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certainty,' that he understood nothing of the kind. We are far from asserting that inspired authors had necessarily any peculiar insight into the laws of nature; but, at the same time, it is most true that, even under the influence of poetry or enthusiasm, men rise above themselves, and enunciate daring conceptions, which nothing appears at the time to warrant to ordinary minds, but which the progress of science fully justifies. Why less should be attributed to the effusions of men moved by the Holy Ghost, it would be hard for our author to show.

However, this may pass. The author of the essay leaves his criticisms on the astral theology of the royal Hebrew, and proceeds to raise, or, as he would say, to state, a difficulty propounded in the form of an objection to religion. We should imagine that there are very few people now-a-days who would base an objection to revealed truth on the assumption, that other worlds besides our own are inhabited. Such an objector it has never been our misfortune to meet, either in person or in print. However, it seems that Dr. Chalmers considered such a fault-finder as representing a class not unworthy of refutation.

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'He supposes an objector to take his stand upon the multiplicity of worlds, assumed or granted as true; and to argue that, since there are so many worlds beside this, all alike claiming the care, the government, the goodness, the interposition, of the Creator, it is in the highest degree extravagant and absurd, to suppose that he has done, for this world, that which religion, both natural and revealed, represents Him as having done, and as doing.

* * If religion requires us to assume, that one particular corner of the universe has been thus singled out, and made an exception to the general rules by which all other parts of the universe are governed; she makes, it may be said, a demand upon our credulity, which cannot fail to be rejected by those who are in the habit of contemplating and admiring those general laws. Can the earth be thus the centre of the moral and religious universe, when it has been shown to have no claim to be the centre of the physical universe? Is it not as absurd to maintain this, as it would be to hold, at the present day, the old Ptolemaic hypothesis, which places the earth in the centre of the heavenly motions, instead of the newer Copernican doctrine, which teaches that the earth revolves around the sun? Is not religion disproved, by the necessity under which she lies of making such an assumption as this?'

Now the obvious answer to the fancied objector-this man of straw whom Dr. Chalmers erected to knock down, and whom the essayist sets on his legs again, in order that he may have

1 We believe that there have been such; Tom Paine and, it is said, Horace Walpole raised the difficulty. And there may be some few pious and humble minds by whom it is really felt as one. That it should be a formidable one to any can only arise from a confusion of thought, and a forgetfulness that no guess, however probable it might appear to reason, can be a legitimate stumbling-block to Faith. Nothing but mental infirmity will find scruples in a probability, in which, if a revealed certainty, the mind would humbly acquiesce.

a bout with him-lies in a brief compass. In the first place, the assumption is not that of religion, but entirely that of the objector. If the multiplicity of worlds leads him into difficulties, let him remember that that doctrine, however probable, is only an assumption when used as the basis for an argument. In the next place, we may freely admit that such a further assumption,' as is here imputed to religion, would be absurd, and is not one which religion requires us to assume.' It might be added, by way of retort, that there are religious considerations, as we have before suggested, which seem rather to discountenance than to support the notion, that the earth is the centre of the moral and religious universe.'

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But, instead of proceeding in any such fashion, the author of the essay deals with the objectors very much as ill-natured people say we have been dealing with our Russian foes. One would think this imaginary sceptic was a friend of forty years' standing!' Perhaps, however, we shall make our reasonings and speculations apply to a wider class of readers, if we consider the view now spoken of, not as an objection, urged by an opponent of religion, but rather,' as a difficulty, felt by a friend of religion.' And then, like a fighter who has shaken hands with his antagonist on entering the lists, he proceeds to contest the difficulty. But how? In the following chapter, by alleging an argument which, so far forth as it is an argument, can only strengthen it; and in the rest of an elaborate, learned, but ill-arranged essay, by advancing various considerations and many arbitrary speculations, with the single purpose of cutting away from the objector the ground on which he built his objection; the position, assumed or granted as true,' of the existence of a multiplicity of worlds.

In all this there is a marvellous confusion of purpose and design-not to say a generally deficient apprehension of the subject-matter. Or the plurality of worlds, this essay does indeed dispute, albeit in a roundabout manner. But the introduction of Chalmers, and the imaginary sceptic, and the 'friend to religion,' is ovdèv πρòs Aióvνoov. It is worse, for it is not simply otiose; it embarrasses and perplexes the argument. We have to complain, then, not merely of a careless arrangement and inelegant style, but, (1.) That the objection proposed is non-existent or unimportant. (2.) That the objection is not summarily disposed of, as it obviously might be, by the plea that it is based on an assumption- the multiplicity of worlds, assumed or granted as true." (3.) Nor yet is it met by showing that such assumption is perfectly consistent with religious

The punctuation, we take leave to observe, is not our own.

truth. (4.) But it is transmogrified from an inimical objection into a friendly difficulty.' (5.) And it is met by adducing microscopical researches, which do but enhance it. (6.) And it is made the ground for a dissertation on a perfectly distinct, though deeply interesting question, whether the assumption be probably correct.

Truly a most clumsy and confused way of entering upon what is really the subject-matter of the book! As clumsy as the following sentences, and as confused as the ideas which induced their writer to embody identical propositions in so Of course,' says our author, <laborate and unwieldy a form. nt the close of his chapter on the objection. Of course it is natural that the views which are used by unbelievers as arguments against religious belief, should create difficulties and troubles in the minds of believers; at least, till the argument is rebutted. And, of course, also, the answers to the arguments, considered as infidel arguments, would operate to remove the difficulties which believers entertain on such grounds.' Of course!!

We have asserted that the answer which the microscope is This supposed to furnish to the difliculty, is no answer at all. point deserves some elucidation.

Among the thoughts, which, it was stated, might naturally arise in won's minds, when the telescope revealed to them an innumerable multiToide of worlds, was this That the Governor of the Universe, who has so Yany worlds under His management, cannot be conceived as bestowing pon this earth, and the various tribes of mhabitants, that care which, till Chion, natural religion had taught men that He does employ, to secure to wan the possession and use of his tacalces of mind and body; and to all *imals, the requisites of animal existence and animal enjoyment. And vepon this, Chaliners remarks, that rust about the time when science gave *is to the anggestion of this diFoala, ste d'so gue occasion to a The telescope drought inte view worlds the microthe ocean. emarkable reply to it * ***..................u as the drops of water which make weupe brought into view a world in almost every drop of water. Infinity *** one direction was balanced by peñarty n the her

It would surely be a very poor way of explaining to a learner Ivis difficulty in conceiving how the branch of a parabola above the axis can be constantly bending towards it, yet ever receding from it, and that to an indefinite distance, if you told him that

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the same thing occurs in the branch below the axis, and that infinity in one direction is balanced by infinity in the other.' The obvious deduction from the revelations of the microscope is this; that there is no such mean limit as man has been accustomed to place to his Creator's power and providence; that what is ever more and more discovered in miniature may very probably have its counterpart in giant forms; that the discovery of new worlds close to us, renders nugatory any à priori objections against the existence of new worlds at vast distances from us; and that among the foolish thoughts which might naturally arise in men's minds,' the above-stated was one of the most foolish. Such would be the conclusion deduced by a man free from the alleged difficulty. But to a man who sincerely felt it, the discovery of microscopic worlds could only enhance and multiply it; in proportion as 'fresh worlds' were brought under the management of the Governor of the Universe to interfere with that care which, till then, natural religion, &c.' Yet our author concludes, The discovery of 'new worlds at vast distances from us, was accompanied by the discovery of new worlds close to us; and was thus rendered 'ineffective to disturb the belief of those who had regarded the world as having God for its Governor. This is a striking ' reflexion.'

Chiefly so from its extremely illogical conclusion. Wherefore we cannot but wish, for the credit of our writer, and the comfort and clearness of thought of his readers, that he had proceeded to his real subject without all this verbose introduction on astronomical discoveries, astronomical objections, and microscopical answers; more especially as the difficulty he raises has, after all, no great force. For, as he himself concludes, in a sentence whereof the readers will (in obedience to the old rule) count one at each comma: 'It is not likely that any one, who ' had formed his conceptions of the Divine Mind from its manifestations in the production and sustentation of animal, as well as vegetable life, on this earth, would have his belief in the operation of such a mind, shaken, by any necessity which might be impressed, upon him, of granting the existence of 'animal life on other planets, as well as on the earth, or even on innumerable such planets, and on innumerable systems of planets and worlds, system above system.'

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Yes, here we are at last; brought, no doubt, to the right result, though by a most crooked path, and at last by floundering through a perfect shingle of commas! What is our consternation on turning the page to meet with a 'further statement of the difficulty! We shall not weary our readers with any lengthy disquisition of this extraordinary chapter.

Starting with a grotesque and clumsy hypothesis that we 'were to see, on the face of the full moon, a figure gradually becoming visible, representing a right-angled triangle, with a square constructed on each of its three sides as a base,'-as if, even on the supposition of there being human beings in the moon, it were not pre-eminently absurd to imagine that their selenometry must be at all analogous to our geometry,―or that if they hare Euclids with I. xlvii. all complete, that proposition must needs claim for them the admiration which we concede it; -the writer on the plurality of worlds discusses, in a rambling sort of a way, the general theory and conditions of intellectual progress. Advance is shown to be a necessary attribute of mental and moral existences. And all this in order to dilate on the self-evident proposition that: Even if there be intelligent ' inhabitants in the moon, or in the planets, it does not follow 'that they have any sympathy with us, or any community of 'knowledge:' a proposition which, so far from seeming to us to discredit the theory of a plurality of worlds, is, on the contrary, one of the most probable features in it. If science told us nothing of other spheres, how eminently unphilosophical would be the assumption that their tenants were modelled, physically or intellectually, upon one type! How does every branch of positive science demonstrate that such a conjecture would be not only unsafe, but improbable. It may be hard to imagine to ourselves the forms and qualities of moral and intellectual creatures distinct from mankind; but it would have been equally hard for angels, or other beings, to conceive of man before the Creator had modelled him, after His own image, and not upon any external type. It is necessarily impossible to picture to ourselves any object upon which none of our natural senses can be brought to bear; because, as Victor Cousin has so admirably shown, in his critique on Locke's Philosophy, the mind possesses its latent ideas all undeveloped and unexpressed until the operation of sensible impressions fertilises the womb. of thought; and calls out into actuality and activity the ideas which lay dormant there. Hence the difficulty of imagining to oneself, or explaining to others, any object of mere abstract thought. The terms we use, when we employ language for the purpose, are all borrowed from the domain of sense; and thus

1 This strange and monstrous conception is, we believe, due to the originality of the gallant and eccentric Col. Thompson. He proposed to carve the figures above-described, in gigantic proportions upon Salisbury Plain, in the hope to elicit a response from the dwellers in the moon.

2 Of course the established relations of space are absolutely true everywhere, in the moon as well as in the earth. But her mathematical appliances may as far transcend our geometry and trigonometry, as these do the old arts of the Nilometricians [not however that we think it even probable the moon is a peopled world.]