evidence, but only to
+prepare the mind to receive evidence: we do not attempt to prove facts,
+but only to accelerate their admission by the removal of prejudice. If a
+bed-ridden meteorologist is told that it rains, he may or he may not
+receive the fact from the force of testimony; but he will certainly be
+more predisposed to receive it, if he finds that his weatherglass is
+falling rather than rising. The fact remains the same, it rains; but the
+mind--precluded by circumstances from positive personal assurance of
+such fact, and able only to arrive at truth from exterior evidence--is
+in a fitter state for belief of the fact from being already made aware
+that it was probable. Let it not then be inferred, somewhat perversely,
+that because antecedent probabilities are the staple of our present
+argument, the theme itself, Religion, rests upon hypotheses so slender:
+it rests not at all upon such straws as probabilities, but on posterior
+evidence far more firm. What we now attempt is not to prop the ark, but
+favourably to predispose the mind of any reckless Uzzah, who might
+otherwise assail it; not to strengthen the weak places of religion, but
+to annul such disinclination to receive Truth, as consists in prejudice
+and misconception of its likelihood. The goodly ship is built upon the
+stocks, the platforms are reared, and the cradle is ready; but mistaken
+preconceptions may scatter the incline with gravel-stones rather than
+with grease, and thus put a needless hindrance to the launching: whereas
+a clear idea that the probabilities are in favour, rather than the
+reverse, will make all smooth, lubricate, and easy. If, then, we fail in
+this attempt, no disservice whatever is done to Truth itself; no breach
+is made in the walls, no mine sprung, no battlement dismantled; all the
+evidences remain as they were; we have taken nothing away. Even granting
+matters seemed anteriorily improbable, still, if evidence proved them
+true, such anterior unlikelihood would entirely be merged in the stoutly
+proven facts. Moreover, if we be adjudged to have succeeded, we have
+added nothing to Truth itself; no, nor to its outworks. That sacred
+temple stands complete, firm and glorious from corner-stone to
+top-stone. We do but sweep away the rubbish at its base; the drifting
+desert sands that choke its portals. We only serve that cause (a most
+high privilege), by enlisting a prejudgment in its favour. We propose
+herein an auxiliary to evidence, not evidence itself; a finger-post to
+point the way to faith; a little light of reason on its path. The risk
+is really nothing; but the advantage, under favour, may be much.
+
+5. It is impossible to elude the discussion of topics, which in their
+direct tendencies, or remoter inferences, may, to the author at least,
+prove dangerous or disputable ground. If a "great door and effectual" is
+opened to him, doubtless he will raise or meet with many adversaries.
+Besides mere haters of his creed, despisers of his arguments, and
+protestors, loud and fierce against his errors; he may possibly fall
+foul of divers unintended heresies; he may stumble unwittingly on the
+relics of exploded schisms; he may exhume controversies in metaphysical
+or scholastical polemics, long and worthily extinct. If this be so, he
+can only plead, _Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa_. But it is
+open to him also to protest against the common critical folly of making
+an offender for a word: of driving analogies on all four feet, and
+straining thoughts beyond their due proportions. Above all, never let a
+reader stir one inch beyond, far less against, his own judgment: if
+there seem to be sufficient reasons, well: if otherwise, let me walk
+uncompanied. The first step especially is felt to be a very difficult
+one; perhaps very debatable: for aught I know, it may be merely a vain
+insect caught in the cobweb of metaphysics, soon to be destroyed, and
+easily to be discussed at leisure by some Aranean logician. However, it
+seemed to my midnight musings a probable mode of arriving at truth,
+though somewhat unsatisfactorily told from poverty of thought and
+language. Moreover, it would have been, in such _a priori_ argument,
+ridiculous to have commenced by announcing a posterior conclusion: for
+this cause did I do my humble best to work it out anew: and however
+supererogatory it may seem at first sight to the majority of readers,
+those keener minds whom I mainly address, and whose interests I wish to
+serve, will recognise the attempt as at least consistent: and will be
+ready to admit that if the arduous effort prove anteriorly a First Great
+Cause, and His attributes, be futile (which, however, I do not admit),
+it was an attempt unneeded on the score of its own merits; albeit, with
+an obvious somewhat of justice, pure reason may desire to begin at the
+beginning. No one, who thinks at all upon religion, however
+misbelieving, can entertain any mental prejudice against the existence
+of a Deity, or against the received character of His attributes. Such a
+man would be merely in a savage state, irrational: whilst his own mind,
+so speculating, would stand itself proof positive of an Intellectual
+Father; either immediately, as in the first man's case, or mediately, as
+in our own, it must have sprung out of that Being, who is emphatically
+the Good One--God. But if, as is possible, a mind, capable of thinking,
+and keen to think on other themes, from any cause, educational or moral,
+has neglected this great track of mediation, has "forgotten God," and
+"had him _not_ in all his thoughts," such an one I invite to walk with
+me; and, in spite of all incompleteness and insufficiency, uncaptious of
+much that may haply be fanciful or false, briefly and in outline to test
+with me sundry probabilities of the Christian scheme, considered
+antecedently to its elucidation.
+
+
+
+
+A GOD: AND HIS ATTRIBUTES.
+
+
+I will commence with a noble, and, as I believe, an inspired sentence:
+than which no truth uttered by philosophers ever was more clearly or
+more sublimely expressed. "In the beginning was the Word: and the Word
+was with God; and the Word was God." In its due course, we will consider
+especially the difference between the Word and God; likewise the seeming
+contradiction, but true concord, of being simultaneously God, and with
+God. At present, and previously to the true commencement of our _a
+priori_ thoughts, let us, by a word or two, paraphrase that brief but
+comprehensive sentence, "In the beginning was the Word." Eternity has no
+beginning, as it has no end: the clock of Time is futile there: it
+might as well attempt to go in vacuo. Nevertheless, in respect to
+finite intelligences like ourselves, seeing that eternity is an idea
+totally inconceivable, it is wise, nay it is only possible, to be
+presented to the mind piecemeal. Even our deepest mathematicians do not
+scruple to speak of points "infinitely remote;" as if in that phrase
+there existed no contradiction of terms. So, also, we pretend in our
+emptiness to talk of eternity past, time present, and eternity to come;
+the fact being that, muse as a man may, he can entertain no idea of an
+existence which is not measurable by time: any more than he can conceive
+of a colour unconnected with the rainbow, or of a musical note beyond
+the seven sounds. The plain intention of the words is this: place the
+starting-post of human thought as far back into eternity as you will, be
+it what man counts a thousand ages, or ten thousand times ten thousand,
+or be these myriads multiplied again by millions, still, in any such
+Beginning, and in the beginning of all beginnings (for so must creatures
+talk)--then was God. He Was: the scholar knows full well the force of
+the original term, the philological distinctions between [Greek: eimi]
+and [Greek: gignomai]: well pleased, he reads as of the Divinity [Greek:
+en], He self-existed; and equally well pleased he reads of the humanity
+[Greek: egennethe], he was born. The thought and phrase [Greek: en]
+sympathizes, if it has not an identity, with the Hebrew's unutterable
+Name. HE then, whose title, amongst all others likewise denoting
+excellence supreme and glory underivative, is essentially "I am;" HE
+who, relatively to us as to all creation else, has a new name wisely
+chosen in "the Word,"--the great expression of the idea of God; this
+mighty Intelligence is found in any such beginning self-existent. That
+teaching is a mere fact, known posteriorly from the proof of all things
+created, as well as by many wonderful signs, and the clear voice of
+revelation. We do not attempt to prove it; that were easy and obvious:
+but our more difficult endeavour at present is to show how antecedently
+probable it was that God should be: and that so being, He should be
+invested with the reasonable attributes, wherewithal we know His
+glorious Nature to be clothed.
+
+Take then our beginning where we will, there must have existed in that
+"originally" either Something, or Nothing. It is a clear matter to
+prove, _a posteriori_, that Something did exist; because something
+exists now: every matter and every derived spirit must have had a
+Father; _ex nihilo nihil fit_, is not more a truth, than that creation
+must have had a Creator. However, leaving this plain path (which I only
+point at by the way for obvious mental uses), let us now try to get at
+the great antecedent probability that in the beginning Something should
+have been, rather than Nothing.
+
+The term, Nothing, is a fallacious one: it does not denote an existence,
+as Something does, but the end of an existence. It is in fact a
+negation, which must presuppose a matter once in being and possible to
+be denied; it is an abstraction, which cannot happen unless there be
+somewhat to be taken away; the idea of vacuity must be posterior to that
+of fullness; the idea of no tree is incompetent to be conceived without
+the previous idea of _a_ tree; the idea of nonentity suggests, _ex vi
+termini_, a pre-existent entity; the idea of Nothing, of necessity,
+presupposes Something. And a Something once having been, it would still
+and for ever continue to be, unless sufficient cause be found for its
+removal; that cause itself, you will observe, being a Something. The
+chances are forcibly in favour of continuance, that is of perpetuity;
+and the likelihoods proclaim loudly that there should be an Existence.
+It was thus, then, antecedently more probable, than in any imaginable
+beginning from which reason can start, Something should be found
+existent, rather than Nothing. This is the first probability.
+
+Next; of what nature and extent is this Something, this Being, likely to
+be?--There will be either one such being, or many: if many, the many
+either sprang from the one, or the mass are all self-existent; in the
+former case, there would be a creation and a God: in the latter, there
+would be many Gods. Is the latter antecedently more probable?--let us
+see. First, it is evident that if many are probable, few are more
+probable, and one most probable of all. The more possible gods you take
+away, the more do impediments diminish; until, that is to say, you
+arrive at that One Being, whom we have already proved probable.
+Moreover, many must be absolutely united as one; in which case the many
+is a gratuitous difficulty, because they may as well be regarded for all
+purposes of worship or argument as one God: or the many must have been
+in essence more or less disunited; in which case, as a state of any
+thing short of pure concord carries in itself the seeds of dissolution,
+needs must that one or other of the many (long before any possible
+beginnings, as we count beginnings, looking down the past vista of
+eternity), would have taken opportunity by such disturbing causes to
+become absolute monarch: whether by peaceful persuasion, or hostile
+compulsion, or other mode of absorbing disunions, would be indifferent;
+if they were not all improbable, as unworthy of the God. Perpetuity of
+discord is a thing impossible; every thing short of unity tends to
+decomposition. Any how then, given the element of eternity to work in,
+a one great Supreme Being was, in the created beginning, an _a priori_
+probability. That all other assumptions than that of His true and
+eternal Oneness are as false in themselves as they are derogatory to the
+rational views of deity, we all now see and believe; but the direct
+proofs of this are more strictly matters of revelation than of reason:
+albeit reason too can discern their probabilities. Wise heathens, such
+as Socrates and Cicero, who had not our light, arrived nevertheless at
+some of this perception; and thus, through conscience and intelligence,
+became a law unto themselves: because that, to them, as now to any one
+of us who may not yet have seen the light, the anterior likelihood
+existed for only one God, rather than more; a likelihood which prepares
+the mind to take as a fundamental truth, "The Lord our God is one
+Jehovah."
+
+Next; Self-existence combined with unity must include the probable
+attribute, or character, Ubiquity; as I now proceed to show. On the same
+principle as that by which we have seen Something to be likelier than
+Nothing, we conclude that the same Something is more probable to be
+every where, than the same Nothing (if the phrase were not absurd), to
+be any where: we may, so to speak, divide infinity into spaces, and
+prove the position in each instance: moreover, as that Something is
+essentially--not a unit as of many, but--unity involving all, it follows
+as most probable that this Whole Being should be ubiquitous; in other
+parlance, that the one God should be every where at once: also, there
+being no limit to what we call Space, nor any imaginable hostile power
+to place a constraint upon the One Great Being, this Whole Being must be
+ubiquitous to a degree strictly infinite: "HE is in every place,
+beholding the evil and the good."
+
+Such a consideration (and it is a perfectly true one) renders necessary
+the next point, to wit, that God is a Spirit. No possible substance can
+be every where at once: essence may, but not substance. Corporeity in
+any shape must be local; local is finite; and we have just proved the
+anterior probability of a One great Existence being (notwithstanding
+unity of essence) infinite. Illocal and infinite are convertible terms:
+spirit is illocal; and, as God is infinite--that is, illocal--it is
+clear that "God is a Spirit."
+
+We have thus (not attempting to build up faith by such slight tools, but
+only using them to cut away prejudice) arrived at the high probability
+of a God invested with His natural qualities or attributes;
+Self-existence, Unity, the faculty of being every where at once and that
+every where Infinitude; and essentially of a Spiritual nature, not
+material. His moral, or accidental attributes (so to speak), were,
+antecedently to their expression, equally easy of being proved
+probable. First, with respect to Power: given no disturbing cause--(we
+shall soon consider the question of permitted evil, and its origin; but
+this, however disturbing to creatures, will be found not only none to
+God, but, as it were, only a ray of His glory suffered to be broken for
+prismatic beauty's sake, a flash of the direction of His energies
+suffered to be diverted for the superior triumph of good in that day
+when it shall be shown that "God hath made all things for himself, yea,
+even the wicked for the time of visitation")--with the _datum_ then of
+no disturbing cause obstructing or opposing, an infinite being must be
+able to do all things within the sphere of such infinity: in other
+phrase, He must be all-powerful. Just so, an impetus in vacuity suffers
+no check, but ever sails along among the fleet of worlds; and the innate
+Impulse of the Deity must expand and energize throughout that
+infinitude, Himself. For a like reason of ubiquity, God must know all
+things: it is impossible to escape from the strong likelihood that any
+intelligent being must be conversant of what is going on under his very
+eye. Again; in the case both of Power and Knowledge, alike with the
+coming attributes of Goodness and Wisdom--(wisdom considered as morally
+distinct from mere knowledge or awaredness; it being quite possible to
+conceive a cold eye seeing all things heedlessly, and a clear mind
+knowing all things heartlessly)--in the case, I say, of all these
+accidental attributes, there recurs for argument, one analogous to that
+by which we showed the anterior probability of a self-existence. Things
+positive must precede things negative. Sight must have been, before
+blindness is possible; and before we can arrive at a just idea of no
+sight. Power must be precursor to an abstraction from power, or
+weakness. The minor-existence of ignorance is an impossibility, unless
+you preallow the major-existence of wisdom; for it amounts to a debasing
+or a diminution of wisdom. Sin is well defined to be, the transgression
+of law; for without law, there can be no sin. So, also, without wisdom,
+there can be no ignorance; without power, there can be no weakness;
+without goodness, there can be no evil.
+
+Furthermore. An affirmative--such as wisdom, power, goodness--can exist
+absolutely; it is in the nature of a Something: but a negative--such as
+ignorance, weakness, evil--can only exist relatively; and it would,
+indeed, be a Nothing, were it not for the previous and now simultaneous
+existence of its wiser, stronger, and better origin. Abstract evil is as
+demonstrably an impossibility as abstract ignorance, or abstract
+weakness. If evil could have self-existed, it would in the moment of its
+eternal birth have demolished itself. Virtue's intrinsic concord tends
+to perpetual being: vice's innate discord struggles always with a force
+towards dissolution. Goodness, wisdom, power have existences, and have
+had existences from all eternity, though gulphed within the Godhead; and
+that, whether evidenced in act or not: but their corruptions have had no
+such original existence, but are only the same entities perverted. Love
+would be love still, though there were no existent object for its
+exercise: Beauty would be beauty still, though there were no created
+thing to illustrate its fairness: Power would be power still, though
+there be no foe to combat, no difficulty to be overcome. Hatred,
+ill-favour, weakness, are only perversions or diminutions of these.
+Power exists independently of muscles or swords or screws or levers;
+love, independently of kind thoughts, words, and actions; beauty,
+independently of colours, shapes, and adaptations. Just so is Wisdom
+philosophically spoken of by a truly royal and noble author:
+
+"I, wisdom, dwell with prudence, and find out the knowledge of clever
+inventions. Counsel is mine, and sound wisdom; I am understanding; I
+have strength. The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before
+his works of old. I was set up from everlasting, from the beginning, or
+ever the earth was. When there were no depths, I was brought forth;
+before the mountains were fixed, or the hills were made. When He
+prepared the heavens, I was there; when he set a compass upon the face
+of the depth; when he established the clouds above; when he strengthened
+the foundations of the deep: Then was I by him, as one brought up with
+him: and I was daily his delight, rejoicing always before him; rejoicing
+in the habitable parts of his earth; and my delights were with the sons
+of men."
+
+King Solomon well knew of Whom he wrote thus nobly. Eternal wisdom,
+power, and goodness, all prospectively thus yearning upon man, and
+incorporate in One, whose name, among his many names, is Wisdom. Wisdom,
+as a quality, existed with God; and, constituting full pervasion of his
+essence, was God.
+
+But to return, and bind to a conclusion our ravelled thoughts. As,
+originally, the self-existent being, unbounded, all-knowing, might take
+up, so to speak, if He willed, these eternal affirmative excellences of
+wisdom, power, and goodness; and as these, to every rational
+apprehension, are highly worthy of his choice, whereas their derivative
+and inferior corruptions would have been most derogatory to any
+reasonable estimate of His character; how much more likely was it that
+He should prefer the higher rather than the lower, should take the
+affirmative before the negative, should "choose the good, and refuse the
+evil,"--than endure to be endowed with such garbled, demoralizing,
+finite attributes as those wherewith the heathen painted the Pantheon.
+What high antecedent probability was there, that if a God should be (and
+this we have proved highly probable too)--He should be One, ubiquitous,
+self-existent, spiritual: that He should be all-mighty, all-wise, and
+all-good?
+
+
+
+
+THE TRIUNITY.
+
+
+Another deep and inscrutable topic is now to engage our thoughts--the
+mystery of a probable Triunity. While we touch on such high themes, the
+Christian's presumption ever is, that he himself approaches them with
+reverence and prayer; and that, in the case of an unbeliever, any such
+mind will be courteous enough to his friendly opponent, and wise enough
+respecting his own interest and safety lest these things be true, to
+enter upon all such subjects with the seriousness befitting their
+importance, and with the restraining thought that in fact they may be
+sacred.
+
+Let us then consider, antecedently to all experience, with what sort of
+deity pure reason would have been satisfied. It has already arrived at
+Unity, and the foregoing attributes. But what kind of Unity is probable?
+Unity of Person, or unity of Essence? A sterile solitariness, easily
+understandable, and presumably incommunicative? or an absolute oneness,
+which yet relatively involves several mysterious phases of its own
+expansive love? Will you think it a foregone conclusion, if I assert the
+superior likelihoods of the latter, and not of the former? Let us come
+then to a few of many reasons. First: it was by no means probable to be
+supposed anteriorly, that the God should be clearly comprehensible: yet
+he must be one: and oneness is the idea most easily apprehended of all
+possible ideas. The meanest of intellectual creatures could comprehend
+his Maker, and in so far top his heights, if God, being truly one in one
+view, were yet only one in every view: if, that is to say, there existed
+no mystery incidental to his nature: nay, if that mystery did not
+amount to the difficulty of a seeming contradiction. I judge it likely,
+and with confidence, that Reason would prerequire for his God, a Being,
+at once infinitely easy to be apprehended by the lowest of His spiritual
+children, and infinitely difficult to be comprehended by the highest of
+His seraphim. Now, there can be guessed only two ways of compassing such
+a prerequirement: one, a moral way; such as inventing a deity who could
+be at once just and unjust, every where and no where, good and evil,
+powerful and weak; this is the heathen phase of Numen's character, and
+is obviously most objectionable in every point of view: the other would
+be a physical way; such as requiring a God who should be at once
+material and immaterial, abstraction and concretion; or, for a still
+more confounding paradox to Reason (considered as antagonist to Faith,
+in lieu of being strictly its ally), an arithmetical contradiction, an
+algebraic mystery, such as would be included in the idea of Composite
+Unity; one involving many, and many collapsed into one. Some such enigma
+was probable in Reason's guess at the nature of his God. It is the
+Christian way; and one entirely unobjectionable: because it is the only
+insuperable difficulty as to His Nature which does not debase the notion
+of Divinity. But there are also other considerations.
+
+For, secondly. The self-existent One is endowed, as we found probable,
+with abundant loving-kindness, goodness overflowing and perpetual. Is it
+reasonable to conceive that such a character could for a moment be
+satisfied with absolute solitariness? that infinite benevolence should,
+in any possible beginning, be discovered existent in a sort of selfish
+only-oneness? Such a supposition is, to the eye of even unenlightened
+Reason, so clearly a _reductio ad absurdum_, that men in all countries
+and ages have been driven to invent a plurality of Gods, for very
+society sake: and I know not but that they are anteriorly wiser and more
+rational than the man who believes in a Benevolent Existence eternally
+one, and no otherwise than one. Let me not be mistaken to imply that
+there was any likelihood of many coeexistent gods: that was a reasonable
+improbability, as we have already seen, perhaps a spiritual
+impossibility: but the anterior likelihood of which I speak goes to
+show, that in One God there should be more than one coeexistence: each,
+by arithmetical mystery, but not absurdity, pervading all, coeequals,
+each being God, and yet not three Gods, but one God. That there should
+be a rational difficulty here--or, rather, an irrational one--I have
+shown to be Reason's prerequirement: and if such a one as I, or any
+other creature, could now and here (ay, or any when or any where, in
+the heights of highest heaven, and the far-stretching distance of
+eternity) solve such intrinsic difficulty, it would demonstrably be one
+not worthy of its source, the wise design of God: it would prove that
+riddle read, which uncreate omniscience propounded for the baffling of
+the creature mind. No. It is far more reasonable, as well as far more
+reverent, to acquiesce in Mystery, as another attribute inseparable from
+the nature of the Godhead; than to quibble about numerical puzzles, and
+indulge unwisely in objections which it is the happy state of nobler
+intelligences than man on earth is, to look into with desire, and to
+exercise withal their keen and lofty minds.
+
+But we have not yet done. Some further thoughts remain to be thrown out
+in the third place, as to the preconceivable fitness or propriety of
+that Holy Union, which we call the trinity of Persons who constitute the
+Self-existent One. If God, being one in one sense, is yet likely to
+appear, humanly speaking, more than one in another sense; we have to
+inquire anteriorly of the probable nature of such other intimate Being
+or Beings: as also, whether such addition to essential oneness is likely
+itself to be more than one or only one. As to the former of these
+questions: if, according to the presumption of reason (and according
+also to what we have since learned from revelation; but there may be
+good policy in not dotting this book with chapter and verse)--if the
+Deity thus loved to multiply Himself; then He, to whom there can exist
+no beginning, must have so loved, so determined, and so done from all
+eternity. Now, any conceivable creation, however originated, must have
+had a beginning, place it as far back as you will. In any succession of
+numbers, however infinitely they may stretch, the commencement at least
+is a fixed point, one. But, this multiplication of Deity, this complex
+simplicity, this intricate easiness, this obvious paradox, this
+sub-division and con-addition of a One, must have taken place, so soon
+as ever eternal benevolence found itself alone; that is, in eternity,
+and not in any imaginable time. So then, the Being or Beings would
+probably not have been creative, but of the essence of Deity. Take also
+for an additional argument, that it is an idea which detracts from every
+just estimate of the infinite and all-wise God to suppose He should take
+creatures into his eternal counsels, or consort, so to speak, familiarly
+with other than the united sub-divisions, persons, and coeequals of
+Himself. It was reasonable to prejudge that the everlasting companions
+of Benevolent God, should also be God. And thus, it appears antecedently
+probable that (what from the poverty of language we must call) the
+multiplication of the one God should not have been created beings; that
+is, should have been divine; a term, which includes, as of right, the
+attribution to each such Holy Person, of all the wondrous
+characteristics of the Godhead.
+
+Again: as to the latter question; was it probable that such so-called
+sub-divisions should be two, or three, or how many? I do not think it
+will be wise to insist upon any such arithmetical curiosity as a perfect
+number; nor on such a toy as an equilateral triangle and its properties;
+nor on the peculiar aptitude for sub-division in every thing, to be
+discerned in a beginning, a middle, and an end; nor in the consideration
+that every fact had a cause, is a constancy, and produces a consequence:
+neither, to draw any inferences from the social maxim that for counsel,
+companionship, and conversation, the number three has some special
+fitness. Some other similar fancies, not altogether valueless, might be
+alluded to. It seems preferable, however, on so grand a theme, to
+attempt a deeper dive, and a higher flight. We would then, reverently as
+always, albeit equally as always with the free-born boldness of God's
+intellectual children, attempt to prejudge how many, and with what
+distinctive marks, the holy beings into whom (Greek: ost epos eipein)
+God, for very Benevolence sake, pours out Essential Unity, were likely
+to be.
+
+Let us consider what principles, as in the case of a forthcoming
+creation, would probably be found in action, to influence such
+creation's Author.
+
+First of all, there would be Will, a will energized by love, disposing
+to create: a phase of Deity aptly and comprehensively typified to all
+minds by the name of a universal Father: this would be the primary
+impersonation of God. And is it not so?
+
+Secondly: there would be (with especial reference to that idea of
+creation which doubtless at most remote beginnings occupied the Good
+One's contemplation), there would be next, I repeat, in remarkable
+adaptation to all such benevolent views, the great idea of principle,
+Obedience; conforming to a Father's righteous laws, acquiescing in his
+just will, and returning love for love: such a phase could not be better
+shadowed out to creatures than by an Eternal Son; the dutiful yet
+supreme, the subordinate yet coeequal, the amiable yet exalted Avatar of
+our God. This was probable to have been the second impersonation of
+Deity. And is it not so?
+
+Thirdly: Springing from the conjoint ideas of the Father and the Son,
+and with similar prospection to such instantly creative universe, there
+would occur the grand idea of Generation; the mighty coeequal, pure, and
+quickening Impulse: aptly announced to men and angels as the Holy
+Spirit. This was to have been the third impersonation of Divinity. And
+is it not so?
+
+Of all these--under illumination of the fore-known fact, I speak, in
+their aspect of anterior probability. With respect to more possible
+Persons, I at least cannot invent one. There is, to my reflection,
+neither need nor fitness for a fourth, or any further Principle. If
+another can, let him look well that he be not irrationally demolishing
+an attribute and setting it up as a principle. Obedience is not an
+attribute; nor Generation; nor Will: whilst the attribute of Love,
+pervading all, sets these only possible three Principles going together
+as One in a mysterious harmony. I would not be misunderstood; persons
+are not principles; but principles may be illustrated and incorporative
+in persons. Essential Love, working distinctively throughout the Three,
+unites them instinctively as One: even as the attribute Wisdom designs,
+and the attribute Power arranges all the scheme of Godhead.
+
+And now I ask Reason, whether, presupposing keenness, he might not have
+arrived by calculation of probabilities at the likelihood of these great
+doctrines: that the nature of God would be an apparent contradiction:
+that such contradiction should not be moral, but physical; or rather
+verging towards the metaphysical, as immaterial and more profound: that
+God, being One, should yet, in his great Love, marvellously have been
+companioned from eternity by Himself: and that such Holy and United
+Confraternity should be so wisely contrived as to serve for the bright
+unapproachable exemplar of love, obedience, and generation to all the
+future universe, such Triunity Itself existing uncreated.
+
+
+
+
+THE GODHEAD VISIBLE.
+
+
+We have hitherto mused on the Divinity, as on Spirit invested with
+attributes: and this idea of His nature was enough for all requirements
+antecedently to a creation. At whatever beginning we may suppose such
+creation to have commenced, whether countless ages before our present
+[Greek: kosmos], or only a sufficient time to have prepared the crust of
+earth; and to whatever extent we may imagine creation to have spread,
+whether in those remote periods originally to our system alone and at
+after eras to its accompanying stars and galaxies and firmaments; or at
+one and the same moment to have poured material existence over space to
+which our heavens are as nothing: whatever, and whenever, and wherever
+creation took place, it would appear to be probable that some one person
+of the Deity should, in a sort, become more or less concretely
+manifested; that is, in a greater or a minor degree to such created
+minds and senses visible. Moreover, for purposes at least of a
+concentrated worship of such creatures, that He should occasionally, or
+perhaps habitually, appear local. I mean, that the King of all spiritual
+potentates and the subordinate Excellencies of brighter worlds than
+ours, the Sovereign of those whom we call angels, should will to be
+better known to and more aptly conceived by such His admiring creatures,
+in some usual glorious form, and some wonted sacred place. Not that any
+should see God, as purely God; but, as God relatively to them, in the
+capacity of King, Creator, and the Object of all reasonable worship. It
+seems anteriorly probable that one at least of the Persons in the
+Godhead should for this purpose assume a visibility; and should hold His
+court of adoration in some central world, such as now we call
+indefinitely Heaven. That such probability did exist in the human
+forecast, as concerns a heaven and the form of God, let the testimony of
+all nations now be admitted to corroborate. Every shape from a cloud to
+a crocodile, and every place from AEther to Tartarus, have been peopled
+by man's not quite irrational device with their so-called gods. But we
+must not lapse into the after-argument: previous likelihood is our
+harder theme. Neither, in this section, will we attempt the
+probabilities of the place of heaven: that will be found at a more
+distant page. We have here to speak of the antecedent credibility that
+there should be some visible phase of God; and of the shape wherein he
+would be most likely, as soon as a creation was, to appear to such his
+creatures. With respect, then, to the former. Creatures, being finite,
+can only comprehend the infinite in his attribute of unity: the other
+attributes being apprehended (or comprehended partially) in finite
+phases. But, unity being a purely intellectual thought, one high and dry
+beyond the moral feelings, involves none of the requisites of a
+spiritual, that is an affectionate, worship; such worship as it was
+likely that a beneficent Being would, for his creatures' own elevation
+in happiness, command and inspire towards Himself. In order, therefore,
+to such worship and such inspiration acting through reason, it would
+appear fitting that the Deity should manifest Himself especially with
+reference to that heavenly Exemplar, the Three Divine Persons of the
+One Supreme Essence already shown to have been probable. And it seems
+likeliest and discreetest to my thinking, that, with this view, the
+secondary phase, loving Obedience, under the dictate of the primary
+phase, a loving Will, and energized by the tertiary or conjoining phase
+a loving Quickening Entity, should assume the visible type of Godhead,
+and thus concentrate unto Himself the worship of all worlds. I can
+conceive no scheme more simply profound, more admirably suited to its
+complex purposes, than that He, in whom dwelt the fullness of the
+Godhead, bodily, should take the form of God, in order that unto Him
+every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and
+things in regions under the earth. Was not all this reasonably to have
+been looked for? and tested afterwards by Scripture, in its frequent
+allusions to some visible phase of Deity, when the Lord God walked with
+Adam, and Enoch, and Abraham, and Peter, and James, and John--I ask, is
+it not the case?
+
+The latter point remaining to be thus briefly touched upon, respects the
+probable shape to be assumed and worn, familiarly enough to be
+recognised as His, by Deity thus vouchsafing Himself visible. And here
+we must look down the forward stream of Time, and search among the
+creatures whom thereafter God should make, to arrive at some good reason
+for, some antecedent probability of, the form which he should thus
+frequently inhabit. Fire, for example, a pure and spirit-like nature,
+would not have been a guess unworthy of reason: but this, besides its
+humbler economic uses, would endanger an idolatry of the natural emblem.
+So also would light be no irrational thought. And it is true that God
+might, and probably would, invest Himself in one or both of these pure
+essences, so seemingly congenial to a nature higher than ours: but then
+there would be some nucleus to the brilliancy and the burning; these
+would be as a veil to the Divinity; we should have need, before He were
+truly visible, that the veil were laid aside: we should have to shred
+away to the nucleus, which (and not the fire or light) would be the form
+of God. Similar objections, in themselves or in their idolatrizing
+tendencies, would lie against any such shape as a cloud, or a rainbow,
+or an angel (whatever such a being may resemble), or in fact any other
+conceivable creature, whether good as the angelic case or indifferent as
+that of the cloud, which the Deity, though assuming often, would
+nevertheless in every instance assume in conjunction with such his
+ordinary creature, and could not entirely monopolize. I mean; if God had
+the shape of a cloud, or of a rainbow, common clouds and rainbows would
+come to be thought gods too. Reason would anticipate this objection to
+such created and too-favoured shapes: more; in every case, but one, he
+would be quite at a loss to look for some type, clearly apt and
+probable. That one case he might discern to be this. Known unto God are
+all things from the beginning to the end: and, in His fore-knowledge,
+Reason might have been enlightened to prophesy (as we shall hereafter
+see) that for certain wise and good ends one great family out of the
+myriads who rejoice in being called God's children, would in a most
+marked manner fall away from Him through disobedience; and should
+thereby earn, if not the annihilation of their being, at least its
+endless separation from the Blessed. Manifestly, the wisdom and
+benevolence of God would be eager and swift to devise a plan for the
+redemption of so lost a race. Why He should permit their fall at all
+will be reverentially descanted on in its proper section; meanwhile, how
+is it probable that God, first, by any theory consistently with truth
+and justice, could, and next by power and contrivance actually would,
+lift up again this sinful family from the pit of condemnation? Reason is
+to search the question well: and after much thought, you will arrive at
+the truth that there was but one way probable. Rebellion against the
+Great and Self-existent Author of all things, must needfully involve
+infinite punishment; if only because He is infinite, and his laws of an
+eternal sanction. The problem then was, how to inflict the unbounded
+punishment thus claimed by justice for a transgressional condition, and
+yet at love's demand to set the prisoner free: how to be just, and
+simultaneously justifier of the guilty. That was a question
+magnificently solved by God alone: magnificently about to be solved, as
+according to our argument seemed probable, by God Triune, in wondrous
+self-involving council. The solution would be rationally this. Himself,
+in his character of filial obedience, should pay the utter penalty to
+Himself in his character of paternal authority, whilst Himself in the
+character of quickening spirit, should restore the ransomed family from
+death to life, from the power of evil unto good. Was not this a most
+probable, a most reasonably probable scheme? was it not altogether wise
+and philosophical, as well as entirely generous and kind to wretched
+men?
+
+And (returning to our present topic), was it not antecedently to have
+been expected that God the Son (so to put it) should, in the shape He
+was thereafter to assume upon earth, appear upon the eternal throne of
+heaven? In a shape, however glorified and etherealized, with glistening
+countenance and raiment bright as the light, nevertheless resembling
+that more humble form, the Son of Man, who was afterwards thus by a
+circle of probabilities to be made in the form of God; in a shape, not
+liable, from its very sinfulness, to the deification either of other
+worlds or of this [hero-worship is another and a lower thing altogether;
+we speak here of true idolatries:]--was it unlikely, I say, that in such
+a shape Deity should have deigned to become visible, and have blazed
+Manifested God, the central Sun of Heaven?--This probability, prior to
+our forth-flowing thoughts on the Incarnation, though in some measure
+anticipating them, will receive further light from the views soon to be
+set forth. I know not but that something is additionally due to the
+suggestion following; namely: that, raise our swift imagination to what
+height we may, and stretch our searching reason to the uttermost, we
+cannot, despite of all inventive energies and powers of mind, conceive
+any shape more beautiful, more noble, more worthy for a rational
+intelligence to dwell in, more in one Homeric word [Greek: theoeides],
+than the glorified and etherealized human form divine. Let this serve as
+Reason's short reply to any charge of anthropomorphism in the doctrines
+of his creed: it was probable that God should be revealed to His
+creation; and as to the form of any such revealed essence in any such
+infinite beginnings of His work, the most likely of all would appear to
+be that one, wherein He, in the ages then to come, was well resolved to
+earn the most glorious of all triumphs, the merciful reconciliation of
+everlasting justice with everlasting love, the wise and wondrous scheme
+of God forgiving sinners.
+
+
+
+
+THE ORIGIN OF EVIL.
+
+
+It will now be opportune to attempt elucidation of one of the darkest
+and deepest riddles ever propounded to the finite understanding; the _a
+priori_ likelihood of evil: not, mind, its eternal existence, which is a
+false doctrine; but its probable procession from the earliest created
+beings, which is a true one.
+
+At first sight, nothing could appear more improbable: nothing more
+inconsistent with the recognised attributes of God, than that error,
+pain, and sorrow should be mingled in His works. These, the spontaneous
+offspring of His love, one might (not all wisely) argue, must always be
+good and happy--because perfect as Himself. Because perfect?--Therein
+lies the fallacy, which reason will at once lay bare. Perfection is
+attributable to no possible creature: perfection argues infinity, and
+infinity is one of the prerogatives of God. However good, "very good," a
+creation may be found, still it must, from essential finitude, fall
+short of that Best, which is in effect the only state purely
+unexceptionable. For instance, no creature can be imagined of a wisdom
+undiminished from the single true standard, God's wisdom: in other
+phrase, every creature must be more or less departed from wisdom, that
+is, verging towards folly. Again; no creature can be presumed of a
+purity so spotless as to rank in an equality with that of the Almighty:
+in other words, neither man, nor angel, nor any other creature, can
+exist who is not more or less--I will not say impure, positively,
+but--unpure negatively. Thus, the birth-mark of creation must have been
+an inclination towards folly, and from purity. The mere idea of
+creatures would involve, as its great need-be, the qualifying clause
+that these emanations from perfection be imperfect; and that these
+children of purity be liable to grow unpure. They must either be thus
+natured, or exist of the essence of God, that is, be other persons and
+phases of the Deity: such a case was possible certainly; but, as we have
+already shown, not probable. And it were possible, that, in consequence
+of some redemption such as we have spoken of, creatures might by
+ingraftation into God become so entirely part of Him--bone of bone, and
+flesh of flesh, and spirit of spirit--that an exhortation to such blest
+beings should reasonably run, "Be ye perfect." But this infinite
+munificence of the Godhead in redemption was not to be found among His
+bounties as Creator. It might indeed arise afterwards, as setting up
+again the fallen creature in some safe niche of Deity: and we now know
+it has arisen: "we are complete in Him."
+
+But this, though relevant, is a digression. Returning, and to produce
+some further argument against all creature perfectness; let us consider
+how rational it seems to presuppose that the mighty Maker in his
+boundless love should have willed to form a long chain of classes of
+existence more and more subordinated each to the other, each good of its
+kind and happy in its way, but yet all needfully more or less removed
+from the high standard of uncreate Perfection. These descending links,
+these graduations downwards, must involve a nearer or remoter approach
+to evil. Now, we must bear in mind that Evil is not a principle, but a
+perversion: it amounts merely to a denial, a limitation, a corruption of
+good, not to the dignity of its abstract antagonism. Familiarly, but
+fallaciously, we talk of the evil principle, the contradictory to good:
+we might as well talk of the nosologic principle, the contradictory to
+health; or the darkness principle, the contradictory to light. They are
+contraries, but not contradictories: they have no positive, but only a
+relative existence. Good and evil are verily foes, but originally there
+was one cemented friendship: slender beginnings consequent on a
+creation, began to cause the breach: the civil war arose out of a state
+of primitive peace: images betray us into errors, or I might add with a
+protest against the risk of being misinterpreted, that like brothers
+turned to a deadly hate, they nevertheless sprang not originally out of
+two hostile and opposite hemispheres, but from one paternal hearth. Not,
+however, in any sense that God is the author of evil; but that God's
+workmanship, the finite creature, needfully perverted good.
+
+The origin of evil--that is, its birth--is a term true and clear:
+original evil--that is, giving it no birth but an antedate to all
+created things, suffering it to run parallel with God and good from all
+eternity--this is a term false and misty. The probability that good
+would be warped, and grow deteriorate; that wisdom would be dwindled
+down into less and less wisdom, or foolishness; and power degenerated
+more and more towards imbecility; must arise, directly a creature should
+spring out of the Creator; and that, let astronomy or geology name any
+date they will: Adam is a definite date; perhaps also the first
+day's--or period's--work: but the Beginning of Creation is undated. It
+would then, under this impression of the necessary defalcation of the
+creature from the strict straight line, be rational to look for
+deviations: it would be rational to presuppose that God--just, and good,
+and pure, and wise--should righteously be able to "charge his angels
+with folly," should verily declare that "the heavens are not pure in his
+sight."
+
+Further; it would be a possible chance (which considerations soon
+succeeding would render even probable) that for a wise humiliation of
+the reasoning creature, and a just exaltation of the only Source of life
+and light and all things, one or more of such first created beings, or
+angels, should be suffered to fall, possibly from the vastest height,
+and at first by the slenderest beginnings, lower and lower into folly,
+impurity, and all other derelictions from the excellence of God. The
+lines, once unparalleled, would, without a check, go further apart for
+all eternity; albeit, the primal deviation arose in time. The aerolite,
+dropping slowly at first, increases in swiftness as it multiplies the
+fathoms of descent: and if the abyss be really bottomless, how
+impossible a check or a return.
+
+Some such terrible example would amount to a reasonable likelihood, if
+only for a lesson and a warning: to all intelligent hierarchs, be not
+high-minded, but fear; to all responsible beings, keep righteousness and
+reverence, and tempt not God; to all the Virtues, Dominations,
+Obediences, and due Subordinations of unknown glorious worlds, a loud
+and living exhortation to exercise, and not to let grow dim their
+spiritual energies, in efforts after goodness, wisdom, and purity. A
+creature state, to be happy, must be a progressive state: the capability
+of progression argues lack, or a tendency from good: and progression
+itself needs a spur, lest indolence relapse towards evil.
+
+Additionally: we must remember that a creature's excellence before God
+is the reasonable service which he freely renders: freedom, dangerous
+prerogative, involves choice: and choice necessitates the possibility of
+error. The command to a rational intelligence would be, do this, and
+live; do it not, and die: if thou doest, it is well done, good and
+faithful servant; thou hast mounted by thine own heaven-blest exertions
+to a higher approach towards infinite perfection; enter thou into the
+joy, not merely of a creature, but of thy Lord. But, if thou doest not,
+it is wo to thee, unworthy hireling; thou hast broken the tie that bound
+thee to thy Maker--obedience, the root of happiness; thou livest on
+indeed, because the Former of all things cancelleth not nor endeth his
+beginning; but henceforth thine existence is, as a river which
+earthquakes have divorced from its bed, and instead of flowing on for
+ever through the fair pastures of peace and among the mountain roots of
+everlasting righteousness, thy downward course is shattery, headlong,
+turbulent, and destructive; black-throated whirlpools here, miasmatic
+marshes there, a cataract, a shoal, a rapid; until the remorseless
+stream, lashing among rocks which its own riot rendered sterile, pours
+its unresting waters into the thirsty sands of the Sahara.
+
+It was indeed probable (as since we know it to be true) that the
+generous Giver of all things would in the vast majority of cases
+minister such secret help to His weaker spiritual children, that, far
+from failing of continuous obedience, they should find it so unceasingly
+easier and happier that their very natures would soon come to be imbued
+with that pervading habit: and that thus, the longer any creature stood
+upright, the stronger should he rest in righteousness; until, at no very
+distant period, it should become morally impossible for him to fall.
+Such would soon be the condition of myriads, perhaps almost the whole,
+of heaven's innumerable host: and with respect to any darker Unit in
+that multitude, for the good of all permitted to make early shipwreck
+of himself, simply by leaving his intelligence to plume its wings into
+presumptuous flight, and by allowing his pristine goodness or wisdom to
+grow rusty from non-usage until that sacred panoply were eaten into
+holes; with respect to any such unhappy one, and all others (if others
+be) who should listen to his glozing, and make a common cause in his
+rebellion, where, I ask, is any injustice, or even unkindness done to
+him by Deity? Where is any moral improbability that such a traitor
+should be; or any just inconsistency chargeable on the attributes of God
+in consequence of such his being? Whom can he in reason accuse but
+himself for what he is? And what misery can such a one complain of,
+which is not the work of his own hands? And lest the Great Offender
+should urge against his God, why didst thou make me thus?--Is not the
+answer obvious, I made thee, but not thus. And on the rejoinder, Why
+didst thou not keep me as thou madest me? Is not the reply just, I made
+thee reasonable, I led thee to the starting place, I taught thee and set
+thee going well in the beginning; thou art intelligent and free, and
+hast capacities of Mine own giving: wherefore didst thou throw aside My
+grace, and fly in the face of thy Creator?
+
+On the whole; consider that I speak only of probabilities. There is a
+depth in this abyss of thought, which no human plummet is long enough to
+sound; there is a maze in this labyrinth to be tracked by no mortal
+clue. It involves the truth, How unsearchable are his judgments: Thou
+hidest thy ways in the sea, and thy paths in the deep waters, and thy
+footsteps are not known. The weak point of man's argument lies in the
+suggested recollection, that doubtless the Deity could, if He would,
+have upheld all the universe from falling by his gracious power; and
+that the attribute of love concludes that so He would. However, these
+three brief considerations further will go some way to solve the
+difficulty, and to strengthen the weak point; first, there are other
+attributes besides love to run concurrently with it, as truth, justice,
+and unchangeableness:--Secondly, that grace is not grace, if manifested
+indiscriminately to all: and thirdly, that to our understanding at least
+there was no possible method of illustrating the amiabilities of
+Goodness, and the contrivances of Wisdom, but by the infused permission
+of some physical and moral evils: Mercy, benevolence, design, would in a
+universe of best have nothing to do; that universe itself would grow
+stagnant, as incapable of progress; and the principal record of God's
+excellences, the book of redemption, would have been unwritten. Is not
+then the existence of evil justified in reason's calculation? and was
+not such existence an antecedent probability?
+
+Of these matters, thus curtly: it is time, in a short recapitulation, to
+reflect, that, from foregoing causes, mysteries were probable around the
+throne of heaven: and, as I have attempted to show, the mystery of
+imperfection, a concrete not an abstract, was likely to have sprung out
+of any creature universe. Reason perceives that a Gordion knot was
+likely to have become entangled; in the intricate complexities of
+abounding good to be mingled needfully with its own deficiencies,
+corruptions, and perversions: and this having been shown by Reason as
+anteriorly probable, its difficult involvements are now since cut by the
+sword of conquering Faith.
+
+
+
+
+COSMOGONY.
+
+
+These deep themes having been descanted on, however from their nature
+unsatisfactorily and with whatever human weakness, let us now endeavour
+mentally to transport ourselves to a period immediately antecedent to
+our own world's birth. We should then have been made aware that a great
+event was about to take place; whereat, from its foreseen consequences,
+the hierarchies of heaven would be prompt to shout for joy, and the holy
+ones of God to sing for gratitude. It was no common case of a creation;
+no merely onemore orb, of third-rate unimportance, amongst the million
+others of higher and more glorious praise: but it was a globe and a race
+about to be unique in character and fate, and in the far-spread results
+of their existence. On it and of its family was to be contrived the
+scene, wherein, to the admiration of the universe, God himself in Person
+was going visibly to make head against corruption in creation, and for
+ever thus to quench that possibility again: wherein He was marvellously
+to invent and demonstrate how Mercy and Truth should meet together, how
+Righteousness and Peace should kiss each other. There, was going to be
+set forth the wonderfully complicated battle-plan, by which, force
+countervailing force, and design converging all things upon one fixed
+point, Good, concrete in the creature, should overwhelm not without
+strife and wounds Evil concrete in the creature, and all things, "even
+the wicked," should be seen harmoniously blending in the glory of the
+attributes of God. The mythologic Pan, [Greek: to pan] the great
+Universal All, was deeply interested in the struggle: for the seed of
+the woman was to bruise the serpent's head; not merely as respected the
+small orb about to be, but concerning heaven itself, the unbounded
+"haysh hamaim," wherefrom dread Lucifer was thus to be ejected. On the
+earth, a mere planet of humble lustre, which the prouder suns around
+might well despise, was to be exhibited this noble and analogous result;
+the triumph of a lower intelligence, such as man, over a higher
+intelligence, such as angel: because, the former race, however frail,
+however weak, were to find their nature taken into God, and should have
+for their grand exemplar, leader and brother, the Very Lord of all
+arrayed in human guise; while the latter, the angelic fallen mass, in
+spite of all their pristine wisdom and excellency, were to set up as
+their captain him, who may well and philosophically be termed their
+Adversary.
+
+This dark being, probably the mightiest of all mere creatures as the
+embodiment of corrupted good and perversion of an archangelic wisdom,
+was about to be suffered to fall victim to his own overtopping
+ambitions, and to drag with him a third part of the heavenly host--some
+tributary monarchs of the stars: thus he, and those his colleagues,
+should become a spectacle and a warning to all creatures else; to stand
+for spirits' reading in letters of fire a deeply burnt-in record how
+vast a gulf there is between the Maker and the made; how impassable a
+barrier between the derived intelligence and its infinite Creator. Such
+an unholy leader in rebellion against good--let us call him _A_ or _B_,
+or why not for very euphony's sake Lucifer and Satanas?--such a
+corrupted excellence of heaven was to meet his final and inevitable
+disgrace to all eternity on the forthcoming battle-field of earth. Would
+it not be probable then that our world, soon to be fashioned and stocked
+with its teeming reasonable millions, should concentrate to itself the
+gaze of the universe, and, from the deeds to be done in it, should
+arrogate towards man a deep and fixed attention: that "the morning stars
+should sing together, and all the sons of God should shout for joy." Let
+us too, according to the power given to us, partake of such attention
+antecedently in some detail: albeit, as always, very little can be
+tracked of the length and breadth of our theme.
+
+What would probably be the nature of such world and of such creatures,
+in a physical point of view? and what, in a moral point of view? It is
+not necessary to divide these questions: for the one so bears upon the
+other, or rather the latter so directs and pervades the former, that we
+may briefly treat of both as one.
+
+The first probability would be, that, as the creature Man so to be
+abased and so to be exalted must be a responsible and reasonable being,
+every thing--with miraculous exceptions just enough to prove the
+rule--every thing around him should also be responsible and reasonable.
+In other words, that, with such exceptions as before alluded to, the
+whole texture of this world should bear to an inquisitive intellect the
+stamp of cause and effect: whilst for the mass, such cause and effect
+should be so little intrusive, that their easier religion might
+recognise God in all things immediately, rather than mediately. For
+instance: take the cases of stone, and of coal; the one so needful for
+man's architecture, the other for his culinary warmth. Now, however
+simple piety might well thank the Maker for having so stored earth with
+these for necessary uses; they ought, to a more learned, though not less
+pious ken, to seem not to have been created by an effort of the Great
+Father _qua stone_, or _qua coal_. Such a view might satisfy the
+ordinary mind: but thinkers would see no occasion for a miracle; when
+Christ raises Lazarus from the dead, it would have been a philosophical
+fault to have found the grave-clothes and swathing bandages ready
+loosened also. Unassisted man can do that: and unhelped common causes
+can generate stone and coal. The deposits of undated floods, the
+periodical currents of lava, the still and stagnant lake, and the
+furious up-bursting earthquake; all these would be called into play, and
+not the unrequired, I had almost said unreasonable, energies, which we
+call miracle. An agglutination of shells, once peopled with life; a
+crystallized lump of segregate minerals, once in a molten state; a mass
+of carbonated foliage and trunks of tropical trees, buried by long
+changes under the soil, whereover they had once waved greenly luxuriant;
+these, and no other, should have been man's stone and coal. This
+instance affects the reasonableness of such material creation. Take
+another, bearing upon its analogous responsibilities. As there was to be
+warred in this world the contest between good and evil, it would be
+expectable that the crust of man's earth, anteriorly to man's existence
+on it, should be marked with some traces that the evil, though newly
+born so far as might regard man's own disobedience, nevertheless had
+existed antecedently. In other words: it was probable that there should
+exist geological evidences of suffering and death: that the gigantic
+ichthyosaurus should be found fixed in rock with his cruel jaws closed
+upon his prey: that the fearful iguanodon should leave the tracks of
+having desolated a whole region of its reptile tribes: that volcanoes
+should have ravaged fair continents prolific of animal and vegetable
+life: that, in fine, though man's death came by man's sin, yet that
+death and sin were none of man's creating: he was only to draw down upon
+his head a preexistent wo, an ante-toppling rock. Observe then, that
+these geological phenomena are only illustrations of my meaning: and
+whether such parables be true or false, the argument remains the same:
+we never build upon the sand of simile, but only use it here and there
+for strewing on the floor. Still, I will acknowledge that the
+introduction of such fossil instances appears to me wisely thrown in as
+affects their antecedent probability, because ignorant comments upon
+scriptural cosmogony have raised the absurdest objections against the
+truth of scriptural science. There is not a tittle of known geological
+fact, which is not absolutely reconcilable with Genesis and Job. But
+this is a word by the way: although aimed not without design against one
+of the poor and paltry weak-holds of the infidel.
+
+
+
+
+ADAM.
+
+
+Remembering, then, that these are probabilities, and that the whole
+treatise purports to be nothing but a sketch, and not a finished
+picture, we have suggestively thus thrown out that the material world,
+man's home as man, was likely to have been prepared, as we posteriorly
+know it to be. Now, what of man's own person, circumstances, and
+individuality? Was it likely that the world should be stocked at once
+with many several races, or with one prolific seed? with a specimen of
+every variety of the genus man, or with the one generic type capable of
+forming those varieties?--Answer. One is by far the likelier in itself,
+because one thing must needs be more probable than many things:
+additionally; Wisdom and Power are always economical, and where one will
+suit the purpose, superfluities are rejected. That this one seed,
+covering with its product a various globe under all imaginable
+differences of circumstance and climate, should, in the lapse of ages,
+generate many species of the genus Man, was antecedently probable. For
+example, morality, peace and obedience would exercise transforming
+powers: their opposites the like in an opposite way. We can well fancy a
+mild and gentle race, as the Hindoo, to spring from the former
+educationals: and a family with flashing eyes and strongly-visaged
+natures, as the Malay, from a state of hatred, war, and license. We can
+well conceive that a tropical sun should carbonize some of that tender
+fabric the skin, adding also swift blood and fierce passions: while an
+arctic climate would induce a sluggish, stunted race. And, when to these
+considerations we add that of promiscuous unions, we arrive at the just
+likelihood that the whole family of man, though springing from one root,
+should, in the course of generations, be what now we see it.
+
+Further. How should this prolific original, the first man, be created?
+and for a name let us call him Adam; a justly-chosen name enough, as
+alluding to his medium colour, ruddiness. Should he have been cast upon
+the ground an infant, utterly helpless, requiring miraculous aid and
+guidance at every turn? Should he be originated in boyhood, that hot and
+tumultuous time, when the creature is most rash, and least qualified for
+self-government? or should he be first discerned as an adult, in his
+prime, equal alike to obedience and rule, to moral control and moral
+energy?
+
+Add also here; is it probable there would be any needless interval
+placed to proecreations? or rather, should not such original seed be able
+immediately to fulfil the blank world call upon him, and as the
+greatly-teeming human father be found fitted from his birth to propagate
+his kind? The questions answer themselves.
+
+Again. Should this first man have been discovered originally surrounded
+with all the appliances of an after-civilization, clad, and housed, and
+rendered artificial? nor rather, in a noble and naturally royal aspect
+appear on the stage of life as king of the natural creation, sole warder
+of a garden of fruits, with all his food thus readily concocted, and an
+eastern climate tempered to his nakedness?
+
+Now, as to the solitariness of this one seed. From what we have already
+mused respecting God's benevolence, it would seem probable that the
+Maker might not see it good that man should be alone. The seed,
+originally one, proved (as was likely) to resemble its great parent,
+God, and to be partitionable, or reducible into persons; though with
+reasonable differences as between creature and Creator. Woman--Eve, the
+living or life-giving--was likely to have sprung out of the composite
+seed, Man, in order to companionship and fit society. Moreover, it were
+expectable that in the pattern creature, composite man, there should be
+involved some apt, mysterious typification of the same creature, after a
+fore-known fall restored, as in its perfect state of reunion with its
+Maker. _A posteriori_, the figurative notion is, that the Redeemed
+family, or mystical spouse, is incorporated in her husband, the
+Redeemer: not so much in the idea of marriage, as (taking election into
+view) of a coecreation; as it were rib of rib, and life woven into life,
+not copulated or conjoined, but immingled in the being. This is a
+mystery most worthy of deep searching; a mystery deserving philosophic
+care, not less than the more unilluminate enjoyment of humble and
+believing Christians. I speak concerning Christ and his church.
+
+
+
+
+THE FALL.
+
+
+There is a special fitness in the fact, long since known and now to be
+perceived probable, that if mankind should fail in disobedience, it
+should rather be through the woman than through the man. Because, the
+man, _qua man_, and the deputed head of all inferior creatures, was
+nearer to his Creator, than the woman; who, _qua woman_, proceeded out
+of man. She was, so to speak, one step further from God, _ab origine_,
+than man was; therefore, more liable to err and fall away. To my own
+mind, I confess, it appears that nothing is more anteriorly probable
+than the plain, scriptural story of Adam and Eve: so simple that the
+child delights in it; so deep that the philosopher lingers there with an
+equal, but more reasonable joy.
+
+For, let us now come to the probabilities of a temptation; and a fall;
+and what temptation; and how ordered.
+
+The heavenly intelligences beheld the model-man and model-woman,
+rational beings, and in all points "very good." The Adversary panted for
+the fray, demanding some test of the obedience of this new, favourite
+race. And the Lord God was willing that the great controversy, which he
+fore-knew, and for wise purposes allowed, should immediately commence.
+Where was the use of a delay? If you will reply, To give time to
+strengthen Adam's moral powers: I rejoin, he was made with more than
+enough of strength infused against any temptation not entering by the
+portal of his will: and against the open door of will neither time nor
+habits can avail. Moreover, the trial was to be exceedingly simple; no
+difficult abstinence, for man might freely eat of every thing but one;
+no natural passion tempted; no exertion of intelligence requisite. Adam
+lived in a garden; and his Maker, for proof of reasonable obedience,
+provides the most easy and obvious test of it--do not eat that apple.
+Was it, in reality, an improbable test; an unsuitable one? Was it not,
+rather, the likeliest in itself, and the fittest as addressed to the
+new-born, rational animal, which imagination could invent, or an amiable
+fore-knowledge of all things could desire? Had it been to climb some
+arduous height without looking back, or on no account to gaze upon the
+sun, how much less apt and easy of obedience! Thus much for the test.
+
+Now, as to the temptation and its ordering. A creature, to be tempted
+fairly, must be tempted by another equal or lower creature; and through
+the senses. If mere spirit strives with spirit, plus matter, the strife
+is unequal: the latter is clogged; he has to fight in the net of
+Retiarius. But if both are netted, if both are spirit plus matter, (that
+is, material creatures,) there is no unfairness. Therefore, it would
+seem reasonable that the Adversary in person should descend from his
+mere spirituality into some tangible and humbled form. This could not
+well be man's, nor the semblance of man's: for the first pair would well
+know that they were all mankind: and, if the Lord God himself was
+accustomed to be seen of them as in a glorified humanity, it would be
+manifestly a moral incongruity to invest the devil in a similar form. It
+must, then, be the shape of some other creature; as a lion, or a lamb,
+or--why not a serpent? Is there any improbability here? and not rather
+as apt an avatar of the sinuous and wily rebel, the dangerous,
+fascinating foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance
+could invent? The plain fact is, that Reason--given keenness--might have
+guessed this also antecedently a likelihood.
+
+A few words more on other details probable to the temptation. Wonderful
+as it may seem to us with our present experience, in the case of the
+first woman it would scarcely excite her astonishment to be accosted in
+human phrase by one of the lower creatures; and in no other way could
+the tempter reach her mind. Much as Milton puts it, Eve sees a beautiful
+snake, eating, not improbably, of the forbidden apple. Attracted by a
+natural curiosity, she would draw near, and in a soft sweet voice the
+serpent, _i.e._ Lucifer in his guise, would whisper temptation. It was
+likely to have been keenly managed. Is it possible, O fair and favoured
+mistress of this beautiful garden, that your Maker has debarred you from
+its very choicest fruit? Only see its potencies for good: I, a poor
+reptile, am instantly thereby endued with knowledge and the privilege of
+speech. Am I dead for the eating?--ye shall not surely die; but shall
+become as gods yourselves; and this your Maker knoweth.
+
+The marvellous fruit, invested thus with mystery, and tinctured with
+the secret charm of a thing unreasonably, nay, harmfully, forbidden,
+would then be allowed silently to plead its own merits. It was good for
+food: a young creature's first thought. It was pleasant to the eyes:
+addressing a higher sense than mere bodily appetite, than mental
+predilection for form and colour which marks fine breeding among men. It
+was also to be desired to make one wise; here was the climax, the great
+moral inducement which an innocent being might well be taken with;
+irrespectively of the one qualification that this wisdom was to be
+plucked in spite of God. Doubtless, it were probable, that had man not
+fallen, the knowledge of good would never have been long withheld: but
+he chose to reap the crop too soon, and reaped it mixed with tares,
+good, and evil.
+
+I need not enlarge, in sermon form, upon the theme. It was probable that
+the weaker creature, Woman, once entrapped, she would have charms enough
+to snare her husband likewise: and the results thus perceived to have
+been likely, we have long since known for fact. That a depraved
+knowledge should immediately occasion some sort of clothing to be
+instituted by the great moral Governor, was likely: and there would be
+nothing near at hand, in fact nothing else suitable, but the skins of
+beasts. There is also a high probability that some sort of slaying
+should take place instantly on the fall, by way of reference to the
+coming sacrifice for sin; and for a type of some imputed righteousness.
+God covered Man's evil nakedness with the skins of innocent slain
+animals: even so, Blessed is he whose unrighteousness is forgiven, and
+whose sin is covered.
+
+With respect to restoration from any such fall. There seems a remarkable
+prior probability for it, if we take into account the empty places in
+heaven, the vacant starry thrones which sin had caused to be untenanted.
+Just as, in after years, Israel entered into the cities and the gardens
+of the Canaanite and other seven nations, so it was anteriorly likely,
+would the ransomed race of Men come to be inheritors of the mansions
+among heavenly places, which had been left unoccupied by the fallen host
+of Lucifer. There was a gap to be filled: and probably there would be
+some better race to fill it.
+
+
+
+
+THE FLOOD.
+
+
+Themes like those past and others still to come, are so immense, that
+each might fairly ask a volume for its separate elucidation. A few
+seeds, pregnant with thought, are all that we have here space, or time,
+or power to drop beside the world's highway. The grand outlines of our
+race command our first attention: we cannot stop to think and speak of
+every less detail. Therefore, now would I carry my companion across the
+patriarchal times at once to the era of the Deluge. Let us speculate, as
+hitherto, antecedently, throwing our minds as it were into some angelic
+prior state.
+
+If, as we have seen probable, evil (a concretion always, not an
+abstraction) made some perceptible ravages even in the unbounded sphere
+of a heavenly creation, how much more rapid and overwhelming would its
+avalanche (once ill-commenced) be seen, when the site of its infliction
+was a poor band of men and women prisoned on a speck of earth. How
+likely was it that, in the lapse of no long time, the whole world should
+have been "corrupt before God, and filled with wickedness." How
+probable, that taking into account the great duration of pristine human
+life, the wicked family of man should speedily have festered up into an
+intolerable guiltiness. And was this dread result of the primal curse
+and disobedience to be regarded as the Adversary's triumph? Had this
+Accuser--the Saxon word is Devil--had this Slanderer of God's attribute
+then really beaten Good? or was not rather all this swarming sin an
+awful vindication to the universe of the great need-be that God
+unceasingly must hold his creature up lest he fall, and that out of Him
+is neither strength nor wisdom? Was Deity, either in Adam's case or
+this, baffled--nor rather justified? Was it an experiment which had
+really failed; nor rather one which, by its very seeming failure, proved
+the point in question, the misery of creatures when separate from God?
+Yea, the evil one was being beaten down beneath his very trophies in sad
+Tarpeian triumph: through conquest and his children's sins heightening
+his own misery.
+
+Let us now advert to a few of the anterior probabilities affecting this
+evil earth's catastrophe. It is not competent to us to trench upon such
+ulterior views as are contained in the idea of types relatively to
+anti-types. Neither will we take the fanciful or poetical aspect of
+coming calamity, that earth, befouled with guilt, was likely to be
+washed clean by water. It is better to ask, as more relevant, in what
+other way more benevolent than drowning could, short of miracle, the
+race be made extinct? They were all to die in their sins, and swell in
+another sphere the miserable hosts of Satan. There was no hope for them,
+for there was no repentance. It was infinitely probable that God's
+long-suffering had worn out every reasonable effort for their
+restoration. They were then to die; but how?--in the least painful
+manner possible. Intestine wars, fevers, famines, a general burning-up
+of earth and all its millions, were any of these preferable sorts of
+death to that caused by the gradual rise of water, with hope of life
+accorded still even to the last gurgle? Assuredly, if "the tender
+mercies of the wicked are cruel," the judgments of the Good one are
+tempered well with mercy.
+
+Moreover, in the midst of this universal slaughter there was one good
+seed to be preserved: and, as Heaven never works a miracle where common
+cause will suit the present purpose, it would have been inconsistent to
+have extirpated the wicked by any such means as must demonstrate the
+good to have been saved only by super-human agency.
+
+The considerations of humanity, and of the divine less-intervention, add
+that of the natural and easy agency of a long-commissioned comet. No
+"_Deus e machina_" was needed for this effort: one of His ministers of
+flaming fire was charged to call forth the services of water. This was
+an easy and majestic interference. Ever since man fell--yea, ages before
+it--the omniscient eye of God had foreseen all things that should
+happen: and his ubiquity had, possibly from The Beginning, sped a comet
+on its errant way, which at a calculated period was to serve to wash the
+globe clean of its corruptions: was to strike the orbit of earth just in
+the moment of its passage, and disturbing by attraction the fountains of
+the great deep, was temporarily to raise their level. Was not this a
+just, a sublime, and a likely plan? Was it not a merciful, a perfect,
+and a worthy way? Who should else have buried the carcases on those
+fierce battle-fields, or the mouldering heaps of pestilence and
+famine?--But, when at Jehovah's summons, heaving to the comet's mass,
+the pure and mighty sea rises indignant from its bed, by drowning to
+cleanse the foul and mighty land--how easy an engulfing of the corpses;
+how awful that universal burial; how apt their monumental epitaph
+written in water, "The wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot
+rest;" how dread the everlasting requiem chanted for the whelmed race by
+the waves roaring above them: yea, roaring above them still! for in
+that chaotic hour it seems probable to reason that the land changed
+place with ocean; thus giving the new family of man a fresh young world
+to live upon.
+
+
+
+
+NOAH.
+
+
+When the world, about to grow so wicked, was likely thus to have been
+cleansed, and so renewed, the great experiment of man's possible
+righteousness was probable to be repeated in another form. We may fancy
+some high angelic mind to have gone through some such line of thought as
+this, respecting the battle and combatants. Were those champions,
+Lucifer and Adam, really fit to be matched together? Was the tourney
+just; were the weapons equal; was it, after all, a fair fight?--on one
+side, the fallen spirit, mighty still, though fallen, subtlest, most
+unscrupulous, most malicious, exerting every energy to rear a rebel
+kingdom against God; on the other, a new-born, inexperienced, innocent,
+and trustful creature, a poor man vexed with appetites, and as naked for
+absolute knowledge in his mind as for garments on his body. Was it, in
+this view of the case, an equal contest? were the weapons of that
+warfare matched and measured fairly?
+
+Some such objection, we may suppose, might seem to have been admissible,
+as having a show at least of reason: and, after the world was to have
+been cleansed of all its creatures in the manner I have mentioned, a new
+champion is armed for the conflict, totally different in every respect;
+and to reason's view vastly superior.
+
+This time, the Adam of renewed earth is to be the best and wisest, nay,
+the only good and wise one of the whole lost family: a man, with the
+experience of full six hundred years upon his hoary brow, with the
+unspeakable advantage of having walked with God all those long-drawn
+centuries, a patriarch of twenty generations, recognised as the one
+great and faithful witness, the only worshipper and friend of his
+Creator. Could a finer sample be conceived? was not Noah the only spark
+of spiritual "consolation" in the midst of earth's dark death? and was
+not he the best imaginable champion to stand against the wiles of the
+devil? Verily, reason might have guessed, that if Deity saw fit to renew
+the fight at all, the representative of man should have been Noah.
+
+Before we touch upon the immediate fall of this new Adam also, at a time
+when God and reason had deserted him, it will be more orderly to allude
+to the circumstances of his preservation in the flood. How, in such a
+hurlyburly of the elements, should the chosen seed survive? No house,
+nor hill-top, no ordinary ship would serve the purpose: still less the
+unreasonable plan of any cavern hermetically sealed, or any aerial
+chariot miraculously lifted up above the lower firmament. To use plain
+and simple words, I can fancy no wiser method than a something between a
+house and a diving-bell; a vessel, entirely storm-tight and water-tight,
+which nevertheless for necessary air should have an open window at the
+top: say, one a cubit square. This, properly hooded against deluging
+rain, and supplied with such helps to ventilation as leathern pipes, air
+tunnels and similar appliances, would not be an impracticable method.
+However, instead of being under water as a diving-bell, the vessel would
+be better made to float upon the rising flood, and thus continually
+keeping its level, would be ready to strike land as the waters assuaged.
+
+Now, as to the size of this ark, this floating caravan, it must needs be
+very large; and also take a great time in building. For, suffering cause
+and effect to go on without a new creation, it was reasonable to suppose
+that the man, so launching as for another world on the ocean of
+existence, would take with him (especially if God's benevolence so
+ordered it) all the known appliances of civilized life; as well as a
+pair or two of every creature he could collect, to stock withal the
+renewed earth according to their various excellences in their kinds. The
+lengthy, arduous, and expensive preparation of this mighty ark--a vessel
+which must include forests of timber and consume generations in
+building; besides the world-be-known collection of all manner of strange
+animals for the stranger fancy of a fanatical old man; not to mention
+also the hoary Preacher's own century of exortations: with how great
+moral force all this living warning would be calculated to act upon the
+world of wickedness and doom! Here was the great ante-diluvian
+potentate, Noah, a patriarch of ages, wealthy beyond our
+calculations--(for how else without a needless succession of miracles
+could he have built and stocked the ark?)--a man of enormous substance,
+good report, and exalted station, here was he for a hundred and twenty
+years engaged among crowds of unbelieving workmen, in constructing a
+most extravagant ship, which, forsooth, filled with samples of all this
+world's stores, was to sail with our only good family in search of a
+better. Moreover, Noah here declares that our dear old mother-earth is
+to be destroyed for her iniquities by rain and sea: and he exhorts us by
+a solid evidence of his own faith at least, if by nothing else, to
+repent, and turn to him, whom Abel, Seth, and Enoch, as well as this
+good Noah, represent as our Maker. Would not such sneers and taunts be
+probable: would they not amply vindicate the coming judgment? Was not
+the "long-suffering of God" likely to have thus been tried "while the
+ark was preparing?" and when the catastrophe should come, had not that
+evil generation been duly warned against it? On the whole, it would have
+been Reason's guess that Noah should be saved as he was; that the ark
+should have been as we read of it in Genesis; and that the very
+immensity of its construction should have served for a preaching to
+mankind. As to any idea that the ark is an unreasonable (some have even
+said ridiculous) incident to the deluge, it seems to me to have
+furnished a clear case of antecedent probability.
+
+Lastly: Noah's fall was very likely to have happened: not merely in the
+theological view of the matter, as an illustration of the truth that no
+human being can stand fast in righteousness: but from the just
+consideration that he imported with him the seeds of an impure state of
+society, the remembered luxuries of that old world. For instance, among
+the plants of earth which Noah would have preserved for future insertion
+in the soil, he could not have well forgotten the generous, treacherous
+Vine. That to a righteous man, little used to all unhallowed sources of
+exhilaration, this should have been a stepping-stone to a defalcation
+from God, was likely. It was probable in itself, and shows the honesty
+as well as the verisimilitude of Scripture to read, that "Noah began to
+be a husbandman, and planted a vineyard; and he drank of the wine, and
+was drunken." There was nothing here but what, taking all things into
+consideration, Reason might have previously guessed. Why then withhold
+the easier matter of an afterward belief?
+
+
+
+
+BABEL.
+
+
+This book ought to be read, as mentally it is written, with at the end
+of every sentence one of those _et ceteras_, which the genius of a Coke
+interpreted so keenly of the genius of a Littleton: for, far more
+remains on each subject to be said, than in any one has been attempted.
+
+Let us pass on to the story of Babel: I can conceive nothing more _a
+priori_ probable than the account we read in Scripture. Briefly consider
+the matter. A multitude of men, possibly the then whole human family,
+once more a fallen race, emigrate towards the East, and come to a vast
+plain in the region of Shinar, afterwards Chaldaea. Fertile,
+well-watered, apt for every mundane purpose, it yet wanted one great
+requisite. The degenerate race "put not their trust in God:" they did
+not believe but that the world might some day be again destroyed by
+water: and they required a point of refuge in the possible event of a
+second deluge from the broken bounds of ocean and the windows of the
+skies. They had come from the West; more strictly the North-west, a land
+of mountains, as they deemed them, ready-made refuges: and their scheme,
+a probable one enough, was to construct some such mountain artificially,
+so that its top might reach the clouds, as did the summit of Ararat.
+This would serve the twofold purpose of outwitting any further attempt
+to drown them, and of making for themselves a proud name upon the earth.
+So, the Lord God, in his etherealized human form (having taken counsel
+with His own divine compeers), coming in the guise wherein He was wont
+to walk with Adam and with Enoch and his other saints of men, "came down
+and saw the tower:" truly, He needed not have come, for ubiquity was
+his, and omniscience; but in the days when God and man were (so to
+speak) less chronologically divided than as now, and while yet the
+trial-family was young, it does not seem unlikely that He should. God
+then, in his aspect of the Head of all mankind, took notice of that
+dangerous and unholy combination: and He made within His Triune Mind the
+wise resolve to break their bond of union. Omniscience had herein a view
+to ulterior consequences benevolent to man, and He knew that it would be
+a wise thing for the future world, as well as a discriminative check
+upon the race then living, to confuse the universal language into many
+discordant dialects. Was this in any sense an improbable or improper
+method of making "the devices of the wicked to be of none effect, and of
+laughing to scorn the counsels of the mighty?" Was it not to have been
+expected that a fallen race should be disallowed the combinative force
+necessary to a common language, but that such force should be dissipated
+and diverted for moral usages into many tongues?--There they were, all
+the chiefs of men congregated to accomplish a vast, ungodly scheme: and
+interposing Heaven to crush such insane presumption--and withal
+thereafter designing to bless by arranging through such means the future
+interchange of commerce and the enterprise of nationalities--He, in his
+Trinity, was not unlikely to have said, "Let us go down, and confound
+their language." What better mode could have been devised to scatter
+mankind, and so to people the extremities of earth? In order that the
+various dialects should crystallize apart, each in its discriminative
+lump, the nucleus of a nation; that thereafter the world might be able
+no longer to unite as one man against its Lord, but by conflicting
+interests, the product of conflicting languages, might give to good a
+better chance of not being altogether overwhelmed; that, though many "a
+multitude might go to do evil," it should not thenceforward be the whole
+consenting family of man; but that, here by one and there by one, the
+remembrance of God should be kept extant, and evil no longer acquire an
+accumulated force, by having all the world one nation.
+
+
+
+
+JOB.
+
+
+Every scriptural incident and every scriptural worthy deserves its own
+particular discussion: and might easily obtain it. For example; the
+anterior probability that human life in patriarchal times should have
+been very much prolonged, was obvious; from consideration of--1, the
+benevolence of God; 2, the inexperience of man; and 3, the claim so
+young a world would hold upon each of its inhabitants: whilst Holy Writ
+itself has prepared an answer to the probable objection, that the years
+were lunar years, or months; by recording that Arphaxad and Salah and
+Eber and Peleg and Reu and Serug and Nahor, descendants of Shem, each
+had children at the average age of two-and-thirty, and yet the lives of
+all varied in duration from a hundred and fifty years to five hundred.
+And many similar credibilities might be alluded to: what shall I say of
+Abraham's sacrifice, of Moses and the burning bush, of Jonah also, and
+Elisha, and of the prophets? for the time would fail me to tell how
+probable and simple in each instance is its deep and marvellous history.
+There is food for philosophic thought in every page of ancient Jewish
+Scripture scarcely less than in those of primitive Christianity: here,
+after our fashion, we have only touched upon a sample.
+
+The opening scene to the book of Job has vexed the faith of many very
+needlessly: to my mind, nothing was more likely to have literally and
+really happened. It is one of those few places where we get an insight
+into what is going on elsewhere: it is a lifting off the curtain of
+eternity for once, revealing the magnificent simplicities constantly
+presented in the halls of heaven. And I am moved to speak about it
+here, because I think a plain statement of its sublime probabilities
+will be acceptable to many: especially if they have been harassed by the
+doubts of learned men respecting the authorship of that rare history. It
+signifies nothing who recorded the circumstances and conversations, so
+long as they were true, and really happened: given power, opportunity,
+and honesty, a life of Dr. Johnson would be just as fair in fact, if
+written by Smollett, as by Boswell, or himself. Whether then Job, the
+wealthy prince of Uz, or Abraham, or Moses, or Elisha, or Eliphaz, or
+whoever else, have placed the words on record, there they stand, true;
+and the whole book in all its points was anteriorly likely to have been
+decreed a component part of revelation. Without it, there would have
+been wanting some evidence of a godly worship among men through the long
+and dreary interval of several hundred years: there would never have
+been given for man's help the example of a fortitude, and patience, and
+trust in God most brilliant; of a faith in the resurrection and
+redeemer, signal and definite beyond all other texts in Jewish
+Scripture: as well as of a human knowledge of God in his works beyond
+all modern instance. However, the excellences of that narrative are
+scarcely our theme: we return to the starting-post of its probability,
+especially with reference to its supernatural commencement. What we have
+shown credible, many pages back, respecting good and evil and the
+denizens of heaven, finds a remarkable after-proof in the two first
+chapters of Job; and for some such reason, by reference, these two
+chapters were themselves anteriorly to have been expected.
+
+Let us see what happened:
+
+"There was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before
+the Lord, and Satan came also among them. And the Lord said unto Satan,
+whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going
+to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it. And the
+Lord said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is
+none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that
+feareth God and escheweth evil? Then Satan answered the Lord, and said,
+Doth Job fear God for naught? Hast thou not made a hedge about him, and
+about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? Thou hast
+blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the
+land. But put forth thine hand now, and touch all he hath, and he will
+curse thee to thy face. And the Lord said unto Satan, Behold, all that
+he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So
+Satan went forth from the presence of the Lord."--[Job 1. 6-13.]
+
+It is a most stately drama: any paraphrase would spoil its dignity, its
+quiet truth, its unpretending, yet gigantic lineaments. Note: in
+allusion to our views of evil, that Satan also comes among the sons of
+God: note, the generous dependence placed by a generous Master on his
+servant well-upheld by that Master's own free grace: note, Satan's
+constant imputation against piety when blessed of God with worldly
+wealth, Doth he serve for naught? I can discern no cause wherefore all
+this scene should not have truly happened; not as in vision of some holy
+man, but as in fact. Let us read on, before further comment:
+
+"Again, there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves
+before the Lord, and Satan came also among them to present himself
+before the Lord. And the Lord said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? And
+Satan answered the Lord, and said, From going to and fro in the earth,
+and from walking up and down in it. And the Lord said unto Satan, Hast
+thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the
+earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth
+evil? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst me
+against him, to destroy him without cause. And Satan answered the Lord,
+and said, Skin for skin, yea, all that a man hath will he give for his
+life. But put forth thine hand now, and touch his bone and his flesh,
+and he will curse thee to thy face. And the Lord said unto Satan,
+Behold, he is in thine hand; but save his life. So Satan went forth from
+the presence of the Lord, and smote Job with sore boils, from the sole
+of his foot unto his crown."
+
+Some such scene, displaying the devil's malice, slandering sneers, and
+permitted power, recommends itself to my mind as antecedently to have
+been looked for: in order that we might know from what quarter many of
+life's evils come; with what aims and ends they are directed; what
+limits are opposed to our foe; and Who is on our side. We needed some
+such insight into the heavenly places; some such hint of what is
+continually going on before the Lord's tribunal; we wanted this plain
+and simple setting forth of good and evil in personal encounter, of
+innocence awhile given up to malice for its chastening and its triumph.
+Lo, all this so probable scene is here laid open to us, and many,
+against reason, disbelieve it!
+
+Note, in allusion to our after-theme, the _locus_ of heaven, that there
+is some such usual place of periodical gathering. Note, the open
+unchiding loveliness dwelling in the Good One's words, as contrasted
+with the subtle, slanderous hatred of the Evil. And then the vulgar
+proverb, Skin for skin: this pious Job is so intensely selfish, that let
+him lose what he may, he heeds it not; he cares for nothing out of his
+own skin. And there are many more such notabilities.
+
+Why did I produce these passages at length? For their Doric simplicity;
+for their plain and masculine features; for their obvious truthfulness;
+for their manifest probability as to fact, and expectability previously
+to it. Why on earth should they be doubted in their literal sense? and
+were they not more likely to have happened than to have been invented?
+We have no such geniuses now as this writer must have been, who by the
+pure force of imagination could have created that tableau. Milton had
+Job to go to. Simplicity is proof presumptive in favour of the plain
+inspiration of such passages: for the plastic mind which could conceive
+so just a sketch, would never have rested satisfied, without having
+painted and adorned it picturesquely. Such rare flights of fancy are
+always made the most of.
+
+One or two thoughts respecting Job's trial. That he should at last give
+way, was only probable: he was, in short, another Adam, and had another
+fall; albeit he wrestled nobly. Worthy was he to be named among God's
+chosen three, "Noah, Daniel, and Job:" and worthy that the Lord should
+bless his latter end. This word brings me to the point I wish to touch
+on; the great compensation which God gave to Job.
+
+Children can never be regarded as other than individualities: and
+notwithstanding Eastern feelings about increase in quantity, its quality
+is, after all, the question for the heart. I mean that many children to
+be born, is but an inadequate return for many children dying. If a
+father loses a well-beloved son, it is small recompense of that aching
+void that he gets another. For this reason of the affections, and
+because I suppose that thinkers have sympathized with me in the
+difficulty, I wish to say a word about Job's children, lost and found.
+It will clear away what is to some minds a moral and affectionate
+objection. Now, this is the state of the case.
+
+The patriarch is introduced to us as possessing so many camels, and
+oxen, and so forth; and ten children. All these are represented to him
+by witnesses, to all appearance credible, as dead; and he mourns for his
+great loss accordingly. Would not a merchant feel to all intents and
+purposes a ruined man, if he received a clear intelligence from
+different parts of the world at once that all his ships and warehouses
+had been destroyed by hurricanes and fire? Faith given, patience
+follows: and the trial is morally the same, whether the news be true or
+false. Remarkably enough, after the calamitous time is past, when the
+good man of Uz is discerned as rewarded by heaven for his patience by
+the double of every thing once lost--his children remain the same in
+number, ten. It seems to me quite possible that neither camels, &c., nor
+children, really had been killed. Satan might have meant it so, and
+schemed it; and the singly-coming messengers believed it all, as also
+did the well-enduring Job. But the scriptural word does not go to say
+that these things happened; but that certain emissaries said they
+happened. I think the devil missed his mark: that the messengers were
+scared by some abortive diabolic efforts; and that, (with a natural
+increase of camels, &c., meanwhile,) the patriarch's paternal heart was
+more than compensated at the last, by the restoration of his own dear
+children. They were dead, and are alive again; they were lost, and are
+found. Like Abraham returning from Mount Calvary with Isaac, it was the
+Resurrection in a figure.
+
+If to this view objection is made, that, because the boils of Job were
+real, therefore, similarly real must be all his other evils; I reply,
+that in the one temptation, the suffering was to be mental; in the
+other, bodily. In the latter case, positive, personal pain, was the gist
+of the matter: in the former, the heart might be pierced, and the mind
+be overwhelmed, without the necessity of any such incurable affliction
+as children's deaths amount to. God's mercy may well have allowed the
+evil one to overreach himself; and when the restoration came, how double
+was the joy of Job over those ten dear children.
+
+Again, if any one will urge that, in the common view of the case, Job at
+the last really has twice as many children as before, for that he has
+ten old ones in heaven, and ten new ones on earth: I must, in answer,
+think that explanation as unsatisfactory to us, as the verity of it
+would have been to Job. Affection, human affection, is not so
+numerically nor vicariously consoled: and it is, perhaps, worth while
+here to have thrown out (what I suppose to be) a new view of the case,
+if only to rescue such wealth as children from the infidel's sneer of
+being confounded with such wealth as camels. Moreover, such a paternal
+reward was anteriorly more probable.
+
+
+
+
+JOSHUA.
+
+
+How many of our superficial thinkers have been staggered at the great
+miracle recorded of Joshua; and how few, even of the deeper sort,
+comparatively, may have discerned its aptness, its science, and its
+anterior likelihood: "Sun! stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, moon,
+in the valley of Ajalon." Now, consider, for we hope to vindicate even
+this stupendous event from the charge of improbability.
+
+Baal and Ashtaroth, chief idols of the Canaanites, were names for sun
+and moon. It would manifestly be the object of God and His ambassador to
+cast utter scorn on such idolatry. And what could be more apt than that
+Joshua, commissioned to extirpate the corrupted race, should
+miraculously be enabled, as it were, to bind their own gods to aid in
+the destruction of such votaries?
+
+Again: what should Joshua want with the moon for daylight, to help him
+to rout the foes of God more fiercely? Why not, according to the
+astronomical ignorance of those days, let her sail away, unconsorted by
+the sun, far beyond the valley of Ajalon? There was a reason, here, of
+secret, unobtruded science: if the sun stopped, the moon must stop too;
+that is to say, both apparently: the fact being that the earth must, for
+the while, rest on its axis. This, I say, is a latent, scientific hint;
+and so, likewise, is the accompanying mention as a fact, that the Lord
+immediately "rained great stones out of heaven" upon the flying host.
+For would it not be the case that, if the diurnal rotation of earth were
+suddenly to stop, the impetus of motion would avail to raise high into
+the air by centrifugal force, and fling down again by gravity, such
+unanchored things as fragments of rock?
+
+Once more: our objector will here perhaps inquire, Why not then command
+the earth to stop--and not the sun and moon? if thus probably Joshua or
+his Inspirer knew better? Answer. Only let a reasonable man consider
+what would have been the moral lesson both to Israelite and to
+Canaanite, if the great successor of Moses had called out,
+incomprehensibly to all, "Earth, stand thou still on thine axis;"--and
+lo! as if in utter defiance of such presumption, and to vindicate openly
+the heathen gods against the Jewish, the very sun and moon in heaven
+stopped, and glared on the offender. I question whether such a noon-day
+miracle might not have perverted to idolatry the whole believing host:
+and almost reasonably too. The strictly philosophical terms would have
+entirely nullified the whole moral influence. God in his word never
+suffers science to hinder the progress of truth: a worldly philosophy
+does this almost in every instance, darkening knowledge with a cloud of
+words: but the science of the Bible is usually concealed in some
+neighbouring hint quite handy to the record of the phenomena expressed
+in ordinary language. In fact, for all common purposes, no astronomer
+finds fault with such phrases as the moon rising, or the sun setting: he
+speaks according to the appearance, though he knows perfectly well that
+the earth is the cause of it, and not the sun or moon. Carry this out in
+Joshua's case.
+
+On the whole, the miracle was very plain, very comprehensible, and very
+probable. It had good cause: for Canaan felt more confidence in the
+protection of his great and glorious Baal, than stiff-necked Judah in
+his barely-seen divinity: and surely it was wise to vindicate the true
+but invisible God by the humiliation of the false and far-seen idol.
+This would constitute to all nations the quickly-rumoured proof that
+Jehovah of the Israelites was God in heaven above as well as on the
+earth beneath. And, considering the peculiar idolatries of Canaan, it
+seems to me that no miracle could have been better placed and better
+timed--in other words, anteriorly more probable--than the command of
+obedience to the sun and to the moon. I suppose that few persons who
+read this book will be unaware, that the circumstance is alluded to as
+well in that honest heathen, old Herodotus, as in the learned Jew
+Josephus. The volumes are not near me for reference to quotations: but
+such is fact: it will be found in Herodotus, about the middle of
+Euterpe, connected with an allusion to the analogous case of Hezekiah.
+
+No miracles, on the whole (to take one after-view of the matter), could
+have been better tested: for two armies (not to mention all surrounding
+countries) must have seen it plainly and clearly: if then it had never
+occurred, what a very needless exposure of the falsity of the Jewish
+Scriptures! These were open, published writings, accessible to all:
+Cyrus and Darius and Alexander read them, and Ethiopian eunuchs;
+Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, with all other nations of the earth, had
+free access to those records. Only imagine if some recent history of
+England, Adolphus's, or Stebbing's, contained an account of a certain
+day in George the Fourth's reign having had twenty-four hour's daylight
+instead of the usual admixture; could the intolerable falsehood last a
+minute? Such a placard would be torn away from the records of the land
+the moment a rash hand had fixed it there. But, if the matter were
+fact, how could any historian neglect it?--In one sense, the very
+improbability of such a marvel being recorded, argues the probability of
+it having actually occurred.
+
+Much more might here be added: but our errand is accomplished, if any
+stumbling-block had been thus easily removed from some erring thinker's
+path. Surely, we have given him some reason for faith's due acceptance
+of Joshua's miracle.
+
+
+
+
+THE INCARNATION.
+
+
+In touching some of the probabilities of our blessed Lord's career, it
+would be difficult to introduce and illustrate the subject better, than
+by the following anecdote. Whence it is derived, has escaped my memory;
+but I have a floating notion that it is told of Socrates in Xenophon or
+Plato. At any rate, by way of giving fixity thereto and picturesqueness,
+let us here report the story as of the Athenian Solomon:
+
+Surrounded by his pupils, the great heathen Reasoner was being
+questioned and answering questions: in particular respecting the
+probability that the universal God would be revealed to his creatures.
+"What a glorious King would he appear!" said one, possibly the brilliant
+Alcibiades: "What a form of surpassing beauty!" said another, not
+unlikely the softer Crito. "Not so, my children," answered Socrates.
+"Kings and the beautiful are few, and the God, if he came on earth as an
+exemplar, would in shape and station be like the greater number."
+"Indeed, Master? then how should he fail of being made a King of men,
+for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom?" "Alas! my children," was
+pure Reason's just rejoinder, "[Greek: oi pleiones kakoi], most men are
+so wicked that they would hate his purity, despise his wisdom, and as
+for his majesty, they could not truly see it. They might indeed admire
+for a time, but thereafter (if the God allowed it), they would even hunt
+and persecute and kill him." "Kill him!" exclaimed the eager group of
+listeners; "kill Him? how should they, how could they, how dare they
+kill God?" "I did not say, kill God," would have been wise Socrates's
+reply, "for God existeth ever: but men in enmity and envy might even be
+allowed to kill that human form wherein God walked for an ensample. That
+they could, were God's humility: that they should, were their own
+malice: that they dared, were their own grievous sin and peril of
+destruction. Yea," went on the keen-eyed sage, "men would slay him by
+some disgraceful death, some lingering, open, and cruel death, even such
+as the death of slaves!"--Now slaves, when convicted of capital crime,
+were always crucified.
+
+Whatever be thought of the genuineness of the anecdote, its uses are the
+same to us. Reason might have arrived at the salient points of Christ's
+career, and at His crucifixion!
+
+I will add another topic: How should the God on earth arrive there? We
+have shown that His form would probably be such as man's; but was he to
+descend bodily from the atmosphere at the age of full-grown perfection,
+or to rise up out of the ground with earthquakes and fire, or to appear
+on a sudden in the midst of the market-place, or to come with legions of
+his heavenly host to visit his Temple? There was a wiser way than these,
+more reasonable, probable, and useful. Man required an exemplar for
+every stage of his existence up to the perfection of his frame. The
+infant, and the child, and the youth, would all desire the human-God to
+understand their eras; they would all, if generous and such as he would
+love, long to feel that He has sympathy with them in every early trial,
+as in every later grief. Moreover, the God coming down with supernatural
+glories or terrors would be a needless expense of ostentatious power.
+He, whose advent is intended for the encouragement of men to exercise
+their reason and their conscience; whose exhortation is "he that hath
+ears to hear, let him hear;" that pure Being, who is the chief preacher
+of Humility, and the great teacher of man's responsible
+condition--surely, he would hardly come in any way astoundingly
+miraculous, addressing his advent not to faith, but to sight, and
+challenging the impossibility of unbelief by a galaxy of spiritual
+wonders. Yet, if He is to come at all--and a word or two of this
+hereafter--it must be either in some such strange way; or in the usual
+human way; or in a just admixture of both. As the first is needlessly
+overwhelming to the responsible state of man, so the second is
+needlessly derogatory to the pure essence of God; and the third idea
+would seem to be most probable. Let us guess it out. Why should not this
+highest Object of faith and this lowest Subject of obedience be born,
+seemingly by human means, but really by divine? Why should there not be
+found some unspotted holy virgin, betrothed to a just man and soon to be
+his wife, who, by the creative power of Divinity, should miraculously
+conceive the shape divine, which God himself resolved to dwell in? Why
+should she not come of a lineage and family which for centuries before
+had held such expectation? Why should not the just man, her affianced,
+who had never known her yet, being warned of God in a dream of this
+strange, immaculate conception, "fear not to take unto him Mary his
+wife," lest the unbelieving world should breathe slander on her purity,
+albeit he should really know her not until after the Holy Birth. There
+is nothing unreasonable here; every step is previously credible: and
+invention's self would be puzzled to devise a better scheme. The
+Virgin-born would thus be a link between God and man, the great
+Mediator: his natures would fulfil every condition required of their
+double and their intimate conjunction. He would have arrived at humanity
+without its gross beginnings, and have veiled his Godhead for a while in
+a pure though mortal tenement. He would have participated in all the
+tenderness of woman's nature, and thus have reached the keenest
+sensibilities of men.
+
+Themes such as these are inexhaustible: and I am perpetually conscious
+of so much left unsaid, that at every section I seem to have said next
+to nothing. Nevertheless, let it go; the good seed yet shall germinate.
+"Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shall find it after many
+days."
+
+It may to some minds be a desideratum, to allude to the anterior
+probability that God should come in the flesh. Much of this has been
+anticipated under the head of Visible Deity and elsewhere; as this
+treatise is so short, one may reasonably expect every reader to take it
+in regular course. For additional considerations: the Benevolent Maker
+would hardly leave his creatures to perish, without one word of warning
+or one gleam of knowledge. The question of the Bible is considered
+further on: but exclusively of written rules and dogmas, it was likely
+that Our Father should commission chosen servants of his own, orally to
+teach and admonish; because it would be in accordance with man's
+reasonable nature, that he should best and easiest learn from the
+teaching his brethren. So then, after all lesser ambassadors had failed,
+it was to be expected that He should send the highest one of all,
+saying, "They will reverence my Son." We know that this really did occur
+by innumerable proofs, and wonderful signs posterior: and now, after the
+event, we discern it to have been anteriorly probable.
+
+It was also probable in another light. This world is a world of
+incarnations; nothing has a real and potential existence, which is not
+embodied in some form. A theory is nothing; if no personal philosopher,
+no sect, or school of learners, takes it up. An opinion is mere air;
+without the multitude to give it all the force of a mighty wind. An
+idea is mere spiritual light; if unclad in deeds, or in words written or
+spoken. So, also, of the Godhead: He would be like all these. He would
+pervade words spoken, as by prophets or preachers: He would include
+words written, as in the Bible: He would influence crowds with
+spirit-stirring sentiments: He would embody the theory of all things in
+one simple, philosophic form. As this material world is constituted, God
+could not reveal himself at all, excepting by the aid of matter. I mean;
+even granting that He spiritually inspired a prophet, still the man was
+necessary: he becomes an inspired man; not mere inspiration. So, also,
+of a book; which is the written labour of inspired men. There is no
+doing without the Humanity of God, so far as this world is concerned,
+any more than His Deity can be dispensed with, regarding the worlds
+beyond worlds, and the ages of ages, and the dread for ever and ever.
+
+
+
+
+MAHOMETANISM.
+
+
+It seems expedient that, in one or two instances, I should attempt the
+illustration of this rule of probability in matters beyond the Bible. As
+very fair ones, take Mahometanism and Romanism. And first of the former.
+
+At the commencement of the seventh century, or a little previously to
+that era, we know that a fierce religion sprang up, promulgated by a
+false prophet. I wish briefly to show that this was antecedently to have
+been expected.
+
+In a moral point of view, the Christian world, torn by all manner of
+schisms, and polluted by all sorts of heresies, had earned for the human
+race, whether accepting the gospel or refusing it, some signal and
+extensive punishment at the hands of Him, who is the Great Retributor as
+well as the Munificent Rewarder. In a physical point of view, the
+civilized kingdoms of the earth had become stagnant, arguing that
+corrupt and poisonous calm which is the herald of a coming tempest. The
+heat of a true religion had cooled down into lukewarm disputations about
+nothings, scholastical and casuistic figments; whilst at the same time
+the prevalence of peaceful doctrines had amalgamated all classes into a
+luxurious indolence. Passionate Man is not to be so satisfied; and the
+time was fully come for the rise of some fierce spirit, who should
+change the tinsel theology of the crucifix for the iron religion of the
+sword: who should blow in the ears of the slumbering West the shrill
+war-blast of Eastern fervencies; who should exchange the dull rewards of
+canonization due to penance, or an after-life voluntary humiliation
+under pseudo-saints and angels, for the human and comprehensible joys of
+animal appetite and military glory: who should enlist under his banner
+all the frantic zeal, all the pent-up licentiousness, all the
+heart-burning hatreds of mankind, stifled either by a positive
+barbarism, or the incense-laden cloud of a scarcely-masked idolatry.
+
+Thus, and then, was likely to arise a bold and self-confiding hero,
+leaning on his own sword: a man of dark sentences, who, by judiciously
+pilfering from this quarter and from that shreds of truth to jewel his
+black vestments of error, and by openly proclaiming that Oneness of the
+object of all worship which besotted Christendom had then, from undue
+reverence to saints and martyrs, virgins and archangels, well nigh
+forgotten; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as
+virtue's avenue the flower-tricked gates of vice; should thus, like
+Lucifer before him, in a comet-like career of victory, sweep the
+startled firmament of earth, and drag to his erratic orbit the stars of
+heaven from their courses.
+
+Mahomet; his humble beginnings; his iron perseverance under early
+probable checks; his blind, yet not all unsublime, dependence on
+fatality; his ruthless, yet not all undeserved, infliction of fire and
+sword upon the cowering coward race that filled the western
+world;--these, and all whatever else besides attended his train of
+triumphs, and all whatever besides has lasted among Moors, and Arabs,
+and Turks, and Asiatics, even to this our day--constitute to a thinking
+mind (and it seems not without cause) another antecedent probability.
+Let the scoffer about Mahomet's success, and the admirer of his hotchpot
+Koran; let him to whom it is a stumbling-block that error (if indeed,
+quoth he, it be more erroneous than what Christendom counts truth)
+should have had such free course and been glorified, while so-called
+Truth, _pede claudo_, has limped on even as now cautiously and
+ingloriously through the well-suspicious world; let him who thinks he
+sees in Mahomet's success an answer to the foolish argument of some, who
+test the truth of Christianity by its Gentile triumphs; let him ponder
+these things. Reason, the God of his idolatry, might, with an
+archangel's ken, have prophesied some Mahomet's career: and, so far from
+such being in the nature of any objection to Faith, the idea thus thrown
+out, well-mused upon, will be seen to lend Faith an aid in the way of
+previous likelihood.
+
+"There is one God, and Mahomet is his prophet!" How admirably calculated
+such a war-cry would be for the circumstances of the seventh century.
+The simple sublimity of Oneness, as opposed to school-theology and
+catholic demons: the glitter of barbaric pomp, instead of tame
+observances: the flashing scimetar of ambition to supersede the cross: a
+turban aigretted with jewels for the twisted wreath of thorns. As human
+nature is, and especially in that time was, nothing was more expectable
+(even if prophetic records had not taught it), than the rise and
+progress of that great False Prophet, whose waving crescent even now
+blights the third part of earth.
+
+
+
+
+ROMANISM.
+
+
+We all know how easy it is to prophesy after the event: but it would be
+uncandid and untrue to confound this remark with another, cousin-germane
+to it; to wit: how easy it is to discern of any event, after it has
+happened, whether or not it were antecedently likely. When the race is
+over, and the best horse has won (or by clever jockey-management, the
+worst), how obviously could any gentleman on the turf, now in possession
+of particulars, have seen the event to have been so probable, that he
+would have staked all upon its issue.
+
+Carry out this familiar idea; which, as human nature goes, is none the
+weaker as to illustration, because it is built upon the rule "_parvis
+componere magna_." Let us sketch a line or two of that great
+fore-shadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Romanism.
+
+That our blessed Master, even in His state as man, beheld its evil
+characteristics looming on the future, seems likely not alone from both
+His human keenness and His divine omniscience, but from here and there a
+hint dropped in his biography. Why should He, on several occasions, have
+seemed, I will say with some apparent sharpness, to have rebuked His
+virgin mother.--"Woman, what have I to do with thee?"--"Who are my
+mother and my brethren?"--"Yea--More blessed than the womb which bare
+me, and the paps that I have sucked, is the humblest of my true
+disciples." Let no one misunderstand me: full well I know the just
+explanations which palliate such passages; and the love stronger than
+death which beat in that Filial heart. But, take the phrases as they
+stand; and do they not in reason constitute some warning and some
+prophecy that men should idolize the mother? Nothing, in fact, was more
+likely than that a just human reverence to the most favoured among women
+should have increased into her admiring worship: until the humble and
+holy Mary, with the sword of human anguish at her heart, should become
+exaggerated and idealized into Mother of God--instead of Jesus's human
+matrix, Queen of heaven, instead of a ransomed soul herself, the joy of
+angels--in lieu of their lowly fellow-worshipper, and the Rapture of the
+blessed--thus dethroning the Almighty.
+
+Take a second instance: why should Peter, the most loving, most
+generous, most devoted of them all, have been singled out from among the
+twelve--with a "Get thee behind me, Satan?"--it really had a harsh
+appearance; if it were not that, prophetically speaking, and not
+personally, he was set in the same category with Judas, the "one who was
+a devil." I know the glosses, and the contexts, and the whole amount of
+it. Folios have been written, and may be written again, to disprove the
+text; but the more words, the less sense: it stands, a record graven in
+the Rock; that same Petra, whereon, as firm and faithful found, our Lord
+Jesus built his early Church: it stands, a mark indelibly burnt into
+that hand, to whom were intrusted, not more specially than to any other
+of the saintly sent, the keys of the kingdom of heaven: it stands, along
+with the same Peter's deep and terrible apostacy, a living witness
+against some future Church, who should set up this same Peter as the
+Jupiter of their Pantheon: who should positively be idolizing now an
+image christened Peter, which did duty two thousand years ago as a
+statue of Libyan Jove! But even this glaring compromise was a matter
+probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rotten Christianity.
+
+Examples such as these might well be multiplied: bear with a word or two
+more, remembering always that the half is not said which might be said
+in proof; nor in answering the heap of frivolous objections.
+
+Why, unless relics and pseudo-sacred clothes were to be prophetically
+humbled into their own mere dust and nothing-worthiness, why should the
+rude Roman soldiery have been suffered to cast lots for that vestment,
+which, if ever spiritual holiness could have been infused into mere
+matter, must indeed have remained a relic worthy of undoubted worship?
+It was warm with the Animal heat of the Man inhabited by God: it was
+half worn out in the service of His humble travels, and had even, on
+many occasions, been the road by which virtue had gone out; not of it,
+but of Him. What! was this wonderful robe to work no miracles? was it
+not to be regarded as a sort of outpost of the being who was Human-God?
+Had it no essential sacredness, no _noli-me-tangere_ quality of shining
+away the gambler's covetous glance, of withering his rude and venturous
+hand, or of poisoning, like some Nessus' shirt, the lewd ruffian who
+might soon thereafter wear it? Not in the least. This woven web, to
+which a corrupted state of feeling on religion would have raised
+cathedrals as its palaces, with singing men and singing women, and
+singing eunuchs too, to celebrate its virtues; this coarse cloth of some
+poor weaver's, working down by the sea of Galilee or in some lane of
+Zion, was still to remain, and be a mere unglorified, economical, useful
+garment. Far from testifying to its own internal mightiness, it probably
+was soon sold by the fortunate Roman die-thrower to a second-hand shop
+of the Jewish metropolis; and so descended from beggar to beggar till it
+was clean worn out. We never hear that, however easy of access so
+inestimable relic might then have been considered, any one of the
+numerous disciples, in the fervour of their earliest zeal, threw away
+one thought for its redemption. Is it not strange that no St. Helena was
+at hand to conserve such a desirable invention? Why is there no St.
+Vestment to keep in countenance a St. Sepulchre and a St. Cross? The
+poor cloth, in primitive times, really was despised. We know well enough
+what happened afterwards about handkerchiefs imbued with miraculous
+properties from holy Paul's body for the nonce: but this is an inferior
+question, and the matter was temporary; the superior case is proved, and
+besides the rule _omne majus continet in se minus_ there are differences
+quite intelligible between the cases, whereabout our time would be less
+profitably employed than in passing on and leaving them unquestioned.
+Suffice it to say, that "God worked those special miracles," and not the
+unconscious "handkerchiefs or aprons." "Te Deum laudamus!" is
+Protestantism's cry; "Sudaria laudemus!" would swell the Papal choirs.
+
+Let such considerations as these then are in sample serve to show how
+evidently one might prove from anterior circumstances, (and the canon of
+Scripture is an anterior circumstance,) the probability of the rise and
+progress of the Roman heresies. And if any one should ask, how was such
+a system more likely to arise under a Gentile rather than a Jewish
+theocracy? why was a St. Paul, or a St. Peter, or a St. Dunstan, or a
+St. Gengulphus, more previously expectable than a St. Abraham, a St.
+David, a St. Elisha, or a St. Gehazi? I answer, from the idea of
+idolatry, so adapted to the Gentile mind, and so abhorrent from the
+Jewish. Martyred Abel, however well respected, has never reached the
+honours of a niche beside the altar. Jephtha's daughter, for all her
+mourned virginity, was never paraded, (that I wot of,) for any other
+than a much-to-be-lamented damsel. Who ever asked, in those old times,
+the mediation of St. Enoch? Where were the offerings, in jewels or in
+gold, to propitiate that undoubted man of God and denizen of heaven, St.
+Moses? what prows, in wax, of vessels saved from shipwreck, hung about
+the dripping fane of Jonah? and where was, in the olden time, that
+wretched and insensate being, calling himself rational and godly, who
+had ventured to solicit the good services of Isaiah as his intercessor,
+or to plead the merits of St. Ezekiel as the make-weight for his sins?
+
+It was just this, and reasonably to have been expected; for when the Jew
+brought in his religion, he demolished every false god, broke their
+images, slew their priests, and burnt their groves with fire. But, when
+a worldly Christianity came to be in vogue, when emperors adorned their
+banners with the cross, and the poor fishermen of Galilee, (in their
+portly representatives,) came to be encrusted with gems, and rustling
+with seric silk; then was made that fatal compromise; then it was likely
+to have been made, which has lasted even until now: a compromise which,
+newly baptizing the damned idols of the heathen, keeps yet St. Bacchus
+and St. Venus, St. Mars and St. Apollo, perched in sobered robes upon
+the so-called Christian altar; which yet pays divine honours to an
+ancyle or a rusty nail; to the black stones at Delphi, or the
+gold-shrined bones at Aix; which yet sanctifies the chickens of the
+capitol, or the cock that startled Peter; which yet lets a wealthy
+sinner, by his gold, bribe the winking Pythoness, or buy dispensing
+clauses from "the Lord our God, the Pope."
+
+There is yet a swarm of other notions pressing on the mind, which tend
+to prove that Popery might have been anticipated. Take this view. The
+religion of Christ is holy, self-denying; not of this world's praise,
+and ending with the terrible sanction of eternity for good or evil: it
+sets up God alone supreme, and cuts down creature-merit to a point
+perpetually diminishing; for the longer he does well, the more he owes
+to the grace which enabled him to do it.
+
+Now, man's nature is, as we know, diametrically opposite to all this:
+and unable to escape from the conviction of Christian truth in some
+sense, he would bend his shrewd invention to the attempt of warping
+that stern truth to shapes more consistent with his idiosyncrasies. A
+religious plan might be expected, which, in lieu of a difficult, holy
+spirituality, should exact easy, mere observances; to say a thousand
+Paters with the tongue, instead of one "Our Father," from the heart; to
+exact genuflections by the score, but not a single prostration of the
+spirit; to write the cross in water on the forehead often-times, but
+never once to bear its mystic weight upon the shoulder. In spite of
+self-denial, cleverly kept in sight by means of eggs, and pulse, and
+hair-cloth, to pamper the deluded flesh with many a carnal holiday; in
+contravention of a kingdom not of this world, boldly to usurp the
+temporal dominion of it all: instead of the overwhelming
+incomprehensibility of an eternal doom, to comfort the worst with false
+assurance of a purgatory longer or shorter; that after all, vice may be
+burnt out; and who knows but that gold, buying up the prayers and
+superfluous righteousness of others, may not make the fiery ordeal an
+easy one? In lieu of a God brought near to his creatures, infinite
+purity in contact with the grossest sin, as the good Physician loveth;
+how sage it seemed to stock the immeasurable distance with intermediate
+numia, cycle on epicycle, arc on arc, priest and bishop and pope, and
+martyr, and virgin, and saint, and angel, all in their stations, at due
+interval soliciting God to be (as if His blessed Majesty were not so of
+Himself!) the sinner's friend. How comfortable this to man's sweet
+estimation of his own petty penances; how glorifying to those "filthy
+rags," his so-called righteousness: how apt to build up the hierarchist
+power; how seemingly analogous with man's experience here, where clerks
+lay the case before commissioners, and commissioners before the
+government, and the government before the sovereign.
+
+All this was entirely expectable: and I can conceive that a deep
+Reasoner among the first apostles, even without such supernal light as
+"the Spirit speaking expressly," might have so calculated on the
+probabilities to come, as to have written, long ago, words akin to
+these: "In the latter times some shall depart from the faith, giving
+heed to seductive doctrines, and fanciful notions about intermediate
+deities, ([Greek: daimonion],) perverting truth by hypocritical
+departures from it, searing conscience against its own cravings after
+spiritual holiness, forbidding marriage, (to invent another virtue,) and
+commanding abstinence from God's good gifts, as a means of building up a
+creature-merit by voluntary humiliation." At the likelihood that such
+"profane and old wives' fables" should thereafter have arisen, might
+Paul without a miracle have possibly arrived.
+
+Yet again: take another view. The Religion of Christ, though intended
+to be universal in some better era of this groaning earth, was, until
+that era cometh, meant and contrived for any thing rather than a
+Catholicity. True, the Church is so far Catholic that it numbers of its
+blessed company men of every clime and every age, from righteous Abel
+down to the last dear babe christened yester-morning; true, the
+commission is "to all nations, teaching them:" but, what mean the
+simultaneous and easily reconciled expressions--come out from among
+them, little flock, gathered out of the Gentiles, a peculiar people, a
+church militant, and not triumphant, here on earth? Thus shortly of a
+word much misinterpreted: let us now see what the Romanist does, what,
+(on human principles,) he would be probable to do, with this
+discriminating religion. He, chiefly for temporal gains, would make it
+as expansive as possible: there should be room at that table for every
+guest, whether wedding-garmented or not; there would be sauces in that
+poisonous feast, fitted to every palate. For the cold, ascetical mind, a
+cell and a scourge, and a record kept of starving fancies as calling
+them ecstatic visions vouchsafed by some old Stylite to bless his
+favoured worshipper; for the painted demirep of fashionable life, there
+would be a pretty pocket-idol, and the snug confessional well tenanted
+by a not unsympathizing father; for the pure girl, blighted in her
+heart's first love, the papist would afford that seemingly merciful
+refuge, that calm and musical and gentle place, the irrevocable nunnery;
+a place, for all its calmness, and its music, and its gentle
+reputations, soon to be abhorred of that poor child as a living tomb,
+the extinguisher of all life's aims, all its duties, uses and delights:
+for the bandit, a tythe of the traveller's gold would avail to pay away
+the murder, and earn for him a heap of merits kept within the cash-box:
+the educated, high-born and finely-moulded mind might be well amused
+with architecture, painting, carving, sweet odours, and the most
+wondrous music that has ever cheated man, even while he offers up his
+easy adorations, and departs, equally complacent at the choral remedies
+as at the priestly absolution; while, for those good few, the truly
+pious and enlightened children of Rome, who mourn the corruptions of
+their church, and explain away, with trembling tongue, her obvious
+errors and idolatries, for these the wily scheme, so probable, devised
+an undoubted mass of truth to be left among the rubbish. True doctrines,
+justly held by true martyrs and true saints, holy men of God who have
+died in that communion; ordinances and an existence which creep up,
+(heedless of corruption though,) step by step, through past antiquity,
+to the very feet of the Founder; keen casuists, competent to prove any
+point of conscience or objection, and that indisputably, for they climax
+all by the high authority of Popes and councils that cannot be deceived:
+pious treatises and manuals, verily of flaming heat, for they mingle the
+yearnings of a constrained celibacy with the fervencies of worship and
+the cravings after God. Yes, there is meat here for every human mouth;
+only that, alas for men! the meat is that which perisheth, and not
+endureth unto everlasting life. Rome, thou wert sagely schemed; and if
+Lucifer devised thee not for the various appetencies of poor,
+deceivable, Catholic Man, verily it were pity, for thou art worthy of
+his handiwork. All things to all men, in any sense but the right,
+signifies nothing to anybody: in the sense of falsehoods, take the
+former for thy motto; in that of single truth, in its intensity, the
+latter.
+
+Let not then the accident--the probable accident--of the Italian
+superstition place any hindrance in the way of one whose mind is all at
+sea because of its existence. What, O man with a soul, is all the world
+else to thee? Christianity, whatever be its broad way of pretences, is
+but in reality a narrow path: be satisfied with the day of small things,
+stagger not at the inconsistencies, conflicting words, and hateful
+strifes of those who say they are Christians, but "are not, but are of
+the synagogue of Satan." Judge truth, neither by her foes nor by her
+friends but by herself. There was one who said (and I never heard that
+any writer, from Julian to Hobbes, ever disputed his human truth or
+wisdom) "Needs must that offences come; but wo be to that man by whom
+the offence cometh. If they come, be not shaken in faith: lo, I have
+told you before. And if others fall away, or do ought else than my
+bidding, what is that to thee? follow thou ME."
+
+
+
+
+THE BIBLE.
+
+
+Whilst I attempt to show, as now I desire to do, that the Bible should
+be just the book it is, from considerations of anterior probability, I
+must expand the subject a little; dividing it, first, into the
+likelihood of a revelation at all; and secondly, into that of its
+expectable form and character.
+
+The first likelihood has its birth in the just Benevolence of our
+heavenly Father, who without dispute never leaves his rational creatures
+unaided by some sort of guiding light, some manifestation of himself so
+needful to their happiness, some sure word of consolation in sorrow, or
+of brighter hope in persecution. That it must have been thus an _a
+priori_ probability, has been all along proved by the innumerable
+pretences of the kind so constant up and down the world: no nation ever
+existed in any age or country, whose seers and wise men of whatever name
+have not been believed to hold commerce with the Godhead. We may judge
+from this, how probable it must ever have been held. The Sages of old
+Greece were sure of it from reason: and not less sure from accepted
+superstition those who reverenced the Brahmin, or the priest of
+Heliopolis, or the medicine-man among the Rocky Mountains, or the Llama
+of old Mexico. I know that our ignorance of some among the most
+brutalized species of mankind, as the Bushmen in Caffraria, and the
+tribes of New South Wales, has failed to find among their rites any
+thing akin to religion: but what may we not yet have to learn of good
+even about such poor outcasts? how shall we prove this negative? For
+aught we know, their superstitions at the heart may be as deep and as
+deceitful as in others; and, even on the contrary side, the exception
+proves the rule: the rule that every people concluded a revelation so
+likely, that they have one and all contrived it for themselves.
+
+Thus shortly of the first: and now, secondly, how should God reveal
+himself to men? In such times as those when the world was yet young, and
+the Church concentrated in a family or an individual, it would probably
+be by an immediate oral teaching; the Lord would speak with Adam; He
+would walk with Enoch; He would, in some pure ethereal garb, talk with
+Abraham, as friend to friend. And thereafter, as men grew, and
+worshippers were multiplied, He would give some favoured servant a
+commission to be His ambassador: He would say to an Ezekiel, "Go unto
+the house of Israel, and speak my words to them:" He would bid a
+Jeremiah "Take thee a roll of a book, and write therein all the words
+that I have spoken to thee:" He would give Daniel a deep vision, not to
+be interpreted for ages, "Shut up the words, and seal the book even to
+the time of the end:" He would make Moses grave His precepts in the
+rock, and Job record his trials with a pen of iron. For a family, the
+Beatic Vision was enough: for a congregated nation, as once at Sinai,
+oral proclamations: for one generation or two around the world, the zeal
+and eloquence of some great "multitude of preachers:" but, indubitably,
+if God willed to bless the universal race, and drop the honey of his
+words distilling down the hour-glass of Time from generation to
+generation even to the latter days, there was no plan more probable,
+none more feasible, than the pen of a ready writer.
+
+Further: and which concerns our argument: what were likely to be the
+characteristic marks of such a revelation? Exclusively of a pervading
+holiness, and wisdom, and sublimity, which could not be dispensed with,
+and in some sort should be worthy of the God; there would be, it was
+probable, frequent evidences of man's infirmity, corrupting all he
+toucheth. The Almighty works no miracles for little cause: one miracle
+alone need be current throughout Scripture: to wit, that which preserves
+it clean and safe from every perilous error. But, in the succession of a
+thousand scribes each copying from the other, needs must that the tired
+hand and misty eye would occasionally misplace a letter: this was no
+nodus worthy of a God's descent to dissipate by miracle.
+
+Again: the original prophets themselves were men of various characters
+and times and tribes. God addresses men through their reason; he bound
+not down a seer "with bit and bridle, like the horse that has no
+understanding"--but spoke as to a rational being--"What seest thou?"
+"Hear my words;"--"Give ear unto my speech." Was it not then likely that
+the previous mode of thought and providential education in each holy man
+of God should mingle irresistibly with his inspired teaching? Should not
+the herdsman of Tehoa plead in pastoral phrase, and the royal son of
+Amoz denounce with strong authority? Should not David whilst a shepherd
+praise God among his flocks, and when a king, cry "Give the King thy
+judgments?" The Bible is full of this human individuality; and nothing
+could be thought as humanly more probable: but we must, with this
+diversity, connect the other probability also, that which should show
+the work to be divine; which would prove (as is literally the case)
+that, in spite of all such natural variety, all such unbiassed freedom
+both of thought and speech, there pervades the whole mass a oneness, a
+marvellous consistency, which would be likely to have been designed by
+God, though little to have been dreamt by man.
+
+Once more on this full topic. Difficulties in Scripture were expectable
+for many reasons; I can only touch a few. Man is rational as he is
+responsible: God speaks to his mind and moral powers: and the mind
+rejoices, and moralities grow strong in conquest of the difficult and
+search for the mysterious. The muscles of the spiritual athlete pant for
+such exertion; and without it, they would dwindle into trepid
+imbecility. Curious man, courageous man, enterprising, shrewd, and
+vigourous man, yet has a constant enemy to dread in his own indolence:
+now, a lion in the path will wake up Sloth himself: and the very
+difficulties of religion engender perseverance.
+
+Additionally: I think there is somewhat in the consideration, that, if
+all revealed truth had been utterly simple and easy, it would have
+needed no human interpreter; no enlightened class of men, who, according
+to the spirit of their times, and the occasions of their teaching, might
+"in season and out of season preach the word, reprove, rebuke, exhort,
+with all long-suffering and doctrine." I think there existed an anterior
+probability that Scripture should be as it is, often-times difficult,
+obscure, and requiring the aid of many wise to its elucidation; because,
+without such characteristic, those many wise and good would never have
+been called for. Suppose all truth revealed as clearly and indisputably
+to the meanest intellect as a sum in addition is, where were the need or
+use of that noble Christian company who are every where man's almoners
+for charity, and God's ambassadors for peace?
+
+A word or two more, and I have done. The Bible would, as it seems to me
+probable, be a sort of double book; for the righteous, and for the
+wicked: to one class, a decoy, baited to allure all sorts of generous
+dispositions: to the other, a trap, set to catch all kinds of evil
+inclinations. In these two senses, it would address the whole family
+man: and every one should find in it something to his liking. Purity
+should there perceive green pastures and still waters, and a tender
+Shepherd for its innocent steps: and carnal appetite should here and
+there discover some darker spot, which the honesty of heaven had filled
+with memories of its chiefest servants' sins; some record of adultery or
+murder wherewith to feast his maw for condemnation. While the good man
+should find in it meat divine for every earthly need, the sneerer should
+proclaim it the very easiest manual for his jests and lewd profanities.
+The unlettered should not lack humble, nay vulgar, images and words, to
+keep himself in countenance: neither should the learned look in vain for
+reasonings; the poet for sublimities; the curious mind for mystery; nor
+the sorrowing heart for prayer. I do discern, in that great book, a
+wondrous adaptability to minds of every calibre: and it is just what
+might antecedently have been expected of a volume writ by many men at
+many different eras, yet all superintended by one master mind; of a
+volume meant for every age, and nation, and country, and tongue, and
+people; of a volume which, as a two-edged sword, wounds the good man's
+heart with deep conviction, and cuts down "the hoary head of him who
+goeth on still in his wickedness."
+
+On the whole, respecting faults, or incongruities, or objectionable
+parts in Scripture, however to have been expected, we must recollect
+that the more they are viewed, the more the blemishes fade, and are
+altered into beauties.
+
+A little child had picked up an old stone, defaced with time-stains: the
+child said the stone was dirty, covered with blotches and all colours:
+but his father brings a microscope, and shows to his astonished glance
+that what the child thought dirt, is a forest of beautiful lichens,
+fruited mosses, and strange lilliputian plants with shapely animalcules
+hiding in the leaves, and rejoicing in their tiny shadow. Every blemish,
+justly seen, had turned to be a beauty: and Nature's works are
+vindicated good, even as the Word of Grace is wise.
+
+
+
+
+HEAVEN AND HELL.
+
+
+Probably enough, the light which I expect to throw upon this important
+subject will, upon a cursory criticism, be judged fanciful, erroneous,
+and absurd; in parts, quite open to ridicule, and in all liable to the
+objection of being wise, or foolish, beyond what is written.
+Nevertheless, and as it seems to me of no small consequence to reach
+something more definite on the subject than the Anywhere or Nowhere of
+common apprehensions, I judge it not amiss to put out a few thoughts,
+fancies, if you will, but not unreasonable fancies, on the localities
+and other characteristics of what we call heaven and hell: in fact, I
+wish to show their probable realities with somewhat approaching to
+distinctness. It is manifest that these places must be somewhere; for,
+more especially of the blest estate, whither did Enoch, and Elijah, and
+our risen Lord ascend to? what became of these glorified humanities when
+"the chariot of fire carried up Elijah by a whirlwind into heaven;" and
+when "HE was taken up, and a cloud received him?" Those happy mortals
+did not waste away to intangible spiritualities, as they rose above the
+world; their bodies were not melted as they broke the bonds of
+gravitation, and pierced earth's swathing atmosphere: they went up
+somewhither; the question is where they went to. It is a question of
+great interest to us; however, among those matters which are rather
+curious than consequential; for in our own case, as we know, we that are
+redeemed are to be caught up, together with other blessed creatures, "in
+the clouds, to meet our coming Saviour in the air, and thereafter to be
+ever with the Lord." I wish to show this to be expected as in our case,
+and expectable previously to it.
+
+We have, in the book of Job, a peep at some place of congregation: some
+one, as it is likely, of the mighty globes in space, set apart as God's
+especial temple. Why not? they all are worlds; and the likelihood being
+in favour of overbalancing good, rather than of preponderating evil from
+considerations that affect God's attributes and the happiness of his
+creatures, it is probable that the great majority of these worlds are
+unfallen mansions of the blessed. Perhaps each will be a kingdom for one
+of earth's redeemed, and if so, there will at last be found fulfilled
+that prevailing superstition of our race, that each man has his star:
+without insisting upon this, we may reflect that there is no one
+universal opinion which has not its foundation in truth. Tradition may
+well have dropped the thought from Adam downwards, that the stars may
+some day be our thrones. We know their several vastness, and can guess
+their glory: verily a mighty meed for miserable services on earth, to
+find a just ambition gladdened with the rule of spheres, to which Terra
+is a point; while that same ambition is sanctified and legalized by
+ruling as vicegerent of Jehovah.
+
+Is this unlikely, or unworthy of our high vocation, our immortality, and
+nearness unto, nay communion with God? The idea is only suggested: let a
+man muse at midnight, and look up at the heavens hanging over all; let
+him see, with Rosse and Herschell, that, multiply power as you will,
+unexhausted still and inexhaustible appear the myriads of worlds
+unknown. Yea, there is space enow for infinite reward; yea, let every
+grain of sand on every shore be gathered, and more innumerable yet
+appear that galaxy of spheres. Let us think that night looks down upon
+us here, with the million eyes of heaven. And for some focus of them
+all, some spot where God himself enthroned receives the homage of all
+crowns, and the worship of all creature service, what is there
+unreasonable in suggesting for a place some such an one as is instanced
+below?
+
+I have just cut the following paragraph out of a newspaper: Is this the
+ridiculous tripping up the sublime? I think otherwise: it is honest to
+use plain terms. I speak as unto wise men--judge ye what I say. With
+respect to the fact of information, it may or it may not be true; but
+even if untrue, the idea is substantially the same, and I cannot help
+supposing that with angels and archangels and the whole company of
+heaven, such bodily saints as Enoch is, (and similar to him all risen,
+holy men will be,) meet for happy sabbaths in some glorious orb akin or
+superior to the following:
+
+"A CENTRAL SUN.--Dr. Madier, the Professor of Astronomy at Dorpat, has
+published the results of the researches pursued by him uninterruptedly
+during the last sixty years, upon the movements of the so-called fixed
+stars. These more particularly relate to the star Alcyone, (discovered
+by him,) the brightest of the seven bright stars of the group of the
+Pleiades. This star he states to be the central sun of all the systems
+of stars known to us. He gives its distance from the boundaries of our
+system at thirty-four million times the distance of the sun from our
+earth, a distance which it takes five hundred and thirty-seven years for
+light to traverse. Our sun takes one hundred and eighty-two million
+years to accomplish its course round this central body, whose mass is
+one hundred and seventeen million times larger than the sun."
+
+One hundred and seventeen million times larger than the Sun! itself, for
+all its vastness, not more than half one million times bigger than this
+earth. To some such globe we may let our fancies float, and anchor there
+our yearnings after heaven. It is a glorious thought, such as
+imagination loves; and a probable thought, that commends itself to
+reason. Behold the great eye of all our guessed creation, the focus of
+its brightness, and the fountain of its peace.
+
+A topic far less pleasant, but alike of interest to us poor men, is the
+probable home of evil; and here I may be laughed at--laugh, but listen,
+and if, listening, some reason meets thine ear, laugh at least no
+longer.
+
+We know that, for spirit's misery as for spirit's happiness, there is no
+need of place: "no matter where, for I am still the same," said one most
+miserable being. More--in the case of mere spirits, there is no need for
+any apparatus of torments, or fires, or other fearful things. But, when
+spirit is married to matter, the case is altered; needs must a place to
+prison the matter, and a corporal punishment to vex it.
+
+Nothing is unlikely here; excepting--will a man urge?--the dread
+duration of such hell. This is a parenthesis; but it shall not be
+avoided, for the import of that question is deep, and should be answered
+clearly. A man, a body and soul inmixt, body risen incorruptible, and
+soul rested from its deeds, must exist for ever. I touch not here the
+proofs--assume it. Now, if he lives for ever, and deliberately chooses
+evil, his will consenting as well as his infirmity, and conscience
+seared by persisted disobedience, what course can such a wilful,
+rational, responsible being pursue than one perpetually erratic? How
+should it not be that he gets worse and worse in morals, and more and
+more miserable in fact? and when to this we add, that such wretched
+creatures are to herd together, continually flying further away from the
+only source of Happiness and Good; and to this, that they have earned by
+sin, remorses and regrets, and positive inflictions; how probable seems
+a hell, the sinner's doom eternal. The apt mathematical analogy of lines
+thrown out of parallel, helps this for illustration: for ever and for
+ever they are stretching more remote, and infinity itself cannot reunite
+their travel.
+
+This, then, as a passing word; a sad one. Honest thinker, do not scorn
+it, for thine own soul's sake. "Now is the time of grace, now is the day
+of salvation." To return. A place of punishment exists; to what quarter
+shall we look for its anterior probability? I think there is a
+likelihood very near us. There may be one, possibly, beneath us, in the
+bowels of this fiery-bursting earth; whither went Korah and his company?
+This idea is not without its arguments, just analogies, and scriptural
+hints. But my judgment inclines towards another. This trial-world, we
+know, is to be purified and restored, and made a new earth: it was even
+to be expected that Redemption should do this, and I like not to imagine
+it the crust and case of hell, but rather, as thus: At the birth of this
+same world, there was struck off from its burning mass at a tangent, a
+mournful satellite, to be the home of its immortal evil; the convict
+shore for exiled sin and misery; a satellite of strange differences, as
+guessed by Virgil in his musings upon Tartarus, where half the orb is,
+from natural necessities, blistered up by constant heats, the other half
+frozen by perennial cold. A land of caverns, and volcanoes, miles deep,
+miles high; with no water, no perceptible air: imagine such a dreadful
+world, with neither air nor water! incapable of feeding life like ours,
+but competent to be a place where undying wretchedness may struggle for
+ever. A melancholy orb, the queen of night, chief nucleus of all the
+dark idolatries of earth; the Moon, Isis, Hecate, Ashtaroth, Diana of
+the Ephesians!
+
+This expression of a thought by no means improbable, gives an easy
+chance to shallow punsters; but ridicule is no weapon against reason.
+Why should not the case be so? Why should not Earth's own satellite,
+void, as yet, be on the resurrection of all flesh, the raft whereon to
+float away Earth's evil? Read of it astronomically; think of it as
+connected with idols; regard it as the ruler of earth's night; consider
+that the place of a Gehenna must be somewhere; and what is there in my
+fancy quite improbable? I do not dogmatize as that the fact is so, but
+only suggest a definite place at least as likely as any other hitherto
+suggested. Think how that awful, melancholy eye looks down on deeds of
+darkness how many midnight crimes, murders, thefts, adulteries, and
+witchcrafts, that would have shrunk into nonentity from open, honest
+day, have paled the conscious Moon! Add to all this, it is the only
+world, besides our own, whereof astronomers can tell us, It is fallen.
+
+
+
+
+AN OFFER.
+
+
+Nothing were easier than to have made this book a long one; but that was
+not the writer's object: as well because of the musty Greek proverb
+about long books; which in every time and country are sure never to be
+read through by one in a thousand; as because it is always wiser to
+suggest than to exhaust a topic; which may be as "a fruit-tree yielding
+fruit after its kind whose seed is in itself." The writer then intended
+only to touch upon a few salient points, and not to discuss every
+question, however they might crowd upon his mind: time and space alike
+with mental capabilities forbade an effort so gigantic: added to which,
+such a course seemed to be unnecessary, as the rule of probability, thus
+illustrated, might be applied by others in every similar instance.
+Still, as the errand of this book is usefulness, and its author's hope
+is, under Heaven, to do good, one personal hint shall here be thrown
+upon the highway. Without arrogating to myself the wisdom or the
+knowledge to solve one in twenty of the doubts possible to be
+propounded; without also designing even to attempt such solutions,
+unless well assured of the genuine anxiety of the doubter; and
+preliminarizing the consideration, that a fitting diffidence in the
+advocate's own powers is no reason why he should not make wide efforts
+in his holy cause; that, such reasonable essays to do good have no sort
+of brotherhood with a fanatical Spiritual Quixotism; and that, to my own
+apprehensions, the doubts of a rationalizing mind are in the nature of
+honourable foes, to be treated with delicacy, reverence, and kindness,
+rather than with a cold distance and an ill-concealed contempt;
+preliminarizing, lastly, the thought--"Who is sufficient for these
+things?"--I nevertheless thus offer, according to the grace and power
+given to me, my best but humble efforts so far to dissipate the doubts
+of some respecting any scriptural fact, as may lie within the province
+of showing or attempting to show its previous credibility. This is not a
+challenge to the curious casuist or the sneering infidel; but an
+invitation to the honest mind harassed by unanswered queries: no
+gauntlet thrown down, but a brother's hand stretched out. Such
+questions, if put to the writer, through his publisher by letter, may
+find their reply in a future edition: supposing, that is to say, that
+they deserve an answer, whether as regards their own merits or the
+temper of the mind who doubts; and supposing also that the writer has
+the power and means to answer them discreetly. It is only a fair rule of
+philanthropy (and that without arrogating any unusual "strength") to
+"bear the infirmities of the weak, and not to please ourselves:" and
+nothing would to me give greater happiness than to be able, as I am
+willing, to remove any difficulties lying in the track of Faith before a
+generous mind. I hang out no glistening holly-bush a-flame with its
+ostentatious berries as promising good wine; but rather over my portal
+is the humbler and hospitable mistletoe, assuring every wearied pilgrim
+in the way, that though scanty be the fare, he shall find a hearty
+welcome.
+
+
+
+
+CONCLUSION.
+
+
+I have thus endeavoured (with solicited help of Heaven) to place before
+the world anew a few old truths: truths inestimably precious. Remember,
+they cannot have lost by any such advocacy as is contained in the idea
+of their being shown antecedently probable; for this idea affects not at
+all the fact of their existence; the thing is; whether probable or not;
+there is, in esse, an ornithorhyncus; its posse is drowned in esse:
+there exists no doubt of it: evidence, whether of senses physical, or of
+considerations moral, puts the circumstance beyond the sphere of
+disputation. But such truths as we have spoken of do, nevertheless, gain
+something as to--not their merits, these are all their own
+substantially; nor their positive proofs, these are adjectives properly
+attendant on them, but as to--their acceptability among the incredulous
+of men; they gain, I say, even by such poor pleading as mine, from being
+shown anteriorly probable. Take an illustration in the case of that
+strange and anomalous creature mentioned just above. Its habitat is in a
+land where plums grow with the stones outside, where aboriginal dogs
+have never been heard to bark, where birds are found covered with hair,
+and where mammals jump about like frogs! If these are shown to be
+literal facts, the mind is thereby well prepared for any animal
+monstrosity: and it staggers not in unbelief (on evidence of honest
+travellers) even when informed of a creature with a duck's bill and a
+beaver's body: it really amounted in Australia to an antecedent
+probability.
+
+Carry this out to matters not a quarter so incredible, ye thinkers, ye
+free-thinkers; neither be abashed at being named as thinking freely:
+were not those Bereans more noble in that they searched to see? For my
+humble part, I do commend you for it: treacherous is the hand that roots
+up the inalienable right of private judgment; the foundation-stone of
+Protestantism, the great prerogative of reason, the key-note of
+conscience, the sole vindex of a man's responsibility: evil and false is
+the so-called reverential wisdom which lays down in place of the truth
+that each man's conscience is a law unto himself, the tyranny of other
+men's authority. Cheap and easy and perilled is the faith, which clings
+to the skirt of others; which leans upon the broken staff of
+priestcraft, until those poisoned splinters pierce the hand.
+
+Prove all things; holding fast that which is good: good to thine own
+reasonable conscience, if unwarped by casuistries, and unblinded by
+licentiousness. Prove all things, if you can, "from the egg to the
+apple:" he is a poor builder of his creed, who takes one brick on
+credit. Be able, as you can be, (if only you are willing so far to be
+wisely inconsistent, as to bend the stubborn knee betimes, and though
+with feeble glance to look to heaven, and though with stammering tongue
+to pray for aid,) be able, as it is thy right, O man of God--to give a
+Reason for the faith that is in thee.
+
+
+                             THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Probabilities, by Martin Farquhar Tupper
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