it was difficult to collect his real meaning from them.* But it is due to him to remark, that he dared not express what he knew. It was, indeed, the highest crime at Athens at that time to do so. Their laws and polity, and domestic habits, were all founded on paganism, as well as their religion. It was on such a charge that Socrates perished.‡ Yet Plato had ideas which he has expressed, that are inconsistent with that rational creation which the Scriptures reveal to us. He makes the fixed stars divine animals, and the earth the first generated Deity, and inculcates a belief in the accounts of the ancients, manifestly alluding to those which Hesiod put into his hexameter verses. Whether he believed or not in all he wrote, still it went to the world as from his pen, and partook of the influence which his works obtained.]]

* Cicero remarks, in the first book of his Academics, that in Plato's works many things are said on both sides of his questions. Every thing is doubted, and nothing ever affirmed. This must always be the case in whatever relates to the Deity, without the regulating aid of revelation.

↑ He mentions in his Timæus, that to discover the Artificer and Father of the universe is indeed difficult, and, when found, it is impossible to reveal him through the ministry of discourse to all men.-P. 456. Cicero has inserted this sentiment in his Universitate.

Xenophon gives us the accusation of Melitus, that Socrates did not acknowledge the gods, whom the republic worshipped, and introduced new ones.-ATо. p. 1.-Plato has preserved a part of the dialogue on the trial.

"Soc. I am myself persuaded that there are gods; I am not at all an atheist.

"Mel. I assert that you do not acknowlege the gods.

"Soc. You are a strange man, Melitus, to say this. Do I not believe as other men do, that the sun and moon are gods?

"Mel. By Jupiter, O judges! he declares that the sun is a stone, and the moon an earth!

"Soc. These were the opinions of Anaxagoras; but have I taught youth so can you think I believe no God?

"Mel. In none. By all that is sacred, not in one."-Plato, Aπoλ. 9. They were obviously here alluding to different things; Melitus to the established divinities; Socrates to his purer theism; and yet his last words were, as stated by Plato, "O Crito! we owe a cock to Esculapius. Render this, and do not forget it."-"This shall be done," answered Crito; "do you wish any thing else?" But the dying sage spoke no more.-Plat. Phed. c. 49.

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

Thus, "it is necessary in this case to believe in ancient men, who,

What was rational in the ideas of Socrates on this grand subject, did not descend, in their truth and simplicity, to the schools and philosophers who were formed from him; but was so spoiled and nullified by the heterogeneous matter which was mingled with it, that it made no impression on the general mind. From the same cause the Pythagoreans, who had also many valuable notions or fragments of the true system of the universe, made no beneficial use of them, and advanced no farther. The Romans followed the Greeks, but only to favour or to adopt opposing speculations. Their most enlightened portion on the subject of Deity was the Stoics, who had many noble ideas, but defeated their proper effect by joining with them Plato's suggestion, that the earth was a living animal, and a god, which exposed them to the Epicurean's sarcastic question, How their deity liked to have his back cut by the plough, or torn by their harrows; to be burnt in the torrid zone, and frozen into ice in the arctic regions.* Cicero, who at times could reason admirably on the intelligent construction of the world, and was the most informed of all his countrymen, yet was so paralyzed in his own judgment by the chaos of the opinions he found started on this topic, that, in his most elaborate work upon it, he contents himself first with stating one series of opinions, and then the contrary, and closes his theme by ingeniously argu

being the progeny of the gods, as they themselves assert, must have a clear knowledge of their parents. It is impossible therefore not to believe in the children of the gods, though they should speak without probable or necessary arguments. It is proper that, complying with the law, we should assent to their tradition."

He then states from them "the generation of these gods." Ocean and Tethys were the progeny of heaven and earth. From hence Phorcys, Saturn and Rhea, and such as subsist with these, were produced: Jupiter and Juno, and all such as are called their brethren, descended from Saturn and Rhea, &c. When they were all generated, the Artificer of the universe thus addressed them: "gods of gods! of whom I am the demiurgus and father," &c. &c.-P. 472. Such a medley was Plato's most serious tuition.

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

ing against all, and apparently recommending a neutralizing uncertainty and indecision. Thus, until Christianity spread, it never became a settled opinion at all in the world that the earth was the planned and deliberate creation of an intelligent God. Nor does any one seem to have conceived it to have been so, in that clear and full meaning, sublimity and certainty, with which the Hebrew writers inculcate the momentous truth. Take up the Timæus, or any other work of Plato, which treats on God and nature, or what fragments of antiquity remain about them, and compare these with the passages in the Genesis and Deuteronomy of Moses; with those in the book of Job, which is peculiarly splendid in many parts on this subject; with others in some of the Psalms of David, in the majestic and unequalled Isaiah, and in several of the other Jewish prophets; and I think you will feel, with me, that Christianity, by diffusing the Jewish Scriptures, or sacred writings, and by its own as sacred additions, imparted a new intellect to mankind on all that concerns divine philosophy. A sun of mind then rose on our world which has never set. Its beams consumed the popular paganism, and spread a purifying light over those who chose not to forsake their ancient favourite.t It has rescued, the civilized world from those phantoms which once degraded it; and now, in friendly association with the science, taste, and virtues which are peculiarly congenial with it, and which it has always fostered, we may hope that both superstition and atheism are generally banished or are departing from us for ever; and that, as they are both noxious to society, and very

*Cicero's first book of the Natura Deorum details, in the person of Velleius, the Epicurean attacks on all the theories of deity which_the ancient philosophers had devised as well as on the popular one. The second book contains the argument of Balbus, the stoic, in defence of his opinions, spoiling what were really good and wise, by the absurd tenet that the world was an animated being, the incorporated divinity.

The last book exhibits Cotta as the academic, reviewing at times with much derision the arguments of both, but criticising them as inconclusive; "not," he adds, "that 1 mean to take the divinity away, but to show how obscure and difficult the subject is ;" and all that Cicero himself adds, as his final sentence, is, "The argument of Balbus seems to me to be ad veritatis similitudinem propensior"-rather more probable. †This effect may be traced in the valuable writings of Epictetus and Marcus Antoninus, and at times in those of Seneca. The same influence roused the later Platonists of the Alexandrian school, and even Porphyry and Julian, to make many improvements, both in the theory and practice of the pagan worship, which they endeavoured to uphold.

apt to create each other, neither will, as knowledge advances and judgment improves, be attached to the mind of any educated, philanthropic, or wellmeaning individual.

LETTER III.

On the Laws of Nature-What they really are―Their divine Origin and Operation.

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

The laws of nature have been stated to be the properties of material things; the modes of their mutual action and the rules of their causations:* and in this largeness of sense they imply the acting powers of nature, the direction or regulation of these powers in their operation, and the effects produced by them.

* "Laws of nature. In this phrase are included all properties of the portions of the material world; all modes of action and rules of causation according to which they operate on each other. The whole course of the visible universe, therefore, is but the collective result of such laws. Its movements are only the aggregate of their working.”—Whewell's Bridgw. Treat. Astron. p. 7.

VOL. II.-E

But this extent of meaning makes them almost synonymous with external nature altogether, for that is but a series of causes and effects; of operating powers governed in their agency, and producing consequential results. Adding to this the fact, that they have been established by the Deity himself, and therefore originate from him, we have the Creator and the creation displayed before us in this description of the laws of nature. Nothing can be more comprehensive and satisfactory. These laws must be as numerous as the parts and composition of nature are diversified, and they are fitly so represented to us. In considering the laws of nature thus, we are contemplating the Deity in his creating and conserving operations; and all the phenomena which we witness and admire, are the consequences of his perpetual agency, by the instrumentality of these his appointed, governed, and continued laws. The laws of nature are thus his laws; the science which they display is his science; their universal operation is his universal agency; the effects which they occasion are his intended and produced results. The laws of nature thus exhibit to us the will, the decisions, the ordainments, the meaning, and the purposes of the divine intellect in their principles, their rules or regulations, their applications, and their co-operations. These they are always manifesting to us in the phenomena which they are producing; which phenomena must be what they were intended to occasion; as all causes are used for the sake of the effects which they produce, and these must be such as were meant to follow from the causing action.

Let us keep these principles always in our view when we talk or think of the laws of nature, and we shall not then get into the habit of using the phrase without any thought of their Divine Author, or as something quite independent of him, and with which he has no concern, and which would have subsisted without him; or as what do not proceed froin him.

* Mr. Whewell divides his subject into two portions: "cosmical arrangements and terrestrial adaptations. The former may be best suited to introduce to us the Deity as the institutor of laws of nature; though the latter may afterward give us a wider view and clearer insight into one province of his legislation."-Whewell's Bridg. Treat. Astron. p. 16. †The number and variety of the laws which we find established in the universe are so great, that it would be idle to endeavour to enumerate them. In their operations they are combined and intermixed in incalculable and endless complexity; influencing and modifying each other's effects in every direction."-Ib. p. 12.