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FS oil Fi ae 18 wit Rage, ce Rt mag ants “Ae a I 2. ee ee ~~ "Bice a a’ EP Ze BER ey,” A ¢ =? eh Sia re * pa ee 8S Fe men fais a cat Ag ttt roliacme ee,” Ou. = pase. as RS. Re Tiana 30 PS eA Os BP td eng i, OR . se Cg EO 18 oes a ae HE, ™, ee! F rs sours eo Fei sxe? BS a a iT ag ne © ae we ctiey: ge- ‘oye ® ~ x, et Pe A Clade ae Y ya = < See sae me al ae sy tae ne é: - A rad ace Es 1 — ’ ant — : a. Nir ae oe Serge ecm i beg . ob: aot ae ee a are SS an rge We gnge rly we PFN pent war ee IB oa atee BT 1101 .T86 1847 Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 1810-1889. Probabilities, an aid to *% - . ‘= a ae goa O bebe alk TT RSS AN AID TO FAITH. BY THE AUTHOR OF “PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.” RAA AA oo ween mas PRELAL 9 5 a rn a mmEmnREERnna anne Aen I IE” TAS ATE 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 va- riety 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 ADAM. 49 a a ct ca oe ee ES swift blood and fierce passions: while an arctic climate would induce a sluggish, stunted race. And, when to these considera- tions 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 hame enough, as alluding to his medium color, 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 in- terval placed to procreations? 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 reduci- 3 50 PROBABILITIES : nnn snc ble into persons; though with reasonable differences as between creature and Creator. Woman,—Eve, the living or lifegiving, —was likely to have sprung out of the composite seed Man, in order to companionship and fit society. Moreover, it were ex- pectable that in the pattern creature, composite man, there should be involved some apt mysterious typification of the same creature, after a foreknown 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 hus- band, the Redeemer: not so much in the idea of marriage, as (taking election into view) of a co-creation ; as it were rib of rib, and life woven into life, not copulated or conjoined, but immin- gled 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 Chris- tians. I speak concerning Christ and his church. THE FALL. 51 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 disobe- dience, 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 de- lights 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 obe- dience of this new favorite race. And the Lord God was wil- ling that the great controversy, which He foreknew 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 52 PROBABILITIES : ee a ee ee ee ee 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 newborn rational animal which imagination could invent, or an amiable Foreknowledge 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 crea- tures), 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 fas- cinating Foe, as poetry at least, nay, as any sterner contrivance couldinvent 2 The plain fact is that Reason—given keenness— might have guessed this also antecedently a likelihood. THE FALL. 53 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 asto- nishment 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, eat- ing not improbably of the forbidden apple. Attracted by a natu- ral 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 favored 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, that mental predilection for form and color 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 ; irrespect- ively 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 with- held: 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 54 PROBABILITIES : the results, thus perceived to have been likely, we have long since known for fact. That a depraved knowiedge should imme- diately 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 right- eousness. God covered Man’s evil nakedness with the skins of innocent slain animals: even so, Blessed is he whose unright- eousness 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 pla- ces, which had been left unoccupied by the fallen host of Luci- fer. There was a gap to be filled: and probably there would be some better race to fill it. THE FLOOD. 59 re LLL LD 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, an- tecedently, 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 unbound- ed 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 proba- ble, 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 56 PROBABILITIES : 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 wis- dom? Was Deity, either in Adam’s case or this, baffled,—nor rather justified 2? 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 toa 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 rela- tively to antitypes. Neither will we take the fanciful or poetical aspect of the 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 2? 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 longsuffering had worn out every reasonable effort for their restoration. They were then to die ; but how ?—in the least painful manner _possi- ble. 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 THE FLOOD. 57 would have been inconsistent to have extirpated the wicked by any such means as must demonstrate the good to have been saved only by superhuman agency. To considerations of humanity, and of the divine less-interven- tion, add that of the natural and easy agency of a long commis- sioned 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 interfer- ence. 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 attrac- tion 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 Je- hovah’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 monu- mental epitaph written in water, “The wicked are like the troubled sea that cannot rest ;’’ how dread the everlasting requi- em 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. 3* 58 PROBABILITIES : NOAH. Wuen 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 the 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 newborn, inexperi- enced, 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 mea- sured 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. 3 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 : NOAH. 59 cece 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 sam- ple be conceived? was not Noah the only spark of spiritual “ gonsolation ” 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 hilltop, 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 stormtight 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 the 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, 60 PROBABILITIES : a nT 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. Phe lengthy, arduous, and expensive preparation of this mighty Ark,—a vessel which must include forests of timber and con- sume generations in building; besides the worldbeknown col- lection of all manner of strange animals for the stranger fancy of a fanatical old man; not to mention also the hoary Preach- er’s own century of exhortations: 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 antedi- luvian 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 extra- vagant 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 3 it would have been reason’s guess that Noah should be saved as hé NOAH. 61 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) inci- dent 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 seéds 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 exhila- ration, 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 be. gan to be a husbandman and planted a vineyard ; and he drank of the wine and wasdrunken.”? 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 ? | 62 | PROBABILITIES : Op BABEL. Tus book ought to be read, as mentally it is written, with at the end of every sentence one of those etceteras, 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 & 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 Chaldea. Fertile, well-watered, apt for every mun- dane 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 con- struct 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 BABEL. °° 63 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 benevo- lent 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 discor- dant 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 uses into many tongues ?—There they were, all the chiefs of men congre- gated 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 64 PROBABILITIES : 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. 65 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 mar- vellous 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 66 PROBABILITIES : eect ia ee nr eS where we get an insight into what is going on Elsewhere : it is a lifting off the curtain of eternity for once, revealing the magni- ficent simplicities constantly presented in the halls of heaven. And I am moved to speak about it here, because | 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 resur- rection 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 excel- lences 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 chap- ters 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. | JOB. 67 enter ape 9 Sg 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.” 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 Mas- ter’s own free grace: note, Satan’s constant imputation against _ piety when blest 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 per- fect and an upright man, one that feareth God and escheweth evil ? and still he holdeth fast his integrity, although thou movedst 68 PROBABILITIES : me against him, to destroy him without cause. And Satan an- swered 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 in- tensely 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 Do- ric 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 JOB. 69 to have happened than to have been invented 2 We have no such geniuses now as this writer must have been, who by the pure force of imagination could have created that tableau. Mil- ton had Job to go to. Simplicity is proof presumptive in favor 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. Ifa 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 J 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 ca- mels 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 710 PROBABILITIES : Og Ss et as ol oa lle ate ie se 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 pa- tience by the double of everything 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 hap- pened. 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 re- turning 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 unsatisfac- JOB. 71 Pi an rn a ENE a tory 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. 72 PROBABILITIES : intent ll cian ener EA TT 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, con- sider, 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 2? 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 sci- ence: 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 JOSHUA, — ° 73 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 broken fragments of rock ? Once more: our objector will here perhaps inquire, Why not then command the earth to stop,—and not tne sun and moon ? if thus probably Joshua or his Inspirer knew better 2 Answer. Only let a reasonable man consider what would have been the moral lesson both to Israelite and to Canaanite, if the great suc- cessor 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 be- lieving host: and almost reasonably too. The strictly philoso- phical terms would have entirely nullified the whole moral influence... God in his word never suffers science to hinder the progress of truth: a world] y 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 neighboring hint quite handy to the record of the phenomena expressed in ordinary language. In fact, for all common purposes, no astro- nomer 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 comprehensi- ble, 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 humi- liation of the false and far-seen idol. This would constitute to all 4 74 PROBABILITIES : ic Na et RR nations the quickly rumored 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 com- mand of obedience to the Sun and to the Moon. I suppose that few persons who read this book will be unaware, that the cir- cumstance is alluded to as well in that honest heathen, old He- rodotus, 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 mat- ter), could have been better tested : for two armies (not to men- tion 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 hours’ daylight instead of the usual admixture ; could the in- tolerable 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 accom- plished, 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. 715 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 respect- ing 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 surpass- ing beauty,”’—said another, not unlikely the softer Crito.”” “ Not ’ 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, so, my children,’ for his goodness, and his majesty, and wisdom 2?” “ Alas! my children,” was pure Reason’s just rejoinder,” of mAsioves xaxoi, 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 76 PROBABILITIES : Oe et rc nomena ae ener aac 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 sa- lient points of Christ’s career, and at His crucifixion! I will add another topic: how should the God on earth arrive there 2. 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 fullgrown 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. con dition,—surely He would hardly come in any way astounding! 7 THE INCARNATION. 77 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 ina 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 2 Why should there not be found some un- spotted 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 afhianced, 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 re- quired of their double and their intimate conjunction. He would have arrived at humanity, without its gross beginnings, and have veiled his Godhead for awhile in a pure though mortal tenement. He would have participated in all the tenderness of woman’s nature, and thus havé 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 78 PROBABILITIES : fl a ce creas ln secaieeceeiagengemamaachaabiandas have said next to nothing. Nevertheless, let it go; the good seed yet shall germinate. “Cast thy bread upon the waters, and thou shalt find it after many days.” It may to some minds be a desideratum, to allude to the ante- rior probability that God should come in the flesh. Much of this has been anticipated under the head of Visible Deity and else- where; as this treatise is so short, one may reasonably expect every reader to take it in regular course. For additional consi- derations : the Benevolent Maker would hardly leave his creatures to perish, without one word of warning or one gleam of know- ledge. 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 THE INCARNATION. 79 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 labor 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. 80 . PROBABILITIES: © 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 7th century, or a little previ- ously to that era, we know that a fierce religion sprang up, pro- mulgated 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 man- ner 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, scho- lastical.and casuistic figments ; whilst at the same time the pre- valence 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 slum- bering West the shrill warblast of Eastern fervencies ; who MAHOMETANISM. 81 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 appe- tite, and military glory: who should enlist under his banner all the frantic zeal, all the pent-up licentiousness, all the heartburn- ing 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 pro- claiming that Oneness of the object of all worship which besotted Christendom had then, from undue reverence to saints and mar- tyrs, virgins and archangels, well nigh forgotten ; a man who, by pandering to human passions and setting wide as virtue’s ave- nue the flower-tricked gates of vice ; should thus, like Lucifer before him, in a cometlike 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 cau- 4* 82 PROBABILITIES : tiously 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 pro- phesied 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 ad- mirably calculated such a war-cry would be for the circumstan- ces 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 sci- metar 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. 83 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 ante- cedently 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 foreshadowing cartoon, the probabilities of Roman- ism. 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 todo 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 noone misunderstand me : full well I know the just explanations which palliate such passages ; and the love 84 PROBABILITIES : 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 favored 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 ran- somed soul herself, the joy of angels—in lieu of their lowly fel- low 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 alt, 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, pro- phetically 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 faith- ful 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 apostasy, 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 asa statue of Libyan Jove! But even this glaring compromise was a matter probable, with the data of human ambitions, and a rot- ten Christianity. . ROMANISM. 85 a samme em ce ne eT 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 pro- phetically humbled into their own mere dust and nothing-worthi- ness,—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 re- mained 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 poison- ing like some Nessus shirt the lewd ruffian who might soon there- after wear it ?—Not in the least. This woven web,—to which a corrupted state of feeling on religion would have raised Cathe- drals 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 und be a mere unglorified, economical, useful garment. Far from testifying to its own in- ternal mightiness, it probably was soon sold by the fortunate Roman die-thrower to a second-hand shop of the Jewish metropo- lis; and so descended from beggar to beggar till it was clean worn out. We never hear that, however easy of access so inesti- mable relic might then have been considered, any one of the numerous disciples, in the fervor of their earliest zeal, threw away one thought for its redemption. Is it not strange that no 86 PROBABILITIES : ieee St. Helena was at hand to conserve such a desirable invention ? Why is there no St. Vestment to keep in countenance a St. Se- pulchre 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 proper- ties 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 ; where- about 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 Pro- testantism’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 pro- bability 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 honors 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 ROMANISM. 87 eee Jonah ? and where was, in the olden time, that wretched and in- sensate being, calling himself rational and godly, who had ven- tured to solicit the good services of Isaiah as his intercessor, or to plead the merits of St. Ezekiel as the makeweight 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 honors to an ancyle or a rusty nail, to the black stones at Delphi or the goldshrined 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 Py- thoness, 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 88 PROBABILITIES : 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 in- stead of one “Our Father” from the heart: to exact ge- nuflections 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 haircloth,—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 numina, cycle on epicycle, are 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 super- nal light as “the Spirit speaking expressly,” might have so os ROMANISM. — $9 : 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 (datpoviwv), 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 anything 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 favored worshipper: for the painted demirep of fashionable life, there would: be a: pretty pocket-idol, and the snug confessional well-tenanted. by a not 90 PROBABILITIES : 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 reputa- tions, 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 cashbox: the educated, highborn and finely moulded mind might be well amused with architecture, painting, carving, sweet odors 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 melodies as at the priestly absolution : while, for those good few, the truly pious and enlightened chil- dren of Rome, who mourn the corruptions of their church and explain away with trembling tongue her obvious errors and idola- tries, 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 handywork. All things to ROMANISM. ot 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 satis- fied with the day of small things; stagger not at the inconsis- tencies, 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 woe 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 aught else than my bidding, what is that to thee, follow thou ME.” 92 PROBABILITIES : THE BIBLE. Wuitst I attempt to show, as now I desire to do, that the Bible should be just the book it is, from considerations of anterior proba- bility, I must expand the subject a little ; dividing it, 1st, into the likelihood of a revelation at all; and 2dly, into that of its ex- pectable 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 manifesta- tion 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 be- lieved 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 igno- rance 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 anything akin to a religion: but what may we not yet have to learn of good even about such poor THE BIBLE. - 93 Ae a a A TM RIAA OK, 3.8 OB A aL RRS NS eS 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 concentred 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 favored servant a commis- sion 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. Fora family, the Beatific 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 hourglass 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 94 PROBABILITIES : 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 ra- tional 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, ery, “‘ 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 THE BIBLE. 95 Seems ceareescaroereaneerese en er conquest of the difficult and search for the mysterious. The muscles of the spiritual athlete pant for such exertion: and with- out it they would dwindle into trepid imbecility. Curious man, courageous man, enterprising, shrewd, and vigorous 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 dif- ficulties 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, oftentimes 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 everywhere 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 right- eous, 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 ad- dress the whole family man: and every one should find in it something to his liking. Purity should there perceive green pas- tures 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 memo- ries of its chiefest servants’ sins; some record of adultery or 96 PROBABILITIES : 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 coun- tenance: 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, an@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 objection- able 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 of all colors: 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. 97 HEAVEN AND HELL. PRoBABLY enough, the light which I expect to throw upon this important subject, will, upon a cursory criticism, be judged fan- ciful, 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 character- istics of what we call heaven and hell: in fact, I wish to show their probable realities with somewhat approaching to distinet- ness. It is manifest that these places must be somewhere : for, more especially of the Blest Estate, whither did Enoch and Eli- jah and our Risen Lord ascend to? what became of these glori- fied 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 gravita- tion, and pierced earth’s swathing atmosphere: they went up somewhither: the question is where they went to. It is a ques- tion 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 5 98 PROBABILITIES : 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 congre- gation: 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 favoy 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 ambi- tion 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 im- mortality, 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 ap- pear that galaxy of spheres. Let us think that night looks down upon us here with the million eyesof heaven. And, for some focus HEAVEN AND HELL. 99 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 sub- stantially 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 move- ments 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 34,000,000 times the distance of the sun from our earth—a dis. tance 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, 100 PROBABILITIES : It is a glorious thought, such as imagination loves: and a proba- ble 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 isno 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 isa 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 immixt, body risen incorruptible, and soul rested from its deeds, must exist forever. I touch not here the proofs; assumeit. 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, responsi- ble being pursue than one perpetually erratic 2 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 eve1 HEAVEN AND HELL. i0i a oa en ea ur een ar coe ree eT | they are stretching more remote: and infinity itself cannot re- unite 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 satel. lite, 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 melan. choly 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. 102 PROBABILITIES : i ae Se it astronomically ; think of it as connected with idols ; regard it as the ruler of earth’s night; consider that the place of a Gehen- na 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. 103 ce AN OFFER. NotuHine 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 thou- sand ; 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, how. ever 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 arrogat- ing 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 rea- son 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 appre- hensions, the doubts of a rationalizing mind are in the nature of 104 PROBABILITIES : Fi ee honorable 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 suf- ficient 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 ques- tions, 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 dis- creetly. 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 aflame with its ostentatious berries as promising good wine; but rather over my portal is the humbler and hospitable misletoe, assuring every wearied pilgrim in the way, that though scanty be the fare, he shall find a hearty welcome. CONCLUSION. 103 Sc oN CONCLUSION. I Have thus endeavored (with solicited help of Heaven) to place before the world anew a few old truths: truths inestimably pre- cious. 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 exist- ence; 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 scnses 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 accepta- bility among the incredulous of men; they gain, I say, even by such poor pleading as mine, from being shown anteriorly proba- ble. ‘Take an illustration in the case of that strange and anoma- lous 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 Be 106 PROBABILITIES : oe 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 think. ers, ye free-thinkers ; neither be abashed at being named as thinking freely : were not those Bereans more noble in that they searched to see 2. 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 keynote 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 stub- born 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. 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