requisitions and sanctions of His law, would find an early place in it; and, whereas in the atonement made known by a professed Revelation there is a remedy proposed, it were most natural to pass onward to the claims and credentials of this professed embassy from Heaven-thence, under the promptings of a desire for relief, from the consideration of our danger to the consideration of the refuge opened up for us in the Gospelthence to the new life required of all its disciples

thence to the promised aids of a strength and grace from on high, for the fulfilment of our due obedience thence to the issues of our repentance and faith in a deathless eternity-thence, finally, and after the settlement of all that was practical and pressing, to the solution of difficulties which are grappled with at the outset of the former scheme of Theology; but which in the latter scheme would be postponed for their more scientific treatment to that stage, when, leaving the first principles of their discipleship, the aspirants after larger views and more recondite mysteries go on unto perfection.

By the former method Theology is capable of being presented more in the form or aspect of a regular science, with the orderly descent and derivation of its propositions from the highest principles to which we can ascend; but when the

departure is made from the primeval designs of the Godhead, or the profound mysteries of his nature -this gives more of a transcendental, but more at the same time of a presumptuous and a priori character, to the whole contemplation. The second method, by which departure is made from the suggestions and the fears of human conscience, has the recommendation of being more practical and, if not in the order of exposition, is more at least in the order of discovery. Even Natural Theology, taken by itself, is susceptible of both these treatments; and may be either studied as the Theology of academic demonstration, or traced to its outgoings as the Theology of Consciencefrom the first stirrings of human feelings or human fancy on the question of a God, to the fullest discoveries that can be made by the light of Nature whether of His existence or His character or His ways. In the following treatise we do not rigorously adhere to any of these methods though we hold it incumbent upon us, to clear away the injurious metaphysics, in which certain disciples of the first school have, even in their earliest, their initial lessons on the subject, shrouded the science of Theology; and we have also endeavoured to show what those incipient, those rudimental tendencies of the human spirit are, under the guidance of which the disciples of the second school are carried

onward in the path of inquiry. In the execution of these tasks we have occupied the first Book, having the title of Preliminary Views; and would now bespeak the indulgence of our readers for what some might deem the superfluous illustration of its two first, and others might feel to be the hopeless and impracticable obscurity of its two succeeding chapters. The latter complaint should be laid, we think, not on the Author, but on the necessities of his subject. To the former however he must plead guilty; for, even though at the expense of nauseating those of quick and powerful understanding; and whose taste is more for the profound than the palpable, however important the truth inculcated may be and however desirable to have the luminous conception and intense feeling of it he should rejoice to be the instrument, and more particularly at the outset of their religious earnestness, of giving the most plain and intelligible notices of their way even unto babes.

We shall not be so liable to either of these extremes in the subsequent Books of which this treatise is composed and the perusal of which indeed might be immediately entered on, although the first or preliminary Book were to receive the treatment that is often given to a long and wearisome preface, that is, passed over altogether. We must confess however our desire for the judgment

of the more profound class of readers on the fourth chapter in this department of the work, and which treats of a peculiar argument by Hume on the side of Atheism. The truth is that we do not conceive the infidelity of this philosopher to have been adequately met, by any of his opponents; whether as it respects the question of a God or the question of the truth of Christianity. In the management of both controversies, it has been thought necessary to conjure up a new principle for the purpose of refuting his especial sophistries; and thus to make two gratuitous, and we think very questionable additions, to the mental philosophy in the shape of two distinct and original laws of the human understanding, which, anterior to the date of his speculations, never had been heard of; and probably never would, but for the service which they were imagined to render in the battles of the faith. We hold ourselves independent of both these auxiliaries; and it is our attempt to show on the premises of the author himself, or at least with the help of no other principles than the universal and uniform faith of men in the lessons of experience, now of his atheistical, and afterwards of his deistical argument-the one grounded on the alleged singularity of the world as an effect, the other grounded on the alleged incompetency of human testimony to accredit the truth of a miracle

we hope to show that there is a distinct fallacy in each, and at the same time a contradiction between the fallacies in itself destructive of both; and which must either have escaped the penetration, or been concealed by the art of this most subtle metaphysician and reasoner.

After having disposed in the first Book of all that is of a prefatory or general character, we in the second Book enter on the consideration of proofs for the being of a God in the dispositions of matter. The third Book is occupied with proofs, not for the being only, but for the being and character of God as displayed in the constitution of the mind-from which department it has been strangely affirmed of late, that little or no evidence has yet been collected for the defence or illustration of Natural Theology. The object of the fourth Book, is to exhibit additional evidence for a God in the adaptation of External Nature to the Mental Constitution of Man. And in the fifth, which is the last Book, we endeavour to estimate the amount as well as the dimness and deficiency of the light of nature in respect to its power of discovering either the character or still less the counsels and the ways of God. In this concluding part of the treatise, beside recording the efforts which Philosophy has made, and to what degree she has failed in resolving that most tremendous and appalling of all mysteries, the Origin of Evil, we attempt to