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He assures the priests that he looks upon their misery with compassion; deprived by their system of home, family, country, and heart-insulated and miserable beings, rendered so, that advantage may be taken both of their abject slavery for some purposes, and their restless activity for other purposes-machines put in motion by others, "to serve a dead system, none but dead men are wanted wandering and troubled spirits, withwanted+wandering out a sepulchre and without repose.'

"I have never been insensible either to the humiliation of the Church, or to the sufferings of the priest. I have them all present, both before my imagination and in my heart. I have followed this unfortunate man in the career of privations, and in the miserable life into which he is dragged by the hand of an hypocritical authority. And in his loneliness, on his cold and melancholy hearth, where he sometimes weeps at night, let him remember that a man has often wept with him, and that I am that man."

The priest is shown to be the victim of social contradictions : he is under two laws-the one that of the Church, forbidding him to be a man; the other that of the State, punishing him when he acts otherwise than as a man. "They will and they will not have him obey nature. The canon law says-No;' the civil law says 'Yes.'" Agree together, then, Ŏ laws! and let the priests be able to find authority somewhere. And let us know to which of the two the priest is amenable.

Youth and age, again, in the same priesthood-expected both alike to undergo the same privations, practice the same duties, and give the same counsel-presents another contradiction. Most of the priestly requirements can only reasonably be expected in those of mature age, as the very name presbyter or elder originally indicated :

"The priest, in the highest acceptation of the term, ought to be an old man, who, having passed through the cares of this world, and being well acquainted with family life, has been taught by his experience to understand the sense of the great family of the universe. Seated among the old men, like the elders of Israel, he would communicate to the young the treasures of his experience; he would be the man for all parties; the man who belongs to the poor, the conciliating umpire" to prevent law suits, and the physician of health to prevent diseases. To be all that, something more is required than an excitable, hotheaded young man. It ought to be a man who has seen, learned, and suffered much, and who has at last found, in his own heart, the kind words which may comfort us on our way to the world to come." tumm

W, E. Painter, Church and State Gazette Office, 342, Strand,

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: anoitoibertos Isions to autoiv sit od of arode er teging odT Ant. La Lectures on the Deluge, and the World after the Flood. By the Rev. CHARLES BURTON, LL.D., F.L.S., &c. JOAuthor of Lectures on the World before the Flood." Lonlivdon Hamilton and Adams. 1845. odt tel bon !ewal O 19di 79115907 59′′ h .97 2762 wil wonten toi bηA .9rodyomoz zihoitus bait of olds od 2129ing THIS volume is a sequel to that which we noticed in our last number; and we wish to follow up the observations which were then made with with some still more precise and specific on o othe present occasion.tops, etc-loog, once et evig bas

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The time, we think, is come when all friends of religion, and all who are anxious for the advancement of true science, should make a stand, and resist that scepticism which, under the mask, or rather the pretence of science, endangers our faith, and that combination of empiricism and dogmatism which threatens the subversion of all right principles of science in geology; the time is come, because scepticism and empiricism have now, reached a height which provokes resistance the time is comes because facts are being brought to light, in the face of which ther former position of the geologists will become no longer tenables and we wish to show that the ground on which they have been standing is rotten to the very foundation that they may now abandon it altogether and not cling to it still, or attempt to repair its breaches, since, sooner or later, the whole structure must fall, and involve those who continue to defend it in the same unhappy catastrophe.

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We have not the most remote idea of imputing conscious infidelity to the great majority of those that are misled by the

VOL. XVIII.-$

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geological theories. And who would think of imputing it even to the founders of those theories? Who would be guilty of such an imputation against Buckland or Sedgwick ?-and who would be believed in imputing it to such advocates of those theories as Dr. Wiseman or Dr. Pye Smith? Yet, that the tendency of these theories is towards infidelity we do not in the least doubt; and we believe that it is an inconsistency with the theory, which has been produced and continued by their better feelings, that saves even such men as these from infidelity; and we hope to entitle ourselves to the lasting gratitude of these good men by pointing out the fallacies of the system on the one hand, and the evil consequences on the other, when such a system is followed out consistently; even though we may not be able to supply the place of the system we reject by any other more worthy of science and of Christianity. We are not bound to provide a substitute for every theory which proves erroneous: men can live very well without theory: the time may not be come for arriving at the truth, and it is incumbent upon us to wait for that which is really true-that which will bear examination and stand every test.

The doubting and questioning spirit which is raised by these theories is not limited to the range of geology, but affects all things; and that not merely by inference, or parity of reasoning, but immediately and directly. For if these doubts are entertained we cannot be sure of a single fact that is past concerning ourselves, or concerning the things around us all except the mere present we have received from others, or know by revelation and hold in faith, out of which faith we may be shaken if these questions are seriously entertained. For if we can forget the alterations which have taken place in the course of time in horses and dogs, and other domesticated animals-if we look upon the different races of men only as they now appear those as sertions, which we hear from geologists, concerning extinct animals, would, in like manner, apply to the human race, and we might be tempted to deny the possibility of regarding all mankind as one species. The races of men differ as much from each other as do many of the fossil remains from their present living analogues; but shall we, therefore, deny that the Negro, and Calmuc, and Esquimaux, and North American-together with Jews, Greeks, and Romans-are derivable from a single pair? What would then become of the doctrine of the Fall?

of the death brought in by one?of the recovery by One? -what of Christianity itself? Or shall we admit that no traces of the Deluge are to be found? What, then, becomes of the veracity of Scripture, or of the inspiration of those apostles who

spake of it as the parallel of baptism? Yea, what confidence can we repose in the words of Christ himself?-who continually referred to the Deluge as a warning to his disciples, and a type of that judgment which should surprise the wicked. And where is the force of the solemn asseveration of Jehovah, that once he had brought that flood upon the earth, and only once, and that never while the earth existed would he bring upon it such a flood again?

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Paley works out well the absurdity of ascribing to chance the origin and construction of a watch, which a man might find on a moor, since design appears in the watch, and this refers its origin to an intelligent being. In asserting that a pebble which lay beside the watch came there by chance, or had lain there from all eternity, no absurdity appears, unless in the pebble also we see marks of design. He uses the watch but as an illustration of the living mechanism which appears in the bodies of all the animals, and pre-eminently in the body of man, to infer so much the more confidently that the uniformity and perfection of design, pervading all this living machinery, necessitates the belief in au all-wise, all-powerful Being-that is, necessitates a belief in God. But suppose the main-spring broken-suppose only a wheel of the watch to remain, and suppose the animals to be dead, and that the outward forms alone remain-the argument remains precisely the same; design is manifested in the single wheel, and in the dead animal. And if, in looking more narrowly at the pebble, we find in it well-known marks of some organic form, though it be but the flinty cast of an echinus, it then becomes as absurd to ascribe the origin of this pebble to chance as the living creature of which it retains the form.

To a man who knew what a watch was, the finding of a single wheel would be just as conclusive evidence of design, and as full proof that the thing had its beginning from another, and that one higher than itself, and that it was meant to act upon other bodies for purposes beyond what it alone could manifest, as though the perfect watch had been found where the wheel lay. So the pebble, if it make part of a system, or bear the forms of creatures which once lived and held a place in a system, can no longer be regarded as a kind of random product, to be consigned to the regions of chance, but must be regarded as a witness for order, and evidence of intelligent purpose-just as in the instance of a watch-wheel, or the organized being whose form alone has been preserved in the flinty cast.

And turning from the single pebble to those vast mountain masses which swell above the surface of the earth, but are only uprising continuations of the same materials which constitute

the valleys and the plains, and in those situations underlie the looser particles of the surface-these all become, just in proportion as we discover in them any order or law, so many evidences of intelligent creation-so many refutations of the doctrine of chance. When any plan, any order, or any signs of past organization appear, it is an impeachment of our consistency and wisdom to find us ascribing such appearances to accident or chance we may not be able at once to discover THE plan, but that there is A plan we may rest assured.

A savage, finding the wheel of a watch lying beside a nummulite and a fragment of pyrites, might possibly confound the wheel with a nummulite from the form, or with pyrites from the metallic appearance. It is the prerogative of science to dissipate all such vulgar errors, and to distinguish things that differ. The labourers in our quarries carry home echini and similar fossils as playthings for their chidren, who call them fairy loaves: it is the privilege of the naturalist to assign them their true place in a system. The erection of such buildings as Stonehenge is attributed by the vulgar to a race of giants, because powers are evinced therein which lie beyond and above their capacity of comprehension. But who, even among the vulgar, ever thought of ascribing such a structure as Stonehenge to a volcano or an earthquake? As reasonably might we assign such an origin to Salisbury Cathedral or Windsor Castle! Stonehenge and the cathedral differ from each other only in our being ignorant of the uses of the former, while the latter is still in use, as belonging to that state of things which at present subsists. The cathedral was built for the system to which we belong : Stonehenge was constructed for another system-this is all the difference. The world was then in other circumstances: Stonehenge was as suitable to what was then required as the cathedral is to what is required now.

The geologists of the present day are, quite unconsciously, taking precisely the same ground in this science which the opponents of Gallileo took in astronomy: namely, setting the vulgar evidence of the senses against the deductions of more accurate and more enlarged observation, and relying upon the appearances of things as they first present themselves to a superficial observer, instead of patiently waiting until principles can be established which may become universal laws, being based on all the known facts, and agreeing with all the recorded phenomena. The opponents of Gallileo said, the sun moves round the earth we see that it does so; all mankind are agreed in this; it is a fact resting on common sense; we must doubt the evidence of our senses in everything if we doubt it in this. And

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