-*.:v; 
 
 ESSAYS.
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 BtftKELOUW
 
 AUSTRALIAN ESSAYS 
 
 ON 
 
 SUBJECTS 
 
 lolilkal, ^mul anir Jldigioxis, 
 
 BY 
 
 JAMES NOKTON, Esq., Sen". 
 
 OF ELSWICK, IN THE COUNTY OF CUMBERLAND, KKW SOUTH WALES, MEMBKK 
 OF THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL OF KEW SOUTH WALES. 
 
 LONDON: 
 LONGMAN, BROWN, GREEN, LONGMANS, AND ROBERTS. 
 
 1857.
 
 Ac 
 
 PEEFACE. 
 
 "QEFOEE the invention of the art of printing, men of the 
 highest order of intellect only were able to make such 
 advances in literature and science as entitled them to the 
 homage of mankind. By this art the almost divine honours 
 paid to individual genius were transferred to the library, 
 which, by placing within the reach of persons of the humblest 
 intellectual capacity the experience of the intelligent and 
 reflecting, put all men in a great measure upon a level. 
 
 The mighty accumulation of letters is daily increased by the 
 contributions of those whose unaided efforts could not have 
 procured for them the slightest distinction. 
 
 But while this universal diffusion of knowledge is un- 
 questionably beneficial to men of ordinary and slender powers, 
 
 h the 
 
 1100870
 
 vi PREFACE. 
 
 the greatness of the mass of literary productions has a tendency 
 to overload and oppress true genius, and is apt to substitute 
 for the ardour of its inspirations, a cold and mechanical habit 
 of thinking. 
 
 It has already become not less difficult to know what to 
 read than what to avoid, and the experiment can hardly be 
 tried without that frightful sacrifice of time which, before the 
 art of printing, was required for the production of the manu- 
 script copy. Dr. Johnson said of the ' Pilgrim's Progress,' that 
 it was too short. Such a judgment can hardly be pronounced 
 upon any book in these days, and would be practically con- 
 demned by the dimensions of a modern catalogue. The best 
 books contain so much that no one can afford time to wade 
 through, that the reading of mankind must last tend to the 
 perusal of reviews and epitomes, books that, if well executed, 
 would afford to men of ordinary talent and education the 
 information necessary for their guidance, and enable them to 
 avoid the load by which they might otherwise be over- 
 whelmed. 
 
 Reviews and epitomes, however, are not perfect, and may 
 be the work of incompetent or prejudiced parties. 
 
 The only cure must be looked for in that condensation of 
 thought and language that tends to the aphoristic style, a mode 
 
 of
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 of writing which, while it conveys information, calls upon 
 the reader to exercise his judgment and his taste, and induces 
 a habit of thinking that the literature of the age too often fails 
 to awaken. 
 
 In these observations will be found the author's apology for 
 presenting to the public a series of papers originally addressed 
 to the greatly-mixed and ever- varying population of the Austra- 
 lian Colonies. 
 
 Many of these papers are written on subjects that cannot fail 
 to interest all enlightened and thinking men ; and while they 
 lead to the consideration of the great principles which affect 
 our well-being in the various relations that arise out of our con- 
 dition in this life, may induce their readers to reflect upon 
 the inconceivably more important objects for which this life was 
 intended. 
 
 It may be thought that some of them unnecessarily tend 
 to awaken inquiries difficult to answer, and hardly consistent 
 with the discipline of the Churches to which their readers 
 may belong ; but as a tendency to rational inquiry constitutes 
 one of the properties impressed by the Creator on the human 
 mind, investigation will assuredly take place ; and it is certainly 
 better that the consideration of important truths, the exposi- 
 tion of vulgar errors, should not be left to the infidel and the 
 scoflfer. 
 
 Increasinjjf 
 
 ^
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 Increasing knowledge of the works of the Creator and of his 
 dealings with the human race, have not been found inconsistent 
 with Divine revelation. Such knowledge, indeed, is calculated 
 to correct fallacious views of the figurative language by which 
 the will of the Creator has been communicated to mankind ; 
 views which might otherwise lead to scepticism and unbelief, 
 and possibly unsettle our reliance on the wisdom and justice of 
 Divine providence. 
 
 Sydney, New South Wales, 1856.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 FIRST PART. 
 
 I. England and her Colonies - - - 
 II. Port Jackson and the City of Sydney 
 
 III. The Genius of Australia - - - 
 
 IV. The Press of Australia - . - 
 V. The New Constitution - . _ 
 
 VI. The Constitution Question 
 VII. Railways and Telegraphic Despatch - 
 VIII. Rail Communication in Australia . 
 IX. Prospects of Ireland - - . . 
 
 X. The Memory 
 
 XI. Beauty - 
 
 XII. Vestiges of Creation - - - 
 XIII. A History of Failures - - - 
 
 1 
 6 
 16 
 19 
 22 
 25 
 30 
 34 
 40 
 44 
 47 
 51 
 57
 
 X CONTENTS. 
 
 SECOND PART. 
 
 PAGB 
 
 XIV. Bishop Bkoughton ------ 63 
 
 XV. Charity 66 
 
 XVI. The Shortness of Human Life - - - 68 
 
 XVII. Time 70 
 
 XVni. Eternity .-.--.- 72 
 
 XIX. The Physical Sufferings of Christ - - - 75 
 
 XX. The Agency of the Devil - - - - 77 
 
 XXI. The Definition of Mysteries - - - - 80 
 
 XXII. Baptism 83 
 
 XXIII. The Burial Service 87 
 
 XXIV. Apostolical Succession ----- 93 
 
 XXV. Repentance of necessity Progressive - . - lOO 
 
 XXVI. Idle Words 104 
 
 XXVII. Prisoners of Hope 107 
 
 XXVIII. The Resurrection of the Body - - - 108 
 
 XXIX. Further Observations ON the Resurrection - 114 
 
 XXX. The Redemption, a Vision - - - 128 
 
 XXXI. The After-state of the Wicked, a Vision - 131 
 
 XXXTT. The Joy of the Righteous, a Vision - - 134 

 
 ESSAY I. 
 
 ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. 
 
 NO feeling is more deeply seated in the human breast than 
 the love of country. Awaking with the dawn of early 
 consciousness, it borrows strength from every element of beauty 
 and grandeur in the objects around us, from all that tends to 
 expand the intellect and from all that appeals to our finer and 
 more ennobling sympathies, either in passing events or in the 
 memorials of ancient greatness and virtue. 
 
 This passion, common to the humblest child of nature, so 
 uniformly and so strikingly distinguishes men of the noblest 
 endowments, that great intellect and true patriotism may 
 almost be considered as correlatives. 
 
 From the pressure of numerous causes it becomes imperative 
 on man to explore new scenes, to find a home in distant lands, 
 and to exchange the refined enjoyments of civilized life for the 
 privations of the wilderness ; and it is evident, that the toils 
 and hardships to which he is there subjected, leave him but 
 little leisure for the cultivation of the higher faculties and 
 feelings of his nature. 
 
 Bands of colonists have from the remotest ages gone forth 
 
 B from
 
 2 ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. [Esbay I. 
 
 from scenes which have been the haunts of their childhood, 
 the glory of their prime, with the view of providing for the 
 increasing demands of their posterity ; and in the harsh and un- 
 ceasing conflict they have to wage with the difficulties of their 
 position, how powerful this sacred passion to keep alive their 
 higher aspirations ! what so well calculated to indiice them to 
 secure, if possible, to the rising generation the intellectual ad- 
 vantages they themselves enjoyed in their early home ? And 
 we find that, no sooner are the more urgent wants of nature 
 provided for, than these wanderers look with intense and 
 deepening interest to the land they have left, as the source from 
 which they are to receive the means of expanding and refining 
 the minds of their children. 
 
 While this passion, operating on the colonist, tends to an 
 object so worthy and important, what can more happily sustain 
 his connection with the land of his nativity ? What scope, too, 
 does it afford the parent land for extending not only her natural 
 boundary but her religion, her arts, and her noble institutions ! 
 What opportunities of relieving the increasing wants of her 
 people, of providing for them a home which, associated in theii 
 minds with the institutions and government of their native 
 country, deprives expatriation of half its terrors ! 
 
 The duty of the monarch towards the colony is that of a 
 father towards his child. Instead of restraining he should 
 encourage her efforts to achieve an honourable independence ; 
 he should watch over her rising greatness, her increasing means, 
 with the pride of a founder ever anxious to promote, never to 
 retard her advancement : and what would be the result of such 
 treatment ? A profound veneration that nothing could shake, 
 a more than British feeling in a foreign land, an attachment so 
 firm that the child would be ever ready to assist the parent. 
 
 Who
 
 Essay I.J ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. 
 
 Who can contemplate without emotion, the effect of such a 
 connection on the taste of the colony ? Looking to the parent 
 land as the model for her imitation, she would be anxious that 
 her children should receive their education their moral tone 
 from the best, the most highly gifted in that land ; and how 
 deeply interesting the spectacle of those children storing their 
 minds with learning in the British Universities, and there 
 laying the foundation of that character which has made Britain 
 the scourge of her enemies and the admiration of the world ! 
 
 While in the remote parts of Britain thousands of her people 
 are destitute of the means of education, the colonists, reaping 
 advantages that are rarely to be found in long-settled countries, 
 would be able to gratify the laudable desire of affording to their 
 offspring the highest mental culture, would not rest contented 
 with anything not British would, like the Romans, think no 
 Greek pure but that of Athens. 
 
 England, instead of pouring her abandoned criminals into her 
 colonies, would be proud to find in them a home for the families 
 of her nobility and gentry, who would, in their turn, exert 
 themselves to sustain her national character in her widely- 
 extended domain; and, if it be in human things to resist the 
 fatal decay which seems to pursue kingdoms as well as men, the 
 mighty result would be the perpetuity of the British Empire. 
 
 The love of coxmtry retained so strong a hold upon the minds 
 of the American colonists, that it was not until aggression had 
 been added to aggression, insult to insult, and that endurance 
 was felt to be inconsistent with the high character which had 
 descended to them from their ancestors, that a stand was made 
 against the corrupt system which England, on the foundation of 
 her earliest colonies, provided for their government, and which 
 she still persists in upholding. Even then so long as a vestige 
 
 B 2 remained
 
 ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. [Essay 1. 
 
 remained of the people of the Old Land, British misrule could 
 not wholly destroy tlie lingering affection of the colonists for 
 the home of their infancy. Time, however, completed what 
 injustice could not accomplish ; and England lost the noble, the 
 enviable power of extending her Empire over the continent of 
 America. 
 
 The language, the courage of their British ancestors remained 
 to the Americans, but oh, how fallen ! The frank and manly 
 bearing of their kinsmen was exchanged for that vindictive 
 spirit which does not hesitate to revenge a quarrel by the bowie 
 knife or the application of Lynch law ; the fine language of 
 England was corrupted by the introduction of low and vulgar 
 words, while its rich accent and full tones were lost in the nasal 
 twang of the United States. And of these evils England was 
 the Author ! 
 
 Of all the charges that are made against the colonists, none 
 is so utterly unfounded as that of disloyalty. Removed from 
 the disturbing scenes that affect the people of England, they 
 ever regard their native country with pride and reverence, 
 feelings so identified with early remembrances and associations, 
 as even to survive the natural effects of tyranny and misrule. 
 
 If ten thousand acres of land were reclaimed from the sea, 
 on any one of the coasts of Great Britain, and were to become 
 the busy scene of the labours and the skill of Englishmen, how 
 would a proposal that the laws and government of this acces- 
 sion of territory should be wholly placed under the control of 
 the office-bearers and ministers of the Sovereign, be received 
 by the British nation ? What would be thought of any attempt 
 to shut out the inhabitants of this new soil from the privilege of 
 being represented in the British Parliament ? and, if they were 
 permitted to make laws for the administration of their internal 
 
 polity,
 
 Essay I.] ENGLAND AND HER COLONIES. 
 
 polity, what would be the general impression if they were to be 
 deprived of all power over the funds which had resulted from 
 their combined exertions ? If added to this enormous grievance 
 the office of their chief magistrate were to be filled by a 
 nominee of the Ministry, destitute of every qualification for his 
 position, perhaps wanting in moral character, what would be 
 the indignant feeling of the people of England ? what the 
 opinion of every friend of liberty ? and if this recovered 
 territory were divided from the main land by those waves 
 which have for so many ages owned the sway of the British 
 sceptre, would it on that account cease to be regarded as one of 
 the "Homes of England?" Should such a circumstance de- 
 prive the enterprising spirits, who added the possession to the 
 British dominions, of any advantage which belongs to English- 
 men? Should it not rather endear them to every British 
 Patriot, in whose mind the foundation of the settlement must 
 ever be associated with the greatness of his country ? 
 
 The tyranny of the home Government rent America from the 
 Empire, and inflicted a deep and lasting injury on mankind by 
 preventing the extension over the western world of the genius 
 and the taste of Englishmen. That tyranny will also deprive 
 her of Australia, of Canada, and of all those possessions that 
 would have more than repaid to her the cost of their foundation 
 that would have relieved from destitution her unemployed 
 children, and transmitted her name to the latest ages.
 
 ESSAY 11. 
 
 PORT JACKSON AND THE CITY OF SYDNEY. 
 
 ON the eastern shores of the continent of Australia, towards 
 the close of the eighteenth century, a small settlement was 
 founded by Great Britain for the discipline and employment of 
 her convicted felons. Far from the haunts of civilization, this 
 remote possession was hardly known to the people of England, 
 and inspired only feelings of contempt and horror. 
 
 Many, however, who visited the harbour of Port Jackson, 
 and examined the inexhaustible coal-fields of the colony, were 
 early impressed with the belief that Sydney would become the 
 emporium of the Southern Hemisphere, and that the despised 
 penal settlement would grow into a mighty empire. 
 
 Surrounded by a savage wilderness, and destitute of resources 
 that could give it value in the mercantile world, it was never- 
 theless destined, within the first century of its existence, to 
 become the home of gentlemen, and to attract the enterprising 
 spirit of the merchant princes of London. 
 
 When steam navigation enhanced the value of the Australian 
 coal-fields, and the discovery of an unbounded supply of the 
 
 richest
 
 Essay II.] POET JACKSON 
 
 richest copper ore enabled the colonists to rival the smelters of 
 England, they felt that it was time to shake off the penal cha- 
 racter of their country, and to induce men of education and 
 science to visit its shores. 
 
 It has been the fate of the Australian colonies, from the time 
 of their foundation, to be the sport of British imbecility and 
 misrule. But for this, they might now have been in a high 
 state of civilization and refinement, and their condition and 
 government in every respect on a level with those of the nation 
 which founded them. 
 
 With a history of colonies, British and foreign, before our 
 eyes, extending over two centuries, it is hardly conceivable that 
 the settlement and early management of Australia should have 
 been left to the discretion of low-minded and unprincipled per- 
 sons. Varying in soil, in climate and productions, all extensive 
 and remote settlements demand of their founders the exercise of 
 intelligence and the appKcation of science the Australian colo- 
 nies not less so than India or Canada ; above all, they require 
 the appropriation of the soil to its proper use the construction 
 of roads, canals, and reservoirs of water ; the erection of public 
 buildings, and the laying out of cities and towns. These works, 
 so unmanageable in old countries, are, in new settlements, objects 
 not less of taste than of public utility, and should never be 
 interfered with by the granting of rights and privileges to private 
 parties. 
 
 No greater mistake can be made than that of supposing that 
 the formation and planting of colonies can be safely intrusted to 
 common or unthinking men. The effects of their wilfulness or 
 of their ignorance and incapacity may not be corrected by the 
 wealth and talents of centuries. 
 
 There is not, perhaps, in the world, a nobler harbour than 
 
 Port
 
 POET JACKSON [Essay II. 
 
 Port Jackson, nor one that affords such perfect shelter for the 
 largest number of ships. This harbour it was impossible to 
 destroy, but all that mental obliquity could devise has been 
 effected ; all that could mark the supineness of the Government 
 is painfully impressed upon the minds of those who require the 
 reparation of the ships by which it is visited. As an illustration, 
 sixty years passed away from the foundation of the colony with- 
 out any attempt to construct a dock ; and putrid mud, to an 
 enormous extent, has been allowed to deposit itself in the waters 
 that surround the city. 
 
 It would, however, be unjust to allow the magnificent dock 
 on Cockatoo, a small island lying about a mile to the west of the 
 city, now far advanced towards completion, to remain unno- 
 ticed. This dock, which is of gigantic dimensions, was designed 
 by Mr. Gother Kerr Mann, a gentleman to whom its construc- 
 tion has been intrusted, and whose engineering skill and high 
 qualifications for the office are displayed in every part of the 
 work, and in placing and adjusting the machinery the use of the 
 dock wiU call into operation. Eemoved fi-om all interference 
 with the city, and approached by water only, a finer site for a 
 dock could not be found even in the harbour of Port Jackson. 
 
 The entrance of Sydney Cove, one of the numerous bays tliat 
 constitute the harbour, was lately adorned by a small but sin- 
 gularly picturesque island, not exceeding one hundred and fifty 
 yards in circumference. On its summit, at an elevation of forty 
 feet above the surrounding water, it was, during the adminis- 
 tration of Sir Eichard Bourke, proposed to erect a small build- 
 ing, after the model of the Temple of the Winds, to be appro- 
 priated to the police. And the Surveyor-General, Sir Thomas 
 Mitchell, recommended that a marine barometer, to be kept in 
 the building, should be carefully inspected by the persons in 
 
 charge
 
 Essay II.] AND THE CITY OF SYDNEY. 
 
 charge ; and that when it indicated a change of weather dan- 
 gerous to sailing boats, a black flag should be hoisted, to prevent, 
 by timely notice, the possibility of such fatal accidents as have 
 frequently occurred in the harbour. Surrounded by shipping, 
 nature could not have provided a happier site for so important 
 and interesting an object. 
 
 This elegant design has been frustrated and the island levelled 
 to the surface of the water, and that for the purpose of con- 
 structing a fortification against foreign aggression ! The site of 
 the island is surrounded by houses within point-blank range of 
 guns, and is about five miles from the entrance of the harbour. 
 The idea of placing a fortification on such a spot called forth the 
 derision of every commander of a war-ship who visited the port ; 
 and, as one gentleman observed in foreign accents, must have 
 been intended by the citizens to give the ladies some idea of the 
 operations of war. 
 
 The fortification, however, was not constructed, the loose 
 matter when brought to the water's edge being converted into a 
 shaking bog incapable of sustaining the weight of cannon. It 
 has now become a dangerous shoal. 
 
 The defences of the harbour are, indeed, almost provided by 
 nature, and require only a very moderate application of skill to 
 make them impregnable; but official obliquity has ever pre- 
 vailed, and a large sum of money was lately expended in con- 
 structing a fort on Bradley's Head. This bold promontory, 
 situated three miles from the entrance of the harboiu-, rises out 
 of water so deep, that riflemen from the yard-arms of a frigate 
 could, without an efibrt, exterminate the largest garrison that 
 might be placed upon it. Many points could be found in the 
 harbour on which forts might be constructed, which, protected 
 by long shoals from the approach of hostile vessels, could be 
 
 brought
 
 i 
 
 10 - PORT JACKSON. [Essay II. 
 
 brought to bear upon them, without the possibility of being 
 reached by their small arms. But the proper mode of fortify- 
 ing Port Jackson is by masked batteries at the entrance of the 
 harbour. 
 
 The fort on Bradley's Head has been abandoned by the gen- 
 tlemen who designed it; but the rulers of Australia still want 
 the information which the history of Gibraltar could not fail to 
 afford. The fortification of the Sow-and-Pigs was at one time 
 contemplated ; but the garrison by which it would be manned 
 would be so obviously exposed to the broadsides of a hostile 
 fleet, that the idea appears justly to have been given up. It 
 must indeed be evident to every thinking person, that fortifica- 
 tions within the harbour could not be so effective as those placed 
 at the Heads. They would at all times be exposed to the fire of 
 the invading party, and might, notwithstanding the most deter- 
 mined resistance, be silenced or passed. The campaign in the 
 Crimea points out the proper mode of fortifying Port Jackson. 
 The armament of the A hies landed out of the reach of the forts 
 of Sebastopol, and attacked the garrison from the land side. 
 This would be the operation of an army invading Port Jackson. 
 It would land at Watson's Bay and attack the city in the rear ; 
 and although New South Wales may now be of too little import- 
 ance for such an enterprise, it would be unpardonable in those 
 who are charged with the construction of the national defences 
 not to contemplate the possibility at a future period of such an 
 occurrence. With masked batteries at the north entrance of the 
 harbour, aided, if necessary, by a heavy chain, no ship could 
 pass the Sow-and-Pigs. 
 
 The site of Sydney is the finest that can be conceived for a 
 large mercantile city. Almost surrounded by navigable water, 
 a considerable part of the city stands on a promontory formed 
 
 by
 
 
 Essay II.] AND THE CITY OF SYDNEY. 11 
 
 by Sydney Cove and Darling Harbour, presenting a front to 
 water of sufficient depth for ships of large burthen, and extensive 
 enough for the commerce of the Southern Hemisphere. 
 
 Had this promontory, which is connected with every part of 
 the city and with the great thoroughfares that lead into the 
 coimtry, been surrounded by a public wharf, stores, counting- 
 houses, and dwellings for the persons engaged in the shipping 
 business of the city, might have been built, not in streets, but 
 in terraces on its sides ; and on the top of the promontory 
 might have been laid out the finest street in the world, over- 
 looking the harbour and trade of the city, and fanned by 
 constant sea and land breezes. 
 
 But the promontory, like every other part of the city, has 
 been damaged in every conceivable manner. Out of upwards 
 of ten thousand houses to be found in Sydney, hardly one has 
 been constructed with a regard to the common rules of archi- 
 tecture, while the streets are narrow, crooked, and irregular, and 
 totally undrained. Even at this period, parties are allowed to 
 open narrow lanes, crowded with buildings squalid and unven- 
 tilated, laying up magazines of disease that may one day sweep 
 away the whole population. 
 
 In building a city in such a climate as New South Wales, 
 nothing was so important as the construction of drains and an 
 abundant and never-failing supply of water ; and here again 
 nature had half executed the work. 
 
 Drains might easily have been formed for the conveyance of 
 the impurities of the city into deep water, or, what would be 
 better, into low adjacent lands, on which all solid matter might 
 be deposited for manure, and from which the water might be 
 raised by engines for the purpose of irrigating and enriching the 
 poorer soil, or conducted into the sea. And to secure an un- 
 failing
 
 * 
 
 12 PORT JACKSON [Essay II. 
 
 failing supply of the purest water, the Eiver Hawkesbury, with 
 its branch the South Creek, might have been conducted through 
 thirty miles of country to the city, forming the noblest reservoirs 
 ever appropriated to such a purpose, and converting this hot 
 and dusty town into a city of fountains. After watering the 
 streets and public ways, an abundant supply might have been 
 poured into every sewer and drain. Public baths, so necessary 
 in the climate of New South Wales, might also have been 
 constructed ; and what sites so admirably adapted for baths and 
 fountains as the corners occasioned by intersecting streets now 
 almost exclusively occupied by public-houses ? 
 
 When the colony was still young and the lands unappro- 
 priated, the Hawkesbury River might have been brought into 
 Sydney in a manner most beneficial to the country, not by the 
 conveyance of the water through a long line of pipes or 
 expensive canals, but by slightly raising by a dam the level of 
 that part of the river not required for navigation, and by cutting 
 through such parts of the country as impeded the progress of 
 the water towards the city. While these basins would have 
 secured an inexhaustible supply of water, they would have 
 added to the charms of the scenery, and, presenting their tem- 
 pering surfaces to the winds, would materially have mitigated 
 the droughts by which the country is occasionally so terribly 
 visited. 
 
 But Sydney, totally undrained, remains with an inadequate 
 and precarious supply of water. In many parts of the town, 
 pestilential effluvia warn you of the mischief that is insidiously 
 undermining the health of the inhabitants, and diffusing a 
 pallor over their faces that obviously proclaims the disease that 
 lurks within. 
 
 Even without the aid of fresh water, the public drains 
 
 might
 
 Essay II.] AND THE CITY OF SYDNEY. 13 
 
 
 
 might be cleansed by sea water raised by steam engines into 
 heads at various points. But, why should this be attempted 
 where all is ignorance and neglect ? The very Macadamizing 
 the streets is performed by labour at 10s. a day, a cost that, it 
 is said, will require 30,000^. for a single street. The metal 
 used is whinstone, found on the Parramatta Eiver. This is 
 broken by the hand into pieces, not of the size recommended by 
 Macadam, but into irregular pieces, often exceeding the size of 
 a man's fist, and, after being carefully freed from any mixture 
 that could possibly bind it together, it is laid on the streets. 
 As a necessary consequence, after destroying the carriages and 
 the horses compelled to use the roads, it settles into irregu- 
 larities that again require breaking-up an operation which the 
 large stones themselves generally perform in the course of a few 
 months. 
 
 For 7000^. a steam crushing- machine could be put up at the 
 quarry & tramway constructed to the water, and a pimt pro- 
 vided for the carriage of the stone to Sydney, by which labour, 
 so costly and so much required for other purposes, would be 
 saved, and the material itself reduced to the proper size, at a 
 tenth part of the present expense. If the splinters, or fine 
 parts of the stone, were used for binding, and a roller passed over 
 the work, the most permanent and the most even surface would 
 be given to a whole street in a few days. 
 
 A very large sum of money is now in the course of expendi- 
 ture for the purpose of constructing public slaughterhouses on 
 a small island lying to the north-west of the city. To this site 
 there are many objections : the animals must be brought within 
 a very short distance of the city, and the constant discharge of 
 filth into the harbour will greatly tend to corrupt the water 
 and fill it with sharks. The proper site for such an establish- 
 ment 
 
 <\
 
 14 POET JACKSON [Essay II. 
 
 ment is Botany Bay, which could be approached from the great 
 western road, from a point at the distance of many miles from 
 the city, while the abundant supply of water might be made to 
 discharge the offal into the Bay, and greatly benefit the fishery 
 which has for several years been carried on in that capacious 
 basin. 
 
 By a short and easily-conducted tramway, the supply, both 
 of meat and fish, could be brought into the city in twenty 
 minutes. 
 
 The barbarous policy of early Governors has prevented the 
 execution of many of these important works; and it will, 
 perhaps, be asked how any of them could have been performed 
 in the earlier days of the colony ? I answer, that nothing was 
 better suited for convict discipline. 
 
 It surely was not the object of the British Grovernment to 
 punish without reforming the offender; and what could be 
 better adapted to the work of reformation than the execution of 
 such works ? Instead of pouring the corrupted mass into 
 private families, or coercing the convict by the lash, he should 
 have been fairly and fully paid for his work he should ever 
 have an interest in his amendment should, even at the latest 
 period, have the means afforded of supporting himself by useful 
 labour. 
 
 If he were employed in the execution of public undertakings, 
 and his work accurately measured and properly paid for, he 
 would have the greatest inducement to acquire habits of 
 industry. 
 
 Suppose every man's labour were carried to his credit (a 
 rateable deduction being first made for general medical attend- 
 ance, and the support of the sick), that he were then charged 
 for his clothing and maintenance, and the balance held at his 
 
 credit,
 
 Essay II.J AND THE CITY OF SYDNEY. 15 
 
 credit until free ; and that he were then allowed to return to 
 his country, or settle in the colony. With habits of industry 
 acquired during his probation, and generally possessing the 
 means of entering upon some beneficial employment, he would 
 have the greatest inducement to become a useful and reformed 
 member of society. What better discipline could be provided 
 for the road-gangs, or the drunkards who now idle away their 
 time in gaols ? 
 
 All intended settlements should be visited and explored by 
 men of education and science : no permanent step should be 
 taken until its consequences on the future condition of the 
 country had been fully considered; and no land should be 
 disposed of until it had been clearly ascertained that the public 
 interest would be best served by making it private property. 
 That men possessing the necessary qualifications for the dis- 
 charge of so important a duty should make a distant colony 
 their permanent residence, is hardly to be expected ; but there 
 can be no doubt many might be found for a short period to 
 direct its public measures and to lay down plans for its future 
 government. 
 
 The first step towards the reformation of such evils as are 
 capable of being removed or mitigated, is to investigate the 
 actual state of the public works of the colony. For that purpose, 
 the Surveyor-General should be called upon to make a report 
 upon all such as have been placed under his control or super- 
 intendence ; and his report, with any suggestions he might 
 think proper to make, should be published for the information 
 of all whose duty or interest might prompt them to propose 
 measures, or afford information on the subject. 
 1854.
 
 ESSAY III. 
 
 THE GENIUS OF AUSTRALIA. 
 
 WHILE the parent land is a glorious inheritance which 
 has descended from our common ancestors, with all its 
 enduring monuments of their industry and their skill, to her 
 Colonies alone belongs the future. 
 
 Unreclaimed from her primeval forests, and with a climate, to 
 which the adventurous settler has to adapt himself, Australia 
 may yet become the principal retreat of the redundant popula- 
 tion of England, and diffuse over the Southern Hemisphere the 
 laws, the liberties, and the glorious constitution of the empire 
 by which she was founded. 
 
 If, from our immediate descendants nature has withheld the 
 iron constitution, the powers of endurance which she has 
 conferred on the Saxon of the North, their sound understand- 
 ing, their delicate perception, have peculiarly fitted the rising 
 generation for scientific inquiries and for the exercise of me- 
 chanical genius. 
 
 That a climate so fickle as that of Australia, must prevent her 
 from ever attaining a high position as a pastoral or an agricul- 
 tural
 
 ^ 
 
 Essay III.] THE GENIUS OF AUSTRALIA. 17 
 
 tural country, the warmest advocates for the raising of raw 
 produce for exportation have too often witnessed the destruction 
 of their herds by the lingering operations of famine, to venture 
 to deny. But even if the cHmate were the most genial, what 
 could be the ultimate destiny of a people who, principally 
 occupied in herding cattle and raising grain, were to neglect the 
 cultivation of those arts by which alone national independence 
 can be secured ? 
 
 A state so circumscribed and subordinate was not intended to 
 be the future of this Empire of the South. No country more 
 certainly requires the application of science, the exercise of 
 intelligence none presents more ample materials on which to 
 operate. With inexhaustible mines of coal, lime, iron, and 
 copper, gold has now been found in deposits of unprecedented 
 richness ; and from the geological formation and appearance of 
 the country, it is not improbable that other precious metals may 
 be stored up in her secret recesses, while sand of the purest 
 quality and the finest porcelain clay, with other articles ex- 
 tensively used in manufactories, are lavishly strewn over her 
 surface. 
 
 Her widely-extended coasts and unrivalled harbours place 
 within her reach the treasures of the Southern Ocean and the 
 commerce of the East ; while a hundred fairy ports, now known 
 to the admirer of sylvan scenery, would afibrd shelter to the 
 adventurous fisherman, and the vessels used for the transport of 
 her various products by means of her ocean boundary. The soft 
 wools of her sheep demand of her a better fate than to be 
 exported as raw material. From a thousand hills the vine pours 
 forth a tribute that promises at no distant period to rival the 
 vintages of the old world ; while the waters that fall in torrents 
 upon her surface, if pent into the lengthened canal, the graceful 
 
 C mere
 
 18 
 
 THE GENIUS OF AUSTRALIA. 
 
 [Essay ITT. 
 
 mere, would at once fertilize her soil and correct the aridity of 
 her atmosphere. 
 
 These are the subjects that imperiously challenge the atten- 
 tion, and may justly exercise the energy and genius of her 
 
 sons. 

 
 ESSAY IV. 
 
 THE PKESS OF AUSTRALIA. 
 
 WE are so much accustomed to the imiumerable benefits 
 which the Press confers, that it is difficult for us to appre- 
 ciate its influence on society, without withdrawing from the 
 immediate scenes in which we are engaged, and contemplating 
 the state of those countries in which it is made the organ of 
 cruelty and despotism. 
 
 While to this mighty engine we must concede the power of 
 forming, it not less surely indicates the sentiments and opinions 
 of the people ; and of it we may truly affirm that like poetry 
 and the fine arts, it either belongs to the present condition 
 of a country, or reflects the image of that which has recently 
 passed away. 
 
 With the dimmest perception only of our future destiny, to 
 the Press we must look for that stimulus to noble exertion, 
 which can alone prompt the people of this Southern Land to 
 develop its resources and to found an empire not unworthy of 
 the stock from which they sprang. 
 
 Hardly freed from the badge of shame that a corrupt adminis- 
 
 C 2 tration
 
 20 THE PRESS OF AUSTRALIA. [Epsay IV. 
 
 tratlon has used all its eflPorts to perpetuate, and without the 
 leisure or fortune to cultivate the elegancies and refinements of 
 life, we feel that the Press, like the oriental wind that bears the 
 perfumes of Arabia to the distant mariner, must introduce 
 amongst us the just reasoning, the profound research, the 
 elegant taste of older and more enlightened lands. 
 
 What is the main feature of the Press in these colonies where 
 all is young all is new? It has industriously laboured to 
 create in us an interest in the wants, the condition, and the 
 tastes of more advanced civilization, and is evidently making 
 rapid strides towards the establishment of national chaxacter 
 the exercise of independent thought. 
 
 That there is much room for improvement much to be 
 achieved, cannot be questioned ; and every friend of the Press 
 must regret that its pages have occasionally been sullied by 
 ribaldry and slander. But is the Press behind those institutions 
 that are essential to the existence of the colony? Is it less 
 advanced than the courts of law the general administration of 
 Justice? The Press does not seek, but it can afford a com- 
 parison. It was recently observed by one of our Judges, that 
 Vhat with new trials, arguments, and motions for rehearings, 
 no cases were more thoroughly sifted than those which were 
 disposed of in the colony. But is there no drawback to this 
 mode of arriving at the truth? Did it never occur to the 
 learned Judge, that this apprenticeship in the administration of 
 justice was served at the expense of the suitor ? 
 
 Has the Church made more progress in diffusing the light of 
 Christianity ? in substituting for the mysteries and bigotry of 
 the dark ages and the sectarian strife of the present, that charity 
 which hopeth all things? in rescuing from destruction the 
 children of poverty and of crime ? 
 
 The
 
 Essay IV.] THE PRESS OF AUSTRALIA. 21 
 
 The base and the cowardly have ever a disposition to fetter 
 the liberty of the Press, are ever more vigilant to mark its 
 slightest error than to acknowledge the debt of gratitude that is 
 due to it, for its exposure of falsehood and of fraud, and would 
 prefer the degradation of their country to the slightest injury 
 from the only instrument that can raise its character. 
 
 Untrammelled in its operations by cowardice or tyranny, the 
 progress of the Press is like that of a noble river, which gradually 
 disengages itself from the wreck and gravel that are borne down 
 from the mountain in which it takes its rise, but which, if 
 impeded, stagnates into the morass that forms a receptacle for the 
 sickly deposit of a rank vegetation, and fills the atmosphere with 
 pestilential miasma. 
 
 Go on, then, great and noble power, fearlessly advance in 
 the good cause you have undertaken ! Let the honour of your 
 country be the object of your existence; and by enlightening 
 the minds of her children, may you make them conscious of her 
 importance ia tlie scale of nations, and obtain for yourself the 
 reward that is due to the benefactors of mankind !
 
 ESSAY V. 
 
 THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 
 
 TT would not be less unreasonable to apply to a young colony 
 all the measures which have been foiuid expedient for the 
 representation and government of the parent land, than to fit out 
 the boats of a ship with the paraphernalia necessary for the na- 
 vigation of the vessel they belong to. And it is impossible to 
 look at the various plans proposed for a constitution for the 
 colony, and the eiForts made to provide materials for an aristo- 
 cratic chamber, without a painful sense of the ludicrous. 
 
 It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that pattern, and not ex- 
 pediency, has governed the minds of the gentlemen who would 
 at once project the coimcils of the colony into a counterpart of 
 the great national assemblies of England. Indeed, perusal of 
 the schemes that have been laid before the public leaves us 
 much in the condition of the schoolboy, who, having wearied 
 through the whole alphabet, was quite at a loss to conceive the 
 value or importance of the task. 
 
 Surely
 
 \S 
 
 Essay V.] THE NEW CONSTITUTION. 23 
 
 Surely it cannot be necessary to provide for a dependent 
 colony all the order and forms that may be required for its 
 government when its state of dependency shall have ceased. 
 
 None can doubt that the colony should be governed by laws 
 made by a Council composed of colonists, who are or ought to 
 be acquainted with its peculiar interests. But why should 
 these laws be submitted to the misconstruction of a stolid and 
 irresponsible Upper House a House probably composed of indi- 
 viduals with no preponderating interest in the prosperity of the 
 country, and perhaps without that talent which commands the 
 respect of a people ? 
 
 What is the condition of the councils of England? The 
 Commons propose and discuss a law ; this law undergoes the 
 consideration of the Peers, another body of the British people 
 interested in all that affects the government of the country. 
 The law is then submitted to the Sovereign and her advisers. 
 
 In the colony, the Council originates a measure, that measure 
 is submitted to the Governor, who may fairly stand in the rela- 
 tion to the colony which the House of Lords does to the people 
 of England, and the proposed law is then laid before the 
 Sovereign. 
 
 It is imreasonable and most mischievous that the Legislative 
 Assembly should be in any degree composed of Crown nomi- 
 nees, a body of persons, who in a deliberative assembly dare 
 not deliberate. Nothing is gained by placing nominees in the 
 House as safeguards against hasty legislation. That may be 
 effectually prevented by the Governor, who, with the assistance 
 of the Executive, ought to possess a power of approving or 
 rejecting the measures of the legislature a power the exercise 
 of which would place him in his proper relative position in the 
 colony, and without casting upon him an undue share of respon- 
 sibility,
 
 24 THE NEW CONSTITUTION. [Essay V. 
 
 sibility, greatly tend to give Kim additional importance. The 
 ultimate control of the Sovereign would interpose an effectual 
 guard against all legislation likely to interfere with the general 
 principles it concerns the British nation to maintain in her 
 colonies. It can hardly be conceived, that either the Governor 
 or the Sovereign would imnecessarily oppose measures which 
 the good sense of the Council might introduce for the local 
 Government. 
 
 The Governor would communicate to the House of Assembly 
 the financial wants of the colony, and there is no reason to anti- 
 cipate in the members of that House, such a blindness to the 
 interests committed to their care as would induce them to object 
 to reasonable demands. 
 
 Removed from the collisions that inevitably take place in 
 a body composed of the representatives of the people and 
 the officers and nominees of the Crown, the Council would 
 be anxious to sustain its character of a popular Assembly, 
 and would feel a heavy, because a sole responsibility for its 
 measures. 
 
 1852.
 
 ESSAY VI. 
 
 THE CONSTITUTION QUESTION. 
 
 17EW things are at the present moment of deeper importance 
 to the Australian colonies than the measures which are to 
 confer upon them a constitution that, however short-lived and 
 bearing within itself the seeds of dissolution, may nevertheless 
 present obstacles to their future good government, impossible to 
 overcome. 
 
 It may be safely asserted that not one hundred persons in 
 New South Wales are capable of affording any aid in the settle- 
 ment of this diflficult question, much less the congregated masses 
 who are ever ready to vociferate for " a counterpart of the 
 glorious constitution of England," or to lay the foundation of a 
 democracy more tyrannical than that of America, or the transi- 
 tory political fabric constructed out of the French Revolution of 
 1848. 
 
 A moment's reflection will satisfy any thinking man, that 
 such a democracy would probably be the result of the unre- 
 strained 

 
 26 THE CONSTITUTION QUESTION. [Essay VI. 
 
 strained choice by the populace of the members of" both houses 
 of Parliament. And one can hardly contemplate the deference 
 for the people, manifested by at least one speaker at the meeting 
 lately held at the Victoria Theatre, without feeling that even a 
 Senator must be restrained from looking for preferment through 
 a channel so unworthy as that of the passions or fancies of a mob, 
 no matter for what purpose congregated. There is, however, an 
 element, in the most inconsiderate mob, that may be made the 
 instrument of controlling a tyranny not less frightful the 
 despotic tyranny of irresponsible government ; and the great 
 question now under consideration, is the means by which that 
 element may be brought into useful operation. 
 
 That the plan proposed for the nomination of an Upper 
 House, is one that would check the progress of genuine liberty 
 and of free inquiry into the rights and interests of all classes of 
 the community, is so evident, that on its authors may be justly 
 charged much of the intemperate character of the recent attacks 
 they complain of. It is impossible to contemplate the creation 
 of hereditary qualification for the senatorial office, without the 
 strongest feeling of disapprobation. If the object be to secure 
 for the colony, as far as possible, a counterpart of the constitu- 
 tion of England, it is necessary to inform ourselves of the ground 
 on which that constitution rests to trace to their proper 
 sources any evils that may be justly chargeable upon it. Is 
 there not a possibility of introducing into this colony those evils 
 without advantages, which have so much more than counter- 
 balanced them, that perturbations are lost in the great move- 
 ment of the whole ? 
 
 It is not true, as has been asserted, that the Peers of Eng- 
 land were ever elected by the people to check the demands of 
 the Sovereign : but, satellites of a great luminary to which they 
 
 owed
 
 Essay VI.] THE CONSTITUTION QUESTION. 27 
 
 owed their existence, they originally purchased their political 
 position by the service of their swords ; and Sovereign and 
 Nobility have each alternately defended the people against the 
 exactions of the other. 
 
 The English Peers have not only the share of talent and 
 patriotism that falls to gentlemen enjoying the advantages of a 
 liberal education, but their enormous landed possessions make 
 them always ready to sustain a form of constitution which 
 affords the sole security for their position : and the jealousy 
 with which they guard the transmission to a single representa- 
 tive of their estates, as well as their titles, has, by perpetuating 
 in its integrity a wealthy and powerful class, continued to the 
 country the social security which that conservative element, 
 wealth, has been almost invariably foimd to afford. 
 
 What patrician qualification could senators of New South 
 Wales transmit to their posterity ? Have they wealth to enable 
 them to secure to a single representative the mediocre fortune of 
 an ordinary English commoner, nay, a bare sufficiency to support 
 him without the toils of business ? Does this colonial settlement 
 of yesterday, afford any security that even he who has most suc- 
 cessfully plied the labouring oar, can, in the incessant struggle 
 which belongs to a rising country, be maintained for a season of 
 repose, however brief? 
 
 But even could every requisite be secured, is a Senate likely 
 to be benefited by the deliberations of conceited heirs-at-law who 
 have just attained their majority, a Senate which will have to 
 deal with the ever-varying phases which present themselves in 
 a land, the climate, the soil, and the products of which 
 daily present problems for the wonder and reflection of the 
 world ? 
 
 It is our duty, however, not to add to the imthinking abuse 
 
 of
 
 28 THE CONSTITUTION QUESTION. [Essay VI. 
 
 of the ignorant on either side of the question, but to grapple 
 honestly with the difficult subject under consideration. We 
 should, if possible, point out a course that may at once secure a 
 body of senators with as much wisdom as the colony can aflPord, 
 free from the corrupting influence of the Crown ; xmdaunted by 
 the vulgar abuse of a mob, of age at least to have learnt the 
 importance of calm deliberation who shall not transmit to a 
 blockhead heir the office without the endowments that are too 
 often found to descend with the man of genius into his grave. 
 It has been said that, but for the federal principle, America, 
 losing her centripetal force, would fly into the regions of anarchy. 
 May not the two forces, the one impelling the planet on its 
 onward co\irse, the other restraining it to its orbit, be united 
 in forming a constitution for New South Wales ? 
 
 The plan I would propose at least for a trial is, that the 
 representative of the Sovereign select one hundred persons, in 
 the colony, whom he believes qualified for the office of Senator, 
 (from time to time filling up vacancies) gentlemen who shall 
 not be less than thirty years of age, and who shall retain the 
 office for life, or for a term of at least ten years. Out of that 
 number the Lower House, which should be elected by the 
 people exclusively, should appoint and from time to time keep 
 up a Senate to consist of twenty-one persons. The members of 
 the Lower House should be capable, at all times, if included in 
 the list of individuals selected by the Crown, of accepting the 
 appointment, the vacancies occasioned by their retirement 
 from the Lower House being filled up as in all other cases. 
 
 It has been thought so utterly impracticable to constitute an 
 Upper House, that suggestions have been made for intrusting 
 the legislation of the colony to one House only. But who can 
 observe the crude, precipitate, and in some cases thoughtless 
 
 legislation
 
 Essay VI.] THE CONSTITUTION QUESTION. 29 
 
 legislation of the present session of Council, and not feel that 
 without the check afforded by a second Chamber, the rights, the 
 interests, and even the liberties of the people, may too often 
 be overlooked in the pursuit of some supposed object of ex- 
 pediency. 
 
 That this vitally-important question should be determined by 
 the violent speeches of the partisans of either side that an 
 inflamed populace should be induced to demand a counterpart 
 of the constitution of that " land of liberty and equality " in 
 which individual citizens indemnify themselves for the sacrifice 
 they make to the multitude, by indulging in exclusiveness of 
 the most tyrannical and degrading character, a constitution 
 under which one portion of the community has been raised to 
 an undue eminence by blasting the bodies and souls of three 
 millions of human beings, and those the producers of a large 
 portion of the exports of the state, I trust that no Australian, 
 certainly no Christian, will desire. 
 
 August, 1853.
 
 ESSAY VIL 
 
 RAILWAYS AND TELEGRAPHIC DESPATCH. 
 
 A STRANGER on arriving in Australia cannot fail to be 
 struck with astonishment at our insensibility to the import- 
 ance of inventions, which are of hourly and indispensable use in 
 the ordinary business of social life, even in countries not more 
 advanced in civilization than our own. People in England 
 would now be as little inclined to dispense with the advantages 
 of railway transit and of the electric telegraph, as their fathers 
 would have been to exchange the fast travelling mail-coach of 
 their time, for the courier, who, in the reign of the Stuarts, was 
 charged with the conveyance of the most important despatches 
 at the rate of twenty-five miles a day. 
 
 What would be thought by the people of Europe and 
 America, who found the mail-coach and the steam-ship in- 
 adequate to the increasing demands o the age without the aid 
 of the steam-carriage, of the transport of the produce of this 
 colony by bullock-drays, which require several months to 
 
 perform
 
 Essay VIT.] EAILWAYS AND TELEGEAPHS. 31 
 
 perform a journey of four hundred miles, a journey which not 
 unfrequently involves a loss of more than one team, and too 
 commonly a serious deterioration of property ? 
 
 That the unenlightened among the native-born should, like 
 their coloured brethren of the soil, see in this nothing but a 
 consequence of residing at a distance of four hundred miles 
 from the capital, may be conceived. But that a member of the 
 Legislative Covmcil, a gentleman representing the county in 
 wliich the capital of Australia is situated, a gentleman who is 
 not supposed to be behind others in English and continental 
 experience, should express an opinion in Council, that the time 
 occupied in the conveyance of colonial produce from the interior 
 to the capital, might be regarded as a matter of little importance, 
 must excite the indignant surprise of every thinking man, of 
 all who take an interest in the diffusion of intelligence and in 
 the education of the rising generation. Few, in selecting this 
 land for the home of their families, could have supposed that 
 while America vies with the Old World, Australia would be 
 satisfied with a condition little better than that of the interior of 
 Britain at the period of the Eoman conquest. 
 
 Energy in a people can do much to advance, and the want of 
 it almost everything to retard, the progress of their country. 
 But the latter can scarcely annihilate the advantages of the 
 unrivalled harbour of Port Jackson, nor the former convert the 
 mud-banks of Port Phillip into a safe or commodious haven. A 
 chart of the Southern Seas will at once show that Port Jackson 
 is as well adapted by its situation as its extent, to become the 
 great outport of this hemisphere. 
 
 The first object of a people who aspire to a high mercantile 
 character, should be to facilitate every approach to their 
 metropolis : and the ports in which their cargoes are shipped 
 
 and
 
 32 EAILWAYS AND TELEGEAPHS. [Essay VII. 
 
 and discharged, should present the most ample maritime accom- 
 modation. 
 
 The coast of the Australian continent, and especially that 
 portion to the south of Port Jackson, is most dangerous. The 
 capital swept away by the loss of small vessels during the last 
 year, would have gone far towards the expense of constructing a 
 railway to Melbourne, a road that would, on its completion, 
 make Sydney the port for receiving and shipping the produce 
 of Victoria a road of which Van Diemen's Land would avail 
 herself, by conveying her exports across the Straits to the Port 
 Phillip terminus, instead of sending small coasters on a perilous 
 voyage to Sydney. The Australian seas would then be 
 navigated solely by steam and other vessels, of suflScient size to 
 avoid the dangers of a lee-shore. 
 
 The foundation of so important a work cannot be laid too 
 early, and measures should at once be taken to prevent all 
 interference with the due progress of the undertaking. 
 
 What could more happily tend to raise the character of the 
 colony to attract intelligent strangers to her shores than the 
 determination of the local legislature to apply all the means at 
 its disposal to the opening of her vast resources, by the execution 
 of great public works ? What so highly calculated to enlarge 
 and improve the minds of the native-bom ? 
 
 A description of the electric telegraph which connects 
 England with France, or of works now associated in Europe 
 even with journeys of pleasure, would a century ago have been 
 looked upon as the fantasies of an insane mind or the marvels 
 of a fairy tale. 
 
 Telegraphic despatch may unquestionably be conducted 
 across the main ocean as well as across a channel, and with 
 greater safety ; for, removed from the disturbing causes to be 
 
 overcome
 
 Essay VII.] RAILWAYS AND TELEGRAPHS. 33 
 
 overcome in shallow waters, the apparatiis would find its level 
 far below the rage of storms or the drift of wrecks, and beyond 
 the attacks of fishes, and would, through profound darkness and 
 silence, convey, with inconceivable velocity, the thoughts, the 
 sentiments, and the wishes of those engaged in the business of 
 the upper world. 
 
 The execution of such gigantic works not only tends to raise 
 the mind from the grovelling pursuits with which it is too much 
 occupied, but to invigorate and fit it to contemplate the infinite 
 wisdom displayed in the Creation. 
 
 1853. 
 
 D
 
 ESSAY VIII. 
 
 RAIL COMMUNICATION IN AUSTRALIA. 
 
 THE author of a paper on Eailways, which appeared in the 
 first number of the Sydney University Magazine, has treated 
 the subject much after the manner of a retail dealer who 
 contemplates the purchase and sale of a chest of tea ; and, were 
 no higher consideration involved in the question, he might be 
 allowed to have succeeded in showing, that the introduction of 
 railways into the colony is not warranted in the present state of 
 its means and population. But, referring to the source from 
 which this paper emanated, we may justly feel disappointed that 
 the question has not been considered under aspects that involve 
 a higher principle than that which governs a contract for the 
 removal of sand drift, or the distribution of hot rolls through 
 the city. 
 
 In the discussion of every question which affects the public 
 interest, it would be unreasonable to look for a treatise on the 
 responsibility of Governments, or the social and political circum- 
 stances
 
 Essay VIII.] RAIL COMMUNICATION, ETC. 35 
 
 Stances of man during his journey through life. But, in a 
 colony, in which the moral tone is manifestly so weak, in which 
 even the physical condition of the people may well challenge the 
 consideration of the most intelligent and reflecting, we might 
 expect that the author of a work addressed to us from the 
 fountain of literature and science, would, in a paper on railways, 
 aim at]liigher things than the pecuniary profit likely to result 
 from the capital employed in their construction. 
 
 The subject of railways, indeed, of all means of communica- 
 tion between the capital and the remote parts of an unreclaimed 
 country, between the sources of religious and political light, and 
 the inhabitants of districts cut off" from all ordinary communica- 
 tion with the rest of mankind, is at all times entitled to earnest 
 consideration. But in a colony, the future condition of which 
 must greatly depend on the foundation now laid for its moral and 
 political character, a colony that has so strenuously exerted itself 
 to secure for the rising generation the higher branches of 
 education, no attempt should be made to dispose of the subject 
 without the fullest consideration of its general bearing and 
 operation on the social condition of the people. 
 
 The author has rather strangely said, at page 34, *' The 
 number of cattle and horses is too small to be worth considering." 
 The supply of homed cattle for Sydney alone amounts to upwards 
 of thirty -three thousand per annum ; and from the remoteness of 
 the pastures from which the animals are driven, particularly in 
 times of drought, all the fat commonly a great part of the flesh 
 is lost during the journey ; added to which, jobbers and dealers, 
 availing themselves of the irregularity of the supply, demand what 
 price they think proper, and, at the expense of the public, amass 
 wealth that is seldom productive of any advantage to the colony. 
 Brought by rail from their pastures, the animals would not only 
 
 D 2 arrive
 
 M" 
 
 36 RAIL COMMUNTCATION [Essay VIII. 
 
 arrive in the best condition, but tbe supply might be regulated 
 in a way to avoid the worst description of combination. One 
 pound a head, a sum that would certainly be saved both by the 
 grazier and the consumer, would contribute 33,000?. per annum 
 to the earnings of the railway. The omission by the author of 
 this item, whether from ignorance of the facts, or from hasty and 
 careless writing, is inexcusable in a paper calculated to operate 
 on the minds of parties who have no means of making inquiry 
 into the subject, and who might be led into the most unwarrant- 
 able conclusions. The same observations apply to the demand 
 and supply of grain, added to which, the most fertile parts of 
 the country, now far beyond the reach of a market, might, as 
 the necessary consequence of railway communication, be culti- 
 vated in preference to the poor and worn-out lands at this time 
 under tillage. It must also be borne in mind, that Australia, 
 like Palestine, is visited by frequent and, although partial, 
 extensive droughts. At such times it is often impossible to 
 bring supplies to market, and the colony is, to a great extent, 
 dependent on the importation of foreign grain. By the cultiva- 
 tion of parts of the country very differently situated, the terrible 
 effects of drought might, in a great measure, be guarded against. 
 The frequent importation of grain, which this country has, 
 owing to the present limited cultivation, to provide for, may 
 swallow ^up capital quite sufficient for the execution of all the 
 works which the most sanguine advocates for railways propose. 
 
 Another important item, left out of the author's calculation, is 
 the construction and repair of public roads. He has told us that 
 the Macadamizing of George-street cost 15,000Z. a mile. It is 
 singular that in stating this fact the author should have omitted 
 to take into account the enormous sum now expended in the 
 repair of public roads, which would be annually saved by the 
 
 construction
 
 \^ 
 
 Essay VIII.] IN AUSTBALIA. 
 
 construction of leading lines of railway lines which when once 
 formed are kept in repair at inconceivably less expense than the 
 most ordinary parish roads. It is true that certain roads would 
 still be required, but the heavy and most damaging work would 
 be conducted by rail. In tliQ climate of New South Wales it is 
 probable that the cost annually incurred in the reparation of a 
 much-used pubHc road would amount to ten times that of a railway. 
 
 The cost of constructing railways, to connect the cities of 
 Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide, would be borne by the three 
 colonies, which would then be relieved, not only from the 
 expense of the present mode of communication, but also, to a 
 great extent, from that of coast navigation. 
 
 Locomotives may, however, except in certain parts of the 
 colony, give place to horse power ; and it is painful to con- 
 template the accidents which, amongst an ignorant and drunken 
 population, must result from steam propulsion. 
 
 With far steeper gradients, and at much less expense, 
 communication, at the rate of eight or nine miles an hour, could 
 be kept up by horses working night and day on tramways ; a 
 vast improvement upon the present conveyance of goods at the 
 rate of ten or fifteen miles a day. But, whatever mode may be 
 adopted for propelling carriages, effectual communication with 
 the remote parts of the country can never be kept up without 
 rails. To insure this important object, if the capital employed 
 in the construction of railways were entirely sunk, if the utmost 
 that could be effected were the payment of the current expenses 
 of management, it might be a question for writers who have more 
 deeply considered the moral and political consequences of rail 
 communication than the author of the paper under consideration 
 appears to have done, whether the interests of the colony might 
 not be best served by the construction of railways. 
 
 The
 
 38 RAIL COMMUNICATION [Essay Vm. 
 
 The writer appears to think that no expenditure of money 
 can be proper that is not capable of a full and perfect return. 
 This is the argument, not of the political economist, but of the 
 shopkeeper. Is the Sydney University an institution that will 
 yield to the colony any interest for the money expended in up- 
 holding it ? Of the cost of all public works a large percentage 
 is annually swept away. Even in old countries, how much 
 diminished is the value of those which are transmitted to the 
 succeeding generation ! In so young a country as New South 
 Wales, our descendants must forgive us if we call upon them 
 to cancel our obligation to account for the capital we have 
 expended in the construction of works of public utility. They 
 should be content even to submit to the expense of preserving 
 and keeping them for pubHc use, a weight they might bear 
 with less difficulty than we the cost of their construction. 
 
 It is a sad reflection that, while the arts and sciences have 
 made such gigantic strides in the world, the great mass of man- 
 kind is but little advanced in religious and moral character from 
 the condition in which our ancestors lived many centuries ago, 
 that even in civilized England, himdreds of thousands of persons 
 are incapable of reading and writing. 
 
 In the remote and scattered population of a poor colony, a 
 large portion of the inhabitants is destitute of all instruction 
 and moral training ; far beyond the reach of the heroic exer- 
 tions, the untiring zeal, the tenderness displayed by ladies in 
 Sunday-schools, they grow up, amongst the animals they tend, 
 with their passions only for their guide. Did it never occur to 
 the writer of the paper under consideration, that any invention 
 that annihilates space is, in such a country, of the deepest im- 
 portance in a moral point of view ; that the glorious lights of the 
 Gospel fly with the panting engine into the remotest wilderness ; 
 
 that
 
 Essay VIH.] IN AUSTEALIA. 39 
 
 that tlie good government, nay, the very existence of the colony, 
 in a great measure, depends on such means of communication ? 
 
 But it may be the object of this paper to show that the intel- 
 ligence of the country yields no gold coin to the realm, that no 
 treasury in this world is open for the deposit of moral character ; 
 that that contributes nothing to the wealth of the State. Has 
 the author even succeeded in supporting this view ? Again we 
 must turn to the savage wilderness for a reply. We must look 
 at the general condition of Australia : extending to bounds that 
 constitute a world by itself, it is intersected by vast regions of 
 desert, incapable of supporting the animals by which they are 
 traversed, while the mineral and other riches of the colony must 
 inevitably lead to large concentrations of its inhabitants. The 
 city of Sydney with its suburbs has probably a population of 
 seventy thousand persons, and those of other of the Australian 
 colonies are fast approaching to the same number. These 
 dense masses of people are, in many respects, connected with 
 each other, and are all dependent on remote grazing and agri- 
 cultural establishments. 
 
 Let us hope that, when the government of the country shall 
 be in hands capable of developing its resources, and when the 
 administration of those resources shall be directed by skilful and 
 scientific men, it will be found that the construction of railways 
 is not an undertaking so formidable as might be inferred from 
 the paper under consideration. That, as increasing light is 
 thrown upon the condition of the colony, the energy and 
 character of those who have made it their home will be found 
 equal to the objects to be accomplished ; and that the colony 
 will then be capable of supporting a moral and intelligent popu- 
 lation. If not, it cannot be too soon abandoned to the savage 
 condition in which it was discovered by Captain Cook. 1855. 
 
 ^
 
 ESSAY IX. 
 
 PKOSPECTS OF IKELAND. 
 
 A LAW of unceasing change presides as imperiously over 
 nations as over the humblest individuals. The imme- 
 diate operation, however, of this subtle tendency is, owing to 
 the longer duration and the more extensive and complicated 
 relations of the former, less perceptible in them than in the 
 latter. 
 
 Yet such are the inevitable results of this law of change, that 
 we can discern scarcely any point of resemblance between 
 aspects assumed by the same country at different periods of its 
 history. The contrast which presents itself between the archi- 
 tecture of a baronial fortress and that of a modern mansion, is 
 not more striking than that between our habits and sentiments 
 and those of our ancestors. 
 
 Who in contemplating, in their first results, the successive 
 conquests of England by the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, and 
 the Norman, could have conceived that the noble race now 
 
 dominant
 
 Essay IX.] PROSPECTS OP IRELAND. 
 
 dominant in that country, would be indebted, for their great 
 moral and physical qualities, to the wars that brought desolation 
 to the hearths of their ancestors, sweeping away both rulers and 
 institutions that on the children of those who bent beneath 
 the scourge, should be conferred the mental capacity and the 
 energy of the conqueror? Who could have conjectured that 
 unvanquished Scotland should have been led on to civilization 
 and refinement by the people, that a few centuries before she 
 viewed from her mountain fastnesses with suspicion and con- 
 tempt ? 
 
 Few observers of the prostrate condition of Ireland expect 
 to find in her misery and degradation the elements of her 
 future greatness. Yet unexampled prosperity may be predicted 
 as the effect of mighty convulsions which have apparently 
 shattered her energies and her hopes. 
 
 How little was it suspected, that the temporary failure of the 
 potato, which, firom its easy cultivation, Mr. Cobbett main- 
 tained would perpetuate the degradation of Ireland, might lead 
 to a remedy for evils which existed in that country before the 
 introduction of the plant itself from America ! How little was 
 it suspected that the continent from which the potato had 
 been imported, might eventually afford an asylum for the 
 famishing multitudes of Ireland ! How little, that the advance- 
 ment of Ireland to the highest moral character and dignity, was 
 likely to result from a calamity that had swept hundreds of 
 thousands of her children into a common grave ! Yet what is 
 more probable than that the emigration of a large portion of 
 her remaining inhabitants, and the sequestration and transfer of 
 her lands to British owners, may prove the means of effecting 
 in Ireland that change which followed the invasions and con- 
 quests of England? What so likely to regenerate Ireland as 
 
 9^
 
 42 PKOSPECTS OF IRELAND. [Essay IX. 
 
 the influx of British settlers, who with their capital will take 
 with them their sound judgment and their practical character ? 
 
 It has long been an enigma to all reflecting minds that a 
 country, on which nature has conferred unbounded fertility, and 
 a climate so congenial to the natives of the British Isles, should 
 have been utterly prostrated. Perhaps the solution of that 
 enigma is at hand. 
 
 That the fault is not wholly with the people, is evident from 
 their success as immigrants both in America and Australia, and 
 the distinguished character of many of their descendants in all 
 parts of the world. May not the infusion of foreign blood have 
 tended to promote in those descendants, the favourable result 
 derived by the English from their conquerors? The pecu- 
 liarities of the Irish people indicate the necessity of such a 
 change. With wit and eloquence the most brilliant, with 
 courage that has earned the highest honours in a hundred 
 battle-fields, and with the most generous and kindly nature, 
 they are deficient in those sturdier characteristics and that con- 
 sistent firmness of purpose, which constitute the peculiar moral 
 features of the people of England and Scotland. 
 
 In the North of Ireland, the introduction of Scottish emi- 
 grants has produced a mixed race, in which the high character- 
 istics of both the Irish and Scottish nations have blended them- 
 selves. 
 
 May it not be safely predicted, that when the neglected soil 
 of Ireland shall be cultivated with scientific skill, when the 
 vast natural resources of an island that has been justly styled 
 the Garden of the World shall be called forth, when the rapid 
 modes of modern travelling shall have brought within the reach 
 of genius and taste her grand and affecting scenery, when her 
 remaining population shall be amalgamated with British emi- 
 ^^ gi-ants, c^
 
 ^ 
 
 Essay IX.] 
 
 PROSPECTS OF lEELAND. 
 
 43 
 
 grants the union of Ireland with Great Britain will be one of 
 feeling and not of force, and the melancholy political contests of 
 centuries will be exchanged for a generous rivalry in exertions 
 for the common good of a mighty empire ? 
 
 1852. 

 
 ESSAY X. 
 
 THE MEMOKY. 
 
 THAT the brain constitutes the material organ which is 
 immediately subjected to the operation of the mind, will 
 hardly be questioned. The consideration, therefore, of the nature 
 of this organ cannot fail deeply to interest every one who is 
 desirous of ascertaining the mysterious purposes of the Creator 
 in such of his works as we are permitted to investigate. 
 
 The human brain consists of a congeries of matter so exten- 
 sive that its actual surface has been computed to be equal to 
 that of the whole body ; while the arrangement of its parts is 
 so evidently the result of design, that we are naturally led 
 to inquire for what objects this extraordinary structure was 
 intended. 
 
 Phrenologists have long assigned to each part of the brain a 
 separate office, and have estimated the capacity of the mind by 
 the relative quantities of the different portions of that organ on 
 which they suppose it to act ; but in what way it acts they 
 
 have
 
 Essay X.] MEMORY. 45 
 
 have not explained. If the distribution they have made be 
 well founded, it is obvious that a particular and distinctive part 
 of .this organ must be the immediate subject of each mental 
 operation, and it may not be an unreasonable conjecture, that 
 this widely-extended surface is the part acted on. 
 
 Take, for example, one of the simplest processes of the mind ; 
 the record it makes of the scenes which are presented to us. If 
 an impression be made in early life, before the brain has been 
 overtasked, it is always easily revived : latent it may be for 
 years, for many years ; but so far is it from becoming extinct 
 that some accidental occurrence, the mention of a person or 
 incident connected with it, immediately brings up the picture 
 of the past in all its marked outlines and with all its glowing 
 colours. 
 
 And it does more: it brings up a himdred other pictures 
 which have also lain in total obscurity, and which seem to have 
 no further connection with each other than the views that are 
 contained in the same portfolio. May we not suppose that the 
 surface of certain organs or parts of the brain constitute a living 
 portfolio ? The objects we look upon pass through that small 
 but highly-finished telescope, the eye, and paint their image 
 on the retina ; the retina does not retain the picture, but trans- 
 mits it to the brain. Why should not the next operation be 
 that of engraving it on the surface of that part of the brain 
 which is appropriated for its preservation? why should not the 
 picture be actually indented on the brain, there to remain until 
 the final destruction of that organ ? How well does such a sup- 
 position correspond with the mental operation ! A scene is 
 viewed, is recollected for years ; so vividly recollected, that 
 we fancy the impression incapable of being strengthened : the 
 scene is again visited, how well does it correspond with the old 
 \4^^, impression, 
 
 G^.
 
 46 MEMOEY. [Essay X. 
 
 impression, but for a time how much more vivid is the pic- 
 ture ! Is not this very like a retouching of the old engraving ? 
 How indelible, as we have already remarked, are the impres- 
 sions which are made in early life when the brain is unoccu- 
 pied ! How evanescent are those which are made when every 
 part is crowded with impressions,^when the portfolio is filled, 
 the drawing-paper used up, and the same ground has been 
 occupied and reoccupied, until a confused blending takes 
 place, and the outlines are too faint to be accurately retained, 
 even for a short period, if they pass not away beyond the dawn 
 of our earthly consciousness ! 
 
 "With mind, abstracted from the material nature of the 
 medium through which it acts we are, in this imperfect and 
 transitory state, unacquainted. In the future and eternal con- 
 dition of the soul, unchained to mortal bodies, we may approach 
 nearer to the Divine nature, and then only be capable of 
 appreciating the infinite wisdom and perfection of the Creator.
 
 ESSAY XL 
 
 BEAUTY. 
 
 PLACED, during this short life, in a body under physical 
 conditions that subject him to innumerable maladies, man 
 is, even in his happiest circumstances, affected by wants and 
 infirmities common to lower animals, the peculiarities of which 
 it is impossible to contemplate without disgust. Yet, instead of 
 receiving with humility the frame provided by his Creator for 
 his material existence, he has offered to the poor tenement the 
 homage of his worship, and has assigned to it a mysterious 
 grace called Beauty a phantom that eludes his grasp is ever 
 gliding into regions of deformity and shame. 
 
 Demand explanation of the worshippers of this chimera, and 
 you are mocked by a charge of want of taste ; nay, you are 
 urged to create the thing they are in pursuit of; to model 
 the idol they would have you worship. You are told there is 
 no standard by which beauty can be determined, that what is 
 by one person enthusiastically admired, excites aversion in the 
 
 mind
 
 48 
 
 BEAUTY. 
 
 [Essay X. 
 
 mind of another. And so insensibly do we allow ourselves to 
 be dictated to, in everything that relates to this undefinable 
 quality, that we are led to surrender our judgment to the 
 blank force of accidental caprice ; to view without disgust the 
 tailless horse and the distorted waist of woman victims of 
 European fashion : even to hear with indifference of the crip- 
 pled foot, thought indispensable to female beauty in China. 
 
 Taste is the property the Creator has implanted in the human 
 mind, to enable us to appreciate the finer relations, whether ma- 
 terial or spiritual, of his works to the Divinity they proclaim. 
 And this property, if not vitiated or misdirected, has a tendency 
 to raise our feelings from admiration of the thing created to 
 reverence for the Creator : to awaken sentiments which lead us 
 from the contemplation of our condition here, to the great First 
 Cause by which that condition was ordained. And what is 
 beauty but the adaptation of means to an end? Does the 
 attenuated calf, or the lengthened heel, indicate no weakness ? 
 Do the distorted waist, the crippled foot, in no way interfere 
 with the functions assigned to them? Do the short neck and 
 the flaccid limb offer no impediment to healthy action? But 
 the face, it is urged the shape and proportions of the face can 
 surely in no way affect the design of the Creator. The sunken 
 eye of the Tartar of the desert, the broad and clear eye of the 
 Saxon here taste alone must surely determine the standard. 
 Not so ! the eye of the Tartar demands our admiration for its 
 adaptation to the arid plains to which it is exposed. Certain 
 organs were necessary. Well packed, they are contained in 
 that oval frame which constitutes the perfect human face. The 
 square jaw may indicate superior strength ; but beyond its due 
 proportion that strength is useless, and therefore destructive of 
 beauty. The nose, the lips, the ears, may be too large or too 
 
 small
 
 EssAT XI.] BEAUTY. 49 
 
 small too long or too short, and, urges the objector, without 
 detracting from their utility. Extend the organs to undue pro- 
 portions, and the most depraved taste is conscious of a want of 
 fitness. 
 
 The object of the Creator is, in all things, to give the greatest 
 possible power, with the least possible incumbrance. The body 
 of an animal is an apparatus constructed for the performance of 
 certain offices, arranged with the harmony that constitutes its 
 only claim to beauty. Give to the Venus the arm or the leg of 
 the Hercules, unnecessary strength would be conferred without 
 the power to use it, and at the obvious expense of symmetry. 
 
 When we assign deformity to nature, we disclose our igno- 
 rance of the design of the Creator. How uncouth, when too 
 closely observed, the elephant, the camel, the giraffe; but 
 view them at a distance, witness their exercise of the functions 
 assigned to them how charming is the adaptation of means to 
 an end ! 
 
 All nature proclaims the knowledge, the wisdom of the 
 Creator. The mountains, rugged indeed and wild, are means 
 by which those waters are stored that cover the plains with 
 verdure. The undulations of the hills, every line in the con- 
 tour of the country, how necessary ! How beneficent the 
 arrangement of the unnumbered flowers, that whisper with 
 odorous breath of the wisdom and goodness of God, that trea- 
 sure honey for the bee, which, in performing her appointed 
 task, hums forth a hymn of praise ! 
 
 But the expression of the face, the kindly or repulsive look, 
 surely on taste alone depends rejection or approval there ; yet 
 there the soul shines out reveals its inmost thought its 
 subtlest feeling. Language may skilfully deceive, and, like a 
 game well played, mark not the truth but cunning of the man. 
 
 E But
 
 BEAUTY. [Essay XI. 
 
 But oh ! the trace that vice, despair, and suflfering leave upon 
 the brow ; the furrowed marks of evil passions cherished long 
 of guilty knowledge, how they mar the fairest face that 
 nature ever formed for love ! 
 
 What is it claims our deference for beauty ? It is that God's 
 most perfect work vibrates on a chord that wakes the deepest 
 sentiment of worship He has planted in the huflaan heart. To 
 bind his creatures to Himself; to win the wanderer in tliis wil- 
 derness of woe back to Hia heaven of love.
 
 ESSAY XII. 
 
 VESTIGES OF THE NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION.' 
 
 THE author of this work conceives, that upon a principle of 
 development, changes from imperfect to perfect animals 
 ascending to man, have been in operation from the earliest 
 stage of animal life ; and that these changes have taken place, 
 not suddenly and abruptly, but by stealthy and imperceptible 
 elaboration during vast periods of time. He supposes that all 
 animals, man included, which have at any time existed, grew 
 out of each other under a law of the Divine will impressed upon 
 matter at the creation. He contends there is no warrant for 
 supposing that the boundless varieties of animal and vegetable life 
 were created by several independent acts of God. 
 
 The book has been assailed on various grounds, but chiefly on 
 account of its supposed tendency to materialism and to infidelity, 
 a charge which the author has in late editions successfully 
 combated, and which his theory does not involve. It is surely 
 quite as consistent with our belief in the Divine superintendence 
 of the world to suppose that the Creator, in His infinite wisdom, 
 
 E 2 so
 
 52 VESTIGES OF THE [Essay XII. 
 
 so constituted natural operations that they should proceed from 
 step to step until their arrival at the highest point, as that He 
 should have devised the principle of generation by which a 
 succession of beings is maintained. The theory of the author 
 has also been condemned, with as little justice, on account of its 
 supposed opposition to the Mosaic history of the creation. This 
 change has been happily treated in the Theologian and Eccle- 
 siastic. " False notions of Scripture science," observe the 
 writers, "may be productive of the very worst effects. The 
 present accepted theory of the heavens was long resisted as un- 
 scriptural. It is, however, established on arguments partaking in 
 a great measure of mathematical rigour. What is the result ? 
 Has it engendered scepticism ? No ; it is received by the most 
 implicit believers in Revelation. It has been foimd not to 
 oppose, but to confirm the Scripture philosophy. The danger 
 attendant on scientific pursuits has at all times had its origins 
 in a great degree, in false notions of the nature of Scripture 
 physics. The object of the sacred writers is not kept in view- 
 Holy Scripture may (we hope without irreverence) be compared 
 to a map, which exhibits minutely all the details of the country 
 which it professes to represent, but sketches in mere outline the 
 frontier countries." The erroneous conclusion of the author 
 is, that of attributing the succession of animals to their develop- 
 ment from each other. In this conclusion, I conceive, he is not 
 borne out by any evidence laid before his readers. 
 
 If his theory were sound, and the development proceeded in 
 a natural order of events, that is, by a law originally impressed 
 by the Creator upon matter, it is obvious that that law would be 
 still in operation. And, although the author might be warranted 
 in supposing that it would cease when its object should have 
 been accomplished when all animals had arrived at the highest 
 
 degree
 
 %^ 
 
 Essay XII.] NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 
 
 degree of perfection they were capable of that is, when all had 
 been consummated in the human species yet, until that point 
 had been attained, this law would remain in force. Now we 
 find that this is not the case; and I think sufficient negative 
 evidence is within reach to show that such a law never was in 
 operation. 
 
 Upon the principle of development, great changes take place 
 in animals as well as vegetables ; in the horse and bull for 
 instance, from the wild parents to the high-bred animals now 
 existing; but, with all the changes that are permitted, a law 
 .appears to be in operation that says, " Hitherto shalt thou come, 
 hut no further." 
 
 The author endeavours to meet this difficulty by pointing at 
 periods of such vast duration, that those over which our know- 
 ledge of the history of the world extends are by comparison 
 reduced to a point. But the evidence we have before iis is fatal 
 to this theory. 
 
 Let us suppose, with the author, man to have been developed 
 fi'om one of the reptiles that were formerly masters of the earth. 
 What must have been the process? At one period, raised upon 
 its hind legs, then applying rudimentary hands to offices in some 
 respect resembling those to which the human hand is now 
 appUed, and exercising the control such an animal must have 
 been capable of, and, of course, multiplying unchecked by those 
 which were less developed. Why have we found no remains of 
 these transformations? The author replies, that the organic 
 phenomena of geology are widely separated, broken and dis- 
 jointed. What? We have whole races, first appearing, then 
 increasing, then disappearing and new races gradually taking 
 their place the trilobitc, the nautilus, the fish, the fish-like 
 saurian, the land saurian, the pachyderm, all separated by the 
 
 most
 
 54 VESTIGES OP THE [Essay XII. 
 
 most marked distinctions. Of every species relics have been 
 disentombed. What is true of man, is true of the horse, of the ox, 
 of the sheep. Where are their progenitors ? Is it conceivable 
 that, while those books of stone the author has so carefully in- 
 spected have faithfully rendered account of every one of these, 
 they should not have afforded any, the slightest, record of the 
 transition state? Strange they should have exhibited no 
 Almost-a-Man, no Nearly-a-Horse, no transition-organization 
 from the sheep to the cow. What is there to justify the 
 author's conclusions? From analogies, real or supposed from 
 points of resemblance, no real support for his theory is gained. 
 The form was governed by the object, and that was to a great 
 extent common. That exquisite instrument, the eye, was 
 suppHed alike to the trilobite and to man adapted indeed to the 
 circumstances in which the animal lived ^but was the eye still ; 
 all were provided with glands for secretion of nourishment. 
 Some properties closely resembling those of animals are common 
 even to the vegetable kingdom. 
 
 But do these facts involve relationship or affinity? In like 
 manner the hands and the feet may, in different animals, 
 bear a resemblance ; the fin of the whale, for instance, to the 
 human hand, because they were required for the same purpose. 
 There is a unity in aU the works of the Creator. They all bear 
 the divine impress animals and rocks alike gravitate to the 
 earth ; but is the animal, therefore, a development of the 
 stone ? 
 
 From the extinction of races nothing can be inferred, but a 
 failure of the condition necessary to their existence, perhaps of 
 their food, possibly from changes of the terrestial temperature. 
 Since the creation of man, many animals have become extinct 
 the dodo, the Irish elk, probably the apteryx of New Zealand, 
 
 These
 
 Essay XII.] jPTATUBAL HISTORY OF CREATION. 55 
 
 These were unable to contend with man he, then, too savage 
 to protect the animals on which he subsisted. The bison of 
 America and the elk of Canada must follow as the wolf of 
 England did long since. Does any one suppose that these 
 animals have been developed into other races ? 
 
 The author, with great appearance of justice and probability, 
 argues that the several conditions of vegetable and animal life 
 on this globe resulted, not from separate and independent acts 
 of the Creator, but that the periods or conditions under which 
 they came into existence were ordered by Infinite intelligence 
 before the creation of the world. But it does not, therefore, 
 follow that their specific existences, one ajter the other, were 
 the result of development onQfrom another. It is just as con- 
 sistent widi the jvill of the Creator (however early expressed) 
 with the prescience of God that altered conditions of the globe 
 should call new creatures into primary existence as that they 
 should descend from each other; and the records we have of 
 the creation accord with this view. In the disclosures these 
 records make, one class follows another, like the first and second 
 sets of teeth in the animal ; not as development, which includes 
 a principle of progression, but as novel qualities of character. 
 Distinctions are always preserved always marked. All the 
 fossil remains are as fully capable of classification, are as dis- 
 tinguishable from each other, as the various animal species that 
 now occupy the earth. 
 
 The author of the ' Vestiges of the Natural History of 
 Creation' observes that a great deal has been discovered; 
 too much indeed for his theory. Why has the kangaroo of 
 Australia produced no change developed itself into no higher 
 character ? 
 
 If it be consistent with the author's views that the like 
 
 should
 
 56 
 
 NATURAL HISTORY OF CREATION. [Essay XII. 
 
 should produce the like, except in extraordinary instances which 
 present themselves in the course of ages, those extraordinary- 
 instances involve that which it is the object of his treatise to 
 deny. They are occurrences against the order of nature they 
 must be special acts of the Creative Power.
 
 ESSAY XIII. 
 
 A HISTORY OF FAILURES. 
 
 WOUNDED pride, a broken heart, and the injustice of 
 mankind, have all tended to suppress a record of exertions 
 that have ended in the ruin or disappointment of the projector. 
 Such a history would nevertheless confer greater benefit upon 
 mankind, and throw more light upon the difficult problems we 
 desire to solve, than tlie self-gratulations that too commonly 
 accompany the announcement of exertions which have been 
 crowned with success, and in which the most valuable informa- 
 tion is not unfrequently withheld. 
 
 Who can imagine the struggles which have been made by 
 thousands of men of genius, whose names are unrecorded, and 
 who have left this world under a cloud that has veiled their 
 efforts, without feeling that rewards are in this life conferred by 
 a Power whose mysterious designs we are unable to fathom ? 
 Who can contemplate the near approach many have made to 
 the noblest discoveries, without believing that the knowledge of 
 
 their
 
 58 A HISTOKY OF FAILURES. [Essay XIII, 
 
 their experience would have enabled others to continue their 
 inquiries with complete success ? Who can be insensible of the 
 importance of a knowledge of even entire failure, and of impe- 
 diments to future progress that can never be removed ? 
 
 We honour and esteem the illustrious ad-venturers who 
 discovered the distribution of land and water on the earth's 
 surface ; who marked and surveyed the intricacies of harbours 
 and shoals, and who have enabled the mariner to conduct his 
 vessel, unharmed, to the most distant portions of the globe. 
 What is the history these benefactors of mankind have left, but 
 one of unnumbered failures and disappointments nay, the very 
 names by which they occasionally distinguished the places they 
 have visited, such as Eeid's Mistake and Cape Disappointment, 
 proclaim what they have lost as well as what they have gained. 
 What would be thought of a mariner if he were to destroy his 
 charts, because the port he was in search of remained undis- 
 covered ? 
 
 We trace with jealous care the rejected lines of a Shakspeare 
 and a Gray, why not the experiments which, though they have 
 disappointed the inquirer, may yet enable him who follows to 
 resolve a nebula or indicate the path of a comet ? If the specu- 
 lations of Newton had not been prosecuted by La Place, the 
 perturbations of the planets and the precession of the equinoxes 
 might for ever have remained undiscovered. Even the failure 
 of the immediate object of the inquirer may be amply com- 
 pensated by some unlocked for result. Villemain, in a lecture 
 on the Middle Ages, in allusion to what he conceived to be the 
 object of Columbus in prosecuting his voyages, observes, that 
 though he failed to find the four rivers of Paradise, he dis- 
 covered America. 
 
 From what can we derive greater benefit in our journey 
 
 through
 
 Essay XIII.] 
 
 A HISTORY OF FAILURES. 
 
 59 
 
 through life than from the knowledge we gain, not by our 
 successes, but by the failure of our schemes ? Knowledge that 
 deeply, perhaps painfully, impressed on the mind, influences all 
 our actions, becomes a monitor to restrain and direct our course, 
 and truly constitutes the wisdom of age.
 
 SECOND PART.
 
 dS 
 
 ESSAY XIV. 
 
 THE LATE BISHOP BROUGHTON. 
 
 IT is certainly not more true that the works of good men do 
 follow them, than that the impression their virtues have 
 made on the minds of those they are no longer able to benefit, 
 is apt too soon to fade away. 
 
 Bishop Broughton has for ever departed from the scene in 
 which, for many years, he acted a prominent part ; and as few 
 seem to be capable of appreciating his character, it may not be 
 xminteresting to those who acknowledge, nor to those who 
 question, the justness of many of his views, to call to remem- 
 brance, before the impression be entirely effaced, peculiarities of 
 his mind and character on which his friends love to linger, and 
 which those who do not admire, can hardly fail to respect. 
 
 None will deny the claim of Bishop Broughton to great 
 learning and to mental endowments of a veiy high order ; and 
 many who at one time hesitated to subscribe to his opinions, 
 became painfully sensible, after his departure from the colony, 
 that the Church was no longer directed by the vigorous hand 
 
 of
 
 ft 
 
 64 THE LATE BISHOP BROUGHTON. [Essay XIV. 
 
 of a master. They noiv feel that it is not easy to repair the 
 loss it has sustained by his death. 
 
 While labouring for the general welfare of the Church, 
 Bishop Broughton never omitted to give due attention, even to 
 those things which exclusively occupy little and ordinary minds, 
 but which, affecting the comfort of the working clergy, ought 
 assuredly not to be disregarded. Few, indeed, of those who 
 most differed from him failed to acknowledge the charity with 
 which he treated the infirmities of his Clergy, nor that their 
 wants awakened a sympathy which, if not expressed by words, 
 led at once to measures for their relief. 
 
 It may not be generally known that Bishop Broughton 
 largely administered to the relief of even those who had no 
 claim on him but their sorrows and their sufferings ; and that, 
 while he was too often called upon to chide their wanderings, 
 he never failed to relieve their pain. If his manner was some- 
 times cold, his charity was never of that Levitical cast that 
 begins and ends with a gentle expression of sympathy. 
 
 In the cause of education he was untiring, and he never felt 
 that his obligations as a Bishop could be performed without 
 especial regard for those who, without the fostering care of the 
 Church, might too probably grow up in total ignorance of the 
 principles and duties of Christianity. 
 
 As a Churchman, he entertained profound veneration for 
 those great men who have ever been looked upon as models for 
 imitation, and safe guides in the difficult duties that especially 
 devolve upon the head of a remote colonial Church; and, 
 however much parties might occasionally be disposed to question 
 the soundness of his policy, his high character and firm con- 
 sistency called forth a universal feeling of deference and 
 respect. 
 
 As
 
 Essay XIV.] THE LATE BISHOP BROUGHTON. 65 
 
 As the head of the Church, he was frequently called upon to 
 act under circumstances of great difficulty. He was surrounded 
 by a clergy not generally capable of advising him, some of whom, 
 though now disposed to speak lightly of the dead, would have 
 met any inquiry for counsel and co-operation by an obsequious 
 expression of plenary reliance on the fulness of their Bishop's 
 wisdom. 
 
 It was the failing of Bishop Broughton, that he too frequently 
 allowed a rigid exterior to^ hide his warm and kindly heart ; and 
 in the belief that jew could assist him with their advice, to for- 
 get that any could do so. It is also possible, that in repelling 
 mountebank pretensions, not unfrequently dignified by the 
 name of sanctity, he was too much disposed to seclude himself 
 from the world in which he was called upon to act. He retired 
 to the fastnesses of the past, instead of adapting himself to the 
 requirements of the age in which he lived. 
 
 But whatever may have been his failings, he laboured zeal- 
 ously for the benefit of the Church was ever more anxious for 
 its success than his own interest or aggrandizement, and was, 
 least of all, capable of trafficking with its sacred offices or the 
 rights and claims of the Clergy. This is the secret of that 
 kindly feeling, the existence of which called forth an exclama- 
 tion from lips that ought to have been sealed against the expres- 
 sion of opinions, especially when founded on data entitled to 
 little consideration or respect. 
 
 But the memory of Bishop Broughton rests on too many acts 
 of a nobly Christian character to require the aid of the pane- 
 gyrist acts that, when the bustle of novelty shall have passed 
 away, will be justly appreciated, and will, in the ecclesiastical 
 history of our adopted land, awaken undying respect for the 
 first Bishop of the English Church in Australia. 
 
 F
 
 
 ESSAY XV. 
 
 CHARITY. 
 
 Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate 
 you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, and persecute you; 
 that you may be the children of your Father, which is in Heaven. 
 Matthew, v. 44, 45. 
 
 IF we were not under the highest obligation that can be im- 
 posed on Christians, the commandment deUvercd by our 
 Lord from the Mount of Olives, charitably to bear with the in- 
 firmity of our neighbours, a very little reflection ought to satisfy 
 us that a censorious spirit is as wicked as it is unwise, and that, 
 although we ought on no account to defer our preparation for the 
 life to come, we should never cease to hope that Divine grace 
 may, even at the eleventh hour, awaken from their slumbers the 
 most erring of the human race. The most abandoned of man- 
 kind, with all his infirmities and his guilt, may repent, may 
 through Divine grace be pardoned; may become an heir of 
 eternal life, a joint heir with Christ. And can we withhold 
 our pardon ? We, whose whole lives in the sight of Him who 
 
 "inspects
 
 Essay XV.] CHARITY. 67 
 
 " inspects the heart to its inmost folds," are but a series of acts 
 requiring forgiveness ? 
 
 But he may die in his sins, may receive the judgment of 
 eternal death ; how solemn, how terrible a subject for our con- 
 templation ! how poor, how vain, to add to the incx)nceivable 
 penalty the mite of our wrath. 
 
 " Though I bestow all ray goods to feed the poor, and though 
 I give my body to be burned, and have not charity, it profiteth 
 me nothing." 1 CoR., xiii. 3. 
 
 ^ 
 
 f2
 
 ESSAY XVI. 
 
 THE SHORTNESS OF HUMAN LIFE. 
 
 Our days on the earth are as a shadow, and there is none abiding. 
 1 Chronicles, xxix. 15. 
 
 'T^HIS feature in the present condition of the world is strik- 
 J- inglj developed by everything that presents itself to the 
 eye, by every circumstance that addresses itself to the imder- 
 standing. 
 
 In the vegetable world all is active progression towards 
 maturity and decay ; not a leaf but reads a lesson to the human 
 heart, and tells us that we have not a moment to lose. In 
 the animal kingdom the earliest gambols of the young are 
 fraught with the same moral ; and however happy the thought- 
 less being may seem during its little hour, all its movements 
 proclaim that it is hastening to an end. 
 
 And what is human life? With aspirations that eternity 
 only can satisfy, we are the tenants of bodies subject to innume- 
 rable infirmities ; we are, even in the happiest circumstances, 
 incapable of penetrating the higher mysteries of nature, and are 
 
 fast
 
 Essay XVI.] THE SHORTNESS OF HUMAN LIFE. 69 
 
 fast tending to the termination of the scene in which we are here 
 called upon to act to a state in which the things of this life 
 have no part. 
 
 Is the soul, then, immortal? who at some period or other of" 
 his life has not asked himself this question ? And who could 
 ever deliberately answer it in the negative ? The body may, 
 like the garment, the circumstances in which we are placed, 
 be changed, be laid aside, but who could ever seriously doubt 
 that death is a mere step in the process by which the great 
 object of our being is attained ? 
 
 A conviction of the immortality of the soul is impressed alike 
 on the scholar and the peasant, the Christian and the untaught 
 child of nature, and unconsciously presides over every operation 
 of the mind. Whence the anxiety so many, even of bad men 
 feel, that their names should be handed down to posterity, but 
 that they have an instinctive assurance that they can never 
 cease to be ? If our souls, like the matter of which the body is 
 composed, were returned to the great laboratory whence are 
 extracted the materials out of which all things are constructed, 
 why cherish a hope that our former being should be kept in 
 remembrance ? why desire that an incident should be connected 
 with a body that had been dissolved with a r^ame that had 
 perished for ever? 
 
 How well is this universal dictate of nature calculated to pre- 
 pare the human mind, the immortal soul for the truths dis- 
 closed by the Author of our existence, for the Scriptures, 
 which have recorded the history of our being, declared to us the 
 Divine will, explained to us the scheme of our redemption !
 
 ' ^t J^2? ^a^*~37 ^ 
 
 ^^ 
 
 
 (^ 
 
 i^^^llr-!( 
 
 f^. 
 
 'liis^ ^nsis"^ ^efe- 
 
 ESSAY XVII. 
 
 TIME. 
 
 Ow day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as 
 one day. 2 Peter, iii. 8. 
 
 OO subtle, so evanescent is the present moment, philosophi- 
 ^ cally considered, that we can contemplate its existence 
 only in the past. Before the mind can be brought to the con- 
 sideration, nay, the knowledge of an event, it is with the events 
 that occurred a thousand years ago. 
 
 If the sun were, by the fiat of the Creator, obliterated in an 
 instant, we should behold his splendour, receive his beams, nay 
 distinguish the spots on his surface for eight minutes, uncon- 
 scious of the change ; and if we could visit those inconceivably 
 more remote bodies which science has discovered, and look down 
 on this planet, unaffected by impediments arising from the in- 
 tervening space, we should witness a procession of events now 
 beyond the records of history. If we were to make our observa- 
 tions from one of the more distant stars, we should see the festi- 
 vities
 
 Essay XVII.] TIME. 71 
 
 vities with which the completion of the Pyramids was celebrated 
 by the monarchs of Egypt. Retreating to regions still more 
 remote, we should behold not only the newly-created man before 
 his expulsion from Paradise, but even this world at a period 
 long anterior to its occupation by the human race to the crea- 
 tion of the coralline limestone to the first volcanic emergence 
 of the land above the waters of the ocean. 
 
 " Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth ! When 
 I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and 
 the stars which thou hast ordained ; what is man, that thou art 
 mindful of him ? and the son of man, that thou visitest him ? "
 
 ESSAY XVIII. 
 
 ETERNITY. 
 
 Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth : and 
 the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou 
 shalt endure : they all shall wax old as doth a garment ; and as a ves- 
 ture shalt thou change them, and they shall be changed: but thou art 
 the same, and thy years shall not fail. Psalm, cii. 25, 26, 27. 
 
 OF eternity we can form no adequate idea. Whatever light 
 we may derive from metaphysical definitions, founded on 
 supposed analogies in nature, or from the refined processes of 
 numerical combination, we feel how vain is the attempt to 
 fathom the profound abyss. The consideration, however, of the 
 inconceivable difference, in point of duration, between the 
 period allotted by the Author of the Universe to each indi- 
 vidual creature for the exercise of the functions of animal life, 
 and that required for the revolution of the heavenly bodies, may 
 assist the vague conceptions with which we are too apt to be 
 satisfied on the subject. 
 
 Thoughtlessly as we behold the insect that passes through 
 
 the
 
 Essay XVIIL] ETEKNITY. 73 
 
 the various stages of its being in a single day, its life, when 
 compared with that of the most aged patriarch, extends over a 
 period inconceivably greater than Ms, when compared with the 
 time occupied by a single revolution of those bodies, which, 
 though moving with the utmost velocity, have, from being 
 apparently confined to the same unvarying spot in the heavens, 
 been denominated the fixed stars. 
 
 Sir William Herschel demonstrated, what had long been sus- 
 pected by astronomers, the progressive movement of the sun 
 through space ; and M. Maedler, the Eussian astronomer, from 
 an extensive series of observations, came to the conclusion that 
 what are called the fixed stars revolve round a body which 
 forms their common centre that to this system as well as to 
 ours the Newtonian law of attraction applies ; and he conceived 
 Alcyone, the brightest of the Pleiades, to be the true central 
 sun. 
 
 It has been computed, that the mass of this star is more than 
 one hundred million times that of our luminary, that its light 
 is upwards of five hundred years in travelling to us, and that 
 a single revolution of our Sun round that body requires a period 
 of eighteen millions of years. 
 
 That this stupendous machinery should have been intended 
 for the performance of a single revolution cannot be conceived : 
 and it is extremely improbable, that the objects for which it was 
 created should be finally attained even in a thousand of such 
 revolutions ; and yet, for the performance of a thousand revolu- 
 tions, eighteen thousand millions of years would be required, a 
 period which, vast as it now appears to us, is lost in comparison 
 with eternity is nothing to the duration of the soul. 
 
 How inconceivable is it, that man, who has received from his 
 Creator the power of contemplating such tremendous symbols of 
 
 infinity,
 
 74 ETERNITY. [Essay XVIII. 
 
 infinity, of bringing within his vision bodies so remote, and of 
 investigating the laws by which they are sustained and im- 
 pelled should, in the pursuit of objects alike transitory and 
 amworthy, lay aside his hopes of eternal life ! 
 
 We grasp with eagerness at the bubbles that present them- 
 selves during our short sojourn here, unmindful that we shall 
 survi^C^e the wreck of this mighty creation, recur to it as a tale 
 that is told, as a point that may be confoxmded with the life 
 of the ephemera. 
 
 We look with contempt upon the insect, and stand with awe 
 before the Pyramids of Egypt, without considering that all trace 
 of both, and even of the histories that record their existence, 
 will, during a single revolution of the heavenly bodies, have 
 disappeared. 
 
 On fallen man, placed in a state of probation, Divine Provi- 
 dence has imposed an easy yoke and a light burden has 
 enabled him, during his transitory life on this earth, to lay hold 
 of that hope to exercise that faith which, unmeritorious as 
 they are, infinite mercy has made the sole condition of his 
 admission to eternal happiness ; but with that condition we feel 
 a strange reluctance to comply, or like Naaman unaccountably 
 resist. 
 
 " What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world 
 and lose his own soul ?" Mark, viii. 36,
 
 ESSAY XIX. 
 
 THE PHYSICAL SUFFERINGS OF CHEIST. 
 
 / reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to he com- 
 pared with the glory which shall he revealed in us. Romans, viii. 18. 
 
 NOTHING indicates a lower conception of the character of 
 Christ than the lamentations in which so many indulge 
 when contemplating his physical sufferings upon the Cross. 
 
 His physical sufferings may not have been greater than those 
 of his disciples ; than those of thousands of human beings ; than 
 those which the American Indian and the disciple of Vishnou 
 volimtarily submit to with unshrinking fortitude; than those 
 which the thieves who were crucified with him endured upon 
 the Cross, and who survived to have their legs broken in the 
 evening. 
 
 The intenseness of his agony was occasioned by his knowledge 
 that the love which had induced him to leave the glories of 
 heaven, and to take upon himself our nature, had too commonly 
 appealed in vain to the human heart ; that his teaching was,
 
 76 PHYSICAL SUFFERINGS OF CHRIST. [Essay XIX. 
 
 in too many instances rejected by the perishing souls it was the 
 great object of his mission to save. 
 
 " Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for 
 yourselves and for your children," was his address to the 
 women who bewailed and lamented his fate. 
 
 It was this deeply-seated grief that burst forth in the affect- 
 ing apostrophe, at the sight of the devoted city of Judea, which 
 is recorded by St. Matthew : 
 
 " Jerusalem, Jesusalem ! thou that killest the Prophets, 
 and stonest them which are sent unto thee : how often would I 
 have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth 
 her chickens under her wings, and ye would not ! Behold your 
 house is left unto you desolate !" And that which we find in 
 St. Luke : 
 
 " And when he came near, he beheld the city, and wept 
 over it, saying. If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this 
 thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace ! but, now, 
 they are hid from thine eyes." 
 
 " God is a . Spirit, and they that worship him must worship 
 him in spirit and in truth." John, iv. 24.
 
 ESSAY XX. 
 
 THE AGENCY OF THE DEVIL. 
 
 Be sober, he vigilant^ because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, 
 waJketh about seeking whom he may devour. 1 Peter, v. 8. 
 
 IF we rightly understand from the Scriptures, that our Arch- 
 enemy is permitted to use every art of temptation to turn 
 us from the path that leads to eternal life, we ought to look for 
 his most strenuous exertions where his influence would natu- 
 rally be least suspected to believe, that it would be his great 
 object to poison the spring at its source, to enlist under his 
 banners the schoolmaster that should bring us to Christ, the 
 teachers and professors of religion; and we find accordingly 
 that in this direction he has ever been most actively engaged, 
 most unhappily successful. 
 
 In the early ages, when Christianity was only shadowed out 
 by types and symbols, craft, idolatry, and infidelity soon began 
 to make their appearance among the Jewish priests. The 
 respect challenged by their rank and sacred character inflamed 
 their pride, and gradually led to acts and demands, so plainly 
 
 opposed
 
 78 THE AGENCY OF THE DEVIL. [Essay XX. 
 
 opposed to the principles of the Divine law, that they were com- 
 pelled to have recourse to traditions, by which they, at once, 
 overawed the ignorant and strengthened their own general 
 
 influence. 
 
 These traditions had, at the time of our Lord's coming, 
 obtained so vast an ascendency, that they not only made the 
 commandments of none effect, but, in some instances, enabled the 
 priesthood to justify their direct infringement. 
 
 From the natural tendencies to veneration in the human 
 mind, the effect of these pretensions to a profound knowledge 
 oftraditional subtleties was to draw the multitude into a blind 
 submission to the dictates of the priests, and to open the way to 
 idolatry. With the thinking and the well informed, scepticism 
 was the consequence ; and this was eventually carried to such 
 an extent that a large and influential sect of the Jews openly 
 denied the immortality of the soul, and taught that there was no 
 resurrection, neither angel nor spirit. 
 
 When the profession of Christianity ceased to be attended by 
 the persecutions to which its early converts were subjected 
 when it became the religion of States and Empires then the 
 worldlings flocked to its standard, and we find the same enemy 
 actively employing, in the Christian Church, the means which 
 had been so successful with the Jewish priesthood. 
 
 Inflated with pride, and not xmmixed with the superstitions 
 of the heathen nations, the Church, even in the time of the 
 Apostles, afforded the most redundant evidence that all who 
 went out from us were not of us. 
 
 The throne of Rome was filled by one who claimed to be the 
 successor of St. Peter ; the Scriptures were closed ; the signs and 
 lying wonders foretold by our Lord were prepared to entrap the 
 \mwary, and, if it were possible, to deceive the A'^ery elect. The 
 
 traditions
 
 Essay XX.] THE AGENCY OF THE DEVIL. * 79 
 
 traditions of the Fathers were substituted for the word of Gk)d,' 
 and a blind obedience was again imposed on the people. 
 
 But there were ever found knees that had not bowed to Baal ; 
 and when the idolatry of Eome had arrived at the height that 
 God permitted, then came the Reformation. The traditions 
 were rejected the lying wonders discarded ; the gospel was 
 preached to the poor. The Sermon, delivered by our Lord 
 from the Mount of Olives, was made the rule of our faith, and 
 all classes were allowed, like the Bereans, to search the Scriptures 
 whether those things were so. 
 
 But the Church to be healthy must also be militant ; and no 
 sooner does she settle down into peace, than the Arch-enemy is 
 again actively employed in the work of evil. Rome, on the one 
 hand, holds out to her followers the fascinating reward of an 
 indemnity against the consequences of their neglects and 
 transgressions ; while, on the other hand, the Protestant Church 
 has begun to insist more emphatically on the Apostolical 
 succession than the Apostolical practice, and to perplex her 
 children with fasts and bowings, candles and crosses ; calling 
 upon them to surrender to their Creator everything but that 
 mysterious combination of amiable weaknesses and evil affec- 
 tions the human heart. 
 
 Pride and vanity and ambition can have no place in the 
 struggle of poor humanity to enter in at the strait gate which 
 leadeth unto life. 
 
 " Pure religion and undefiled is this, To visit the fatherless and 
 widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from 
 the world." J AMES, i. 27.
 
 ESSAY XXL 
 
 THE DEFINITION OF MYSTERIES. 
 
 Canst thou by searching find out God ? Canst thou find out the Almighty 
 to perfection ? Job, xi. 7. 
 
 NOTHING can be more inconsistent with the finite powers of 
 man than his assumption of a right to dogmatize on the 
 mysterious character and designs of the Creator; nothing less 
 creditable to our self-knowledge than to pronounce judgment 
 upon others, whose conclusions, on these high subjects, do not 
 correspond with our own ; but that the Scriptures, in which we 
 read that even Michael the Archangel, when contending with 
 the devil, durst not bring against him a railing accusation, 
 should have been used as a warrant for enforcing religious 
 opinions by persecution, nothing short of actual observation, or 
 the most authentic testimony, could induce an enlightened mind 
 to believe. 
 
 The greatest mystery that man is permitted to contemplate is, 
 his redemption from the consequences of his fall his restoration 
 to the favour of his Maker. Of the future and eternal condition 
 
 of
 
 )kL. 
 
 EssAT XXI.] THE DEFINITION OF MYSTERIES. 81 
 
 of the soul we are assured bj Scripture ; but of the power the 
 being of the Creator, we are utterly incapable of forming an 
 estimate Omnipotent! Omnipresent! "Whither shall I go 
 from thy Spirit ? Whither shall I flee from thy presence ? If 
 I ascend up into heaven, thou art there : if I make my bed in 
 hell, behold thou art there. If I take the wings of the morning, 
 and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea ; even there shall thy 
 hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold me." 
 
 Yet, to this ever-present this infinitely powerful Being, vain 
 man has ventured to assign a nature to confound Him with 
 substance and with person to divide to unite to describe I 
 
 If the definition of these mysteries had been essential to the 
 salvation of our souls, how certainly would our Eedeemer have 
 supplied the want ! but behold his doctrine observe his injunc- 
 tions : " No man hath seen God at any time. Judge not, that 
 ye be not judged. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in 
 thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine 
 own eye ? Every good tree bringeth forth good fimit ; but a 
 corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. Wlierefore by their fruits 
 ye shall know them." And " Blessed are the peacemakers, for 
 they shall be called the children of God." 
 
 If, after his resurrection, it became necessary to explain more 
 fully subjects so remote from human apprehension, who so 
 competent to perform the task as our Saviour's immediate 
 followers his. inspired disciples ? But they did not venture to 
 expoimd mysteries which our limited powers are incapable of 
 grasping. Their earnest injunction was, "Believe on the Lord 
 Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved." 
 
 Who less fitted to act as our interpreters than those who were 
 brought up amidst the wrangling disputations which existed at 
 the time of Athanasius ? 
 
 G The
 
 82 THE DEFINITION OF MYSTERIES. [Essay XXI. 
 
 The faith of the Christian is not evidenced by his skill in 
 defining mysteries, but by his practical character, by that 
 wisdom which is from above, which is first pure, then peaceable, 
 gentle and easy to be entreated, full of mercy and good fruits, 
 without partiality and without hypocrisy by love, joy, peace, 
 long-sufiering, gentleness, goodness, meekness, temperance. 
 
 What are the fruits of the dogmas which have emanated from 
 those who are denominated the Fathers of the Church ? contro- 
 versies in which the most angry passions of our nature have been 
 awakened in which the signs of faith pointed out by our Lord 
 have been lost sight of; in which gentleness and long-suffering 
 have been offered up at the shrine of pride, ambition, and 
 vanity ; and in which damnation has been impiously hurled upon 
 the heads of many, endeavouring, by the light of the Gospel, to 
 find the narrow way, and that, for the alleged misunderstanding 
 of mysteries which the Creator of the universe the Redeemer 
 of mankind, has not seen proper to unroll. 
 
 It is so congenial to the feelings of our human nature to be 
 able to substitute, for our own responsibility, the authoritative 
 declarations of the Church, that to this fatal source may be traced 
 many of our most serious delusions. 
 
 Like Christian, on his journey to the Celestial City, we fancy 
 that, with the roll in our bosom, we may venture to take a nap 
 by the way. But the duty of the Christian is progress ; he is 
 ever to press forward on his journey never relying on any- 
 thing that he has gained never forgetting the task he has to 
 perform, but running like St. Paul to the close, lest that by any 
 means he himself should be a castaway. 
 
 " Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little 
 child shall in no wise enter therein." Luke, xviii. 17.
 
 ESSAY XXII. 
 
 BAPTISM. 
 
 And John answered and said, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy 
 name, and we forbade him, because he followeth not with us. And 
 Jesiis said unto him, Forbid him not ; for he that is not against us is 
 for us, Luke, ix. 49, 50. 
 
 WHO that has heard the facts disclosed by Mr. Gorham's 
 case, could persuade himself that the reverend prelate 
 who refused to institute a preacher of the Gospel to a benefice, to 
 which he had been presented, ever read these words ? And who, 
 without being deeply versed in the deceitfulness of the human 
 heart, could have conceived that the concluding text should in 
 an age, in which even the dark chambers of the Inquisition are 
 closed, be applicable to professors of Christianity to dignita- 
 ries of the Church ? But so it is, that the wisdom and learning 
 of this world, while they have shed a bland influence over man 
 as a social being, have done nothing towards eradicating that evil 
 spirit which prompted the disciples of our Lord to entreat his 
 permission to command fire to come down from heaven and 
 
 G 2 consume
 
 84 BAPTISM. [Essay XXIT. 
 
 consume the Samaritans. Nor can any dispassionate person deny 
 that the rebuke of. our Lord is as justly due to the professors of 
 Christianity in this age, as it was to his immediate followers, nor 
 hesitate to conclude that we, like them, know not what manner 
 of spirit we are of; that we are still unmindful that the Son of 
 Man came not to destroy men's lives but to save them, and that 
 he wase specially tender in pronouncing judgment upon those 
 who were ignorant of his intentions. 
 
 Without entering upon the question between Mr. Gorham 
 and the Bishop of Exeter, a Christian can hardly believe that 
 it is consistent with the mercy and goodness of God, with the 
 declarations of our Lord that our salvation should depend 
 upon a rite, the performance of which involves no exercise of 
 consciousness on the part of the object to be benefited, the 
 performance of which may, owing to the carelessness of those 
 who are intrusted with the infant, be long neglected, perhaps 
 wholly omitted. The opposite conclusion would at all events 
 scarcely seem to be supported by the dealings of God with 
 the early converts to Christianity, on whom the Holy Spirit 
 descended without the previous observance of this ceremony. 
 
 But if the rite of baptism were essential to our salvation, 
 how was it that the most zealous of the Apostles, he who was 
 made all things to all men, that he might by all means save 
 some ; he who especially devoted himself to the conversion of the 
 Gentiles, and who must frequently have been their sole visitor, 
 allowed the fear of being charged with having substituted his 
 own name for our Lord's to interfere with its performance ? 
 Nay, that he thanked God that he had baptized none save 
 Crispus and Gaius and the household of Stephanus ? 
 
 No doubt it was of the highest importance that Paul should 
 be always understood to preach that in which he gloried, the 
 
 Cross
 
 Essay XXII.] BAPTISM. 85 
 
 Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world was crucified 
 unto him, and he unto the world; but if the most perfect 
 knowledge of the object of our Lord's mission, the fullest com- 
 pliance with his injunctions, could not save the Christian 
 converts without the rite of baptism, would the Apostle have 
 allowed the possibility of misapprehension in their minds to 
 interfere with its performance ? 
 
 What is the rite of baptism? The Church Catechism 
 describes it to be a ceremony, in which the sponsors promise 
 that the infant shall renounce the devil and all his works, the 
 pomps and vanities of the world, and the lusts of the flesh ; that 
 he shall believe tlie Articles of the Christian Faith, and keep 
 God's holy will and commandments ; and it proceeds to say, 
 that these promises the infant is bound to perform. Now, is it 
 the performance of the rite by the minister, or of the promises 
 by the infant, that is so necessary to salvation? Surely a 
 doubt, on a subject of so much importance, ought not to rest 
 upon the mind of a believer in the divine mission of the Re- 
 deemer of the world. 
 
 " What think ye ?" (asked our Lord of the chief priests and 
 elders) " a certain man had two sons ; and he came to the fii-st, 
 and said, Son, go work to-day in my vineyard. He answered 
 and said, I will not; but afterwards he repented, and went. 
 And he came to the second, and said likewise. And he answered 
 and said, I go, sir ; and went not. Whether of them twain did 
 the will of his father ?" And, that there should be no possible 
 ground for misapprehension, he added, " The publicans and the 
 harlots go into the kingdom of God before you." That is, that 
 those who never even professed obedience to the will of" God, 
 but, like the elder son, openly rebelled against him when, like 
 him, they repented, should be received into the kingdom of God, 
 
 before
 
 86 BAPTISM. [Essay XXII. 
 
 before the formal and professing chief priests and elders of the 
 Jewish Church. 
 
 The question of circumcision and the keeping of the law of 
 Moses was afterwards determined by the Apostles and Elders of 
 the Church at Jerusalem, to whom it was referred, apparently 
 on the same ground. With the Jewish rites we have no 
 concern ; but the determination of the question by the Apostles 
 was founded upon the acknowledgment that *' God, which 
 knoweth the heart, bare them " (the converts from the Gentiles) 
 " witness, giving them the Holy Ghost, even as he did unto us " 
 (the Jewish converts) ; " and put no difference between us 
 and them, purifying their hearts by faith," they believing that 
 through the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ they should be 
 saved. 
 
 It was not with any neglect in the performance of the rite 
 of baptism that Mr. Gorham was charged, but merely with en- 
 tertaining incorrect views of its operation upon the soul of the 
 infant, and for such an error, real or supposed, he was, by 
 hundreds of professing Christians and preachers of the Gospel, 
 thought to be unworthy to call sinners to repentance to go into 
 the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, to 
 proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord, and to call unto their 
 rest all that labour and are heavy laden ! 
 
 " God, Ithank thee, that I am not as other men are." Luke, 
 xviii. 11.
 
 ESSAY XXIII. 
 
 THE BUEIAL SERVICE. 
 
 As concerning, therefore, the eating of tfwse things, that are offered in 
 sacrifice unto idols, we know that an idol is nothing in the world, and 
 that there is none other God but one. 1 CoR., viii. 4. 
 
 Whatsoever is sold in the shambles, that eat, asking no question for con- 
 science sake. 1 Cos., x. 25. 
 
 NOTHING- is more striking in the teaching of our Lord and 
 of his disciples and Apostles, than the earnestness with 
 which the one thing needful is insisted upon, and the indif- 
 ference with which the rites and ceremonies, on which the self- 
 righteous have in all ages laid so much stress, are invariably 
 treated. 
 
 Never, perhaps, had idolatry acquired such general influence 
 over the mind, as at the time of our Lord's advent ; and super- 
 ficial observers might have expected that he would make it the 
 subject of a direct attack, and guard his disciples against it by 
 formal rules and prohibitions. This, however, would have 
 been inconsistent with the comprehensive spirit of his doctrines 
 
 which 
 
 ^
 
 88 THE BURIAL SERVICE. [Essay XXIll. 
 
 which formed a strong contrast, though a beautifully-connected 
 sequel, to the minute provisions of the mosaic law. It was not 
 the worship of idols that our Saviour thought worthy of par- 
 ticular notice, but a more deeply-seated and subtle delusion, the 
 worship of self, and those tendencies to self-righteousness, 
 which, like the tares sown by the enemy amongst the wheat, 
 had found a fertile soil in the depravity of the human heart. 
 We find, therefore, that the eating of meat, which had actually 
 been offered or dedicated to idols was prohibited only when it 
 became a stumbling-block to those Christians who were so weak 
 and so ill-informed in the religion they professed, as to con- 
 found things so unimportant with those that affected their 
 eternal interest. 
 
 If, when Christianity was so partially understood, so artfully 
 misrepresented, as it was at the time when the Apostles 
 preached, the early converts were sufficiently informed of its 
 grand principles to entitle them to be treated, not as babes in 
 knowledge, but as men what a fearful responsibility must 
 attach to us, who live in an age and belong to a community in 
 which the inspired writings are open to all, if we remain 
 satisfied with less enlarged views of our spiritual and practical 
 duties ; and if our ignorance of that true light which has come 
 into the world, be attributable to those who are especially 
 appointed to watch over our internal interests, how assuredly 
 shall we rise up in judgment against them ! 
 
 These reflections were occasioned by the printed address of a 
 clergyman to his parishioners, the object of which was to justify 
 himself for refusing to read the Burial Service OA^er a child, 
 whose father was desirous of having it deposited in his own 
 vault, a vault which already contained another member of the 
 same family. 
 
 The
 
 E88AY XXIII.] THE BURIAL SERVICE. 
 
 The reverend gentleman, in his letter, refers to the minutes 
 of a conference held at Sydney by the six Bishops of the 
 province, and directs the attention of his parishioners to the 
 following resolutions : 
 
 " 4. Church Membership. We acknowledge, as members of 
 the Church of England, all persons who, having been duly 
 baptized with water in the name of the Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost, are conformable to the doctrine, government, 
 rites, and ceremonies contained in the Book of Prayer ; it being 
 understood that they are entitled to claim, at the hands of its 
 Ministers, the rites and ceremonies of our Church, so long 
 only as they shall continue conformable to the extent above 
 required." 
 
 " 7. Ministering to Dissenters. We are of opinion that the 
 general principle of colonial legislation, by which the equality 
 of all religious denominations is recognised, releases the clergy 
 of the Church of England in these colonies from the obligation 
 to perform religious services for persons who are not members 
 of our own Church." 
 
 He then proceeds to explain that the Church, being autho- 
 rized " to loose and to bind," does not fulfil her mission when 
 she fails to exercise a godly discipline over her members by 
 rejecting the disobedient from her communion. " Nothing," 
 adds the reverend gentleman, " can be more incongruous than 
 admitting those who disclaim their faith in the Church, to the 
 participation of those privileges of which she is the divinely- 
 constituted dispenser." 
 
 But who, it will be asked, was the apostate who had so 
 utterly blasted his child, that its body was not allowed to 
 moulder in his own vault beside that of its deceased sister? 
 What odious offence had he committed, that disentitled him to 
 
 the
 
 90 THE BURIAL SEEVICE. [Essay XXIII. 
 
 the sympathy of the priest, and left him to the mercy of the 
 Samaritan ? He was a duly -baptized member of the Church of 
 England, a large contributor to its temporal means, and in that 
 Church had duly baptized his child ; but, disapproving of the 
 introduction into its services of forms and ceremonies which he 
 had never conceived to be sanctioned by the Protestant Church, 
 and which, he feared, might in the minds of his children be 
 confounded with the superstitious rites of the Church of Eome, 
 he had determined, for a time, to attend the chapel of an 
 evangelical Scotch minister : and for this offence the reverend 
 gentleman refused the privilege his Church was divinely con- 
 stituted to dispense, of allowing what had been the temple 
 of the Holy Ghost to be placed in the tomb which had been 
 provided for its reception ! 
 
 If this had been a solitary instance of the refusal by a clergy- 
 man to perform the service, appointed to be read over a body 
 which had been brought to the church for interment, an impres- 
 sion might have been entertained, that, amongst the servants of 
 the Church, one at least was found, who had not on the wed- 
 ding-garment ; but as the case is not without something like 
 a parallel, and as the reverend gentleman has attempted to 
 vindicate his conduct by deferring to the judgment of the 
 Bishops in conference assembled, it may not be out of place to 
 make a few reflections on the subject. 
 
 The ceremony which the Church has directed to be used, on 
 committing a body to the earth, may be divided into three parts. 
 
 First. Eeflections on the shortness of human life, and the 
 certainty of death. 
 
 Secondly. The committing of the body to the earth. 
 
 Thirdly. The expression of a hope that the departed soul 
 is amongst the redeemed. 
 
 Is
 
 Essay XXIIL] THE BUEIAL SERVICE. 91 
 
 Is a clergyman who thinks that a defect in orthodoxy on the 
 part of the deceased, or of the relatives of the deceased, a suf- 
 ficient justification for refusing to perform this ceremony over 
 one who, withdrawn from the scenes of this life, awaits the 
 judgment of Him in whose eye there is no beam, guilty of no 
 inconsistency, when he performs it over an abandoned profli- 
 gate ? one who for years may have neglected public and appa- 
 rently all other worship, and who was perhaps hurried from 
 scenes of debauchery to the presence of an oflfended Judge, 
 nay, professes a hope that such deceased brother may, at the 
 general resurrection, be found acceptable in the sight of God? 
 Professes a hope which charity itself can hardly entertain, but 
 would shrink from the responsibility of pronouncing the same 
 words over the body of Dr. Doddridge or of Dr. Isaac Watts ! 
 
 It is, therefore, impossible that the unwillingness to perform 
 the ceremony can arise from a doubt, whether it should be used 
 on the interment of one who has left this world without the full 
 assurance of the remission of his sins ; and we can hardly attribute 
 to the bigots of the darkest age a desire, by the omission of the 
 ceremony, to exclude from all hope of pardon the soul, even of 
 the most erring. 
 
 To those who, like St. Paul, desire to be instant in season 
 and out of season, what better opportunity can a clergyman 
 have of addressing his hearers with effect, than that afforded by 
 the solemn scene, in which they may possibly part for ever 
 from the being whom they would, perhaps, have laid down 
 their lives to save? What more favourable opportunity of 
 bringing back the wanderer to his fold, an occasion, when even 
 the thoughtless and the profane have, at least for a moment, had 
 torn from their eyes the veil that has shut out the scenes that 
 lie beyond the grave, a time when the most stubborn, softened 
 
 by
 
 92 THE BURIAL SERVICE. [Essay XXIII. 
 
 by sorrow, is anxious to believe that tlie object of his affections 
 is not for ever removed from his sight, a time at which he is 
 compelled to feel that he too is mortal, and that within a very 
 short period a group will assemble round his grave, will hear 
 the sound of his kindred earth falling upon his own body, and 
 will there leave him to await the judgment of his Maker on a 
 life of iblly and of crime ? 
 
 It is surely important that the last relics of our mortality 
 should be solemnly consigned to that earth to which they have 
 already returned ; and what is so likely to impress the deeply- 
 interested spectators of such a scene as the expression of a hope 
 that the immortal principle which so lately animated the body 
 has been redeemed by the Saviour of the World, and by him 
 led back to the bosom of its Father and its God, 
 
 Surely, the desire cannot be wanting, that the departed soul 
 may be numbered with the redeemed ! If an infant, however 
 it may have been nurtured, if of maturer age, however unsound 
 the doctrines of the Church he frequented may be thought ! 
 
 If indeed a minister of the Gospel has no such desire, he may 
 find, too late, that his own claim for admission into the king- 
 dom of our heavenly Father may be met by the awful words 
 with which these observations are closed : 
 
 " Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for 
 the devil and his angels." Matt., xxv. 41.
 
 ESSAY XXIV. 
 
 APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 
 
 Now I say that every one of you saith, I am of Paul ; and I of Apollos ; 
 and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? was Paul 
 crucified for you i I CoR., i. 12, 13. 
 
 ON looking into the records the Apostles have left of the life 
 and doctrines of our Lord, and of their own conduct in 
 executing the commission given them to preach the kingdom 
 of God, we become deeply conscious that the light that hath 
 shined in our hearts, " to give the light of the knowledge of the 
 glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ," is indeed a treasure 
 contained " in earthen vessels," that " the excellency of the 
 power may be of God, and not of us ;" and when we observe 
 that the Apostles have in their writings unreservedly recorded 
 their own errors and infirmities, we are made painfully sensible 
 of the contrast between their humility and the aiTogance of 
 those who style themselves their Successors, and are led to 
 inquire on what ground the claim of those who appropriate to 
 
 themselves
 
 94 APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. [Essay XXIV. 
 
 themselves this title, rests. We are induced to ask whether its 
 validity is to be determined by the Scriptures or the Church, 
 by the Gospel of our Lord and the writings of his disciples, or 
 by the decrees of ecclesiastical councils ? 
 
 It may, however, be proper, first to inquire what those who 
 claim the title, contend they have succeeded to. 
 
 Why were the Apostles selected ? What were their quali- 
 fications? They were not perfect, but they were humble and 
 they were holy, at least with the exception of one, of whom 
 none claims to be the successor. 
 
 That the priests of our time have inherited the miraculous 
 powers wliich our Lord conferred upon his Apostles, no mem- 
 ber of a Protestant Church will, we think, contend. They 
 certainly have not succeeded to the virtues that pre-eminently 
 fitted the Apostles to preach to all people the glad tidings of 
 salvation. 
 
 If the model they have set up for imitation be the Fathers, 
 tliey should have concealed from us, before demanding acknow- 
 ledgment of their pretensions, the history of the squabbles and 
 wrangliugs of the early leaders of the Christian Church ; they 
 should have exhibited the relics rather than the histories of 
 their Saints, and have amused the fancy rather than exercised 
 the understanding and the judgment. Unhappily, the lives of 
 the Fathers disclose contentions fatal to their claim to light up 
 the narrow way pointed out by our Lord for the guidance of 
 his true disciples. Not only do we read in ecclesiastical history 
 of differences of opinion among the early rulers of the Church 
 on the most vital matters, but, alas ! we find those same rulers 
 invoking Divine wrath upon each other, and condemning each 
 other's teaching as false and damnable. 
 
 The Protestant clergy, conscious of the sins and errors of that 
 
 Church
 
 Essay XXIV.] APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 95 
 
 Church which burnt the Bible and excavated the dungeons of 
 the Inquisition, which substituted for the teaching of Christ the 
 dogmas of a corrupt priesthood, for the test of truth the conceal- 
 ment of the prison, profess to have regulated their faith and 
 opinions by the alleged agreement of the Fathers during the 
 first two or three centuries of the Christian era, and before the 
 Church was corrupted by the practices that too early sprang up 
 amongst those who professed the religion of Jesus. But, alas ! 
 we find it recorded by St. John that even in Ms time, five of the 
 Seven Churches of Asia had fallen from the faith ; and the 
 other two afibrded fatal evidence of the melancholy shortness of 
 their Christian career. 
 
 Why should Christians trouble themselves about the Fathers, 
 men who are entitled to respect only when they agree with the 
 infallible rules that Christ has laid down for our guidance? 
 Why endeavour to augment that light which requires no addi- 
 tion, to add to that grace which is sufficient for all ? Why 
 neglect the warning we have received against false teachers, 
 who privily should bring in damnable heresies, even denying 
 the Lord that bought them, and whose pernicious ways we are 
 assured that many should follow ? 
 
 Were the Fathers better than the immediate followers of our 
 Lord? Were they less affected by human infirmities more 
 perfectly devoted to the office they had undertaken more holy 
 and blameless in their lives ? Yet even of the Apostles, we 
 find recorded that on the solemn occasion of our Lord's com- 
 municating to them his approaching death, " There was strife 
 amongst them which should be the greatest;" and how soon 
 afterwards was Peter guilty of his memorable denial of his Lord 
 and Master, and again at Antioch of desertion of the Gentiles, 
 ii'om whom a fear of the Jews induced him to withdraw, and 
 
 which
 
 96 APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. [Essay XXIV. 
 
 which drew down from St. Paul severe and merited reproof! 
 Even of Paul there is recorded an unseemly contention with 
 Barnabas. 
 
 If in the natures, but partially subdued, of even these noble- 
 minded Christians, there lingered so much of hviman infirmity, 
 what could be expected of their converts ? 
 
 Surely, true successors of the Apostles would have laboured 
 to maintain the primitive simplicity of faith and the earnest 
 zeal of the disciples of our Lord. They would not have in- 
 cumbered those it was their duty to guide in the path of their 
 Divine Master with dogmas and barren subtleties, nor made 
 them parties in the quarrels and disputations that too early 
 convulsed Christian society. 
 
 If the Holy Scriptures were foimd sufficient for all purposes 
 of doctrine and discipline by the early Christians, those who 
 had actually listened to the preaching of our Lord and His 
 Apostles, or those whose conversion to Christianity had taken 
 place before the earnest appeals of the friends and companions 
 of Christ's disciples had been forgotten, and their doctrines con- 
 founded with the fanciful theories and the corrupt practices of 
 the Jewish Doctors, or the philosophy of the Heathen, how 
 vigilantly should we guard against the delusions which took 
 their rise amongst the controversialists of a later and a darker 
 age, ^how jealously should we look at the dogmas of men, framed 
 often with a view to the suppression of some temporary heretical 
 opinion of their day ! How guardedly should we listen to argu- 
 ments, which having no application to the general faith and 
 condition of the Christian world, may, at a period when even 
 the name of the heresy or the hallucination they were intended 
 to combat has passed away, lead the mind to conclusions the 
 controversialist never contemplated ! Compare that declaration 
 
 of
 
 Essay XXIV.] APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 97 
 
 of faith, whicli from its antiquity is called the Apostles' Creed, 
 with the Athanasian and Nicene symbols. How wide apart are 
 the too frequently captious restrictions in the two latter, from 
 the simplicity, breadth, and true Catholicity of the earlier decla- 
 ration of faith. It has been said that the latter creeds are but 
 the extension of the Apostles' Creed ; but where in the Apos- 
 tles' Creed is it alleged that Christ was begotten of the Father 
 before all worlds? Where that he was of one substance with 
 the Father, that he was not made nor created, but begotten? 
 Where that a union of God and man are one Christ ? If the 
 Scriptures are plain and explicit on these mysterious subjects, 
 why dogmatize ? If the creeds are not supported by the Scrip- 
 tuies, they are the inventions of men and not the word of God. 
 At best they result from a presumptuous desire "to define mys- 
 teries that the human mind is incapable of comprehending, and 
 like all such unhallowed attempts, have thrown a stumbling- 
 block in the way of those who might otherwise have humbly 
 followed the course enjoined by the Redeemer of the world. 
 They have rent the Church have split Christian society into a 
 thousand sects and factions, and have delivered the government 
 of God's worshippers to parties who prefer the recondite defini- 
 tion of mysteries to the simple preaching of Christian grace. 
 
 Unwarrantable and mistaken views of mysteries that are 
 placed beyond our comprehension have led to more strife about 
 unimportant things, more disunion amongst Christians, more 
 unhappy divisions into sects, than all that the armies of infi- 
 delity have achieved. 
 
 As might naturally be expected, in proportion to the remote- 
 ness of the time of Our Lord's advent upon earth from the 
 periods at which the creeds were framed, the more widely the 
 authors of them have departed from that declaration of faith 
 
 Ti at
 
 98 APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. [Essay XXIV. 
 
 at once simple and comprehensive, the adoption of which, in 
 the earliest ages of the Church, distinguished the believer in 
 the doctrines of Christianity from the infidel and the idolater. 
 
 In composing creeds or symbols of doctrine, the object should 
 have been not irreverently to ascend into heaven, and there pro- 
 nounce categorically the degrees of relationship which subsist 
 between Divine and incorporeal beings, but humbly to express, 
 for the practical use of the Christian, those essential articles of 
 faith which our Lord taught to the humble auditors that ever 
 surrounded him. This is clearly and amply effected in the 
 Apostles' Creed. What is a creed but a declaration of belief? 
 Belief is not hnowledge: it involves a doubt. "Believing and 
 doubting," observes a modern writer, " are correlative terms ;" 
 yet the compilers of the Athanasian Creed have ventured to 
 exclude from salvation all who do not faithfully hold the dogmas 
 they themselves held all who do not believe to be true, that 
 which the authors of the Creed themselves could only express as 
 matters of belief. 
 
 "The Fathers as a body," says Mr. De Quincey, "are 
 chargeable with antichristian practices of a twofold order ; 
 sometimes, as supporting their great cause in a spirit alien to 
 its own, retorting in a tone not less uncharitable than that of 
 their opponents ; sometimes, again, as adopting arguments that 
 are unchristian in their ultimate grounds : resting upon errors 
 the refutation of errors : upon superstitions the overthrow of 
 superstitions ; and drawing upon the armouries of darkness for 
 weapons, that to be durable ought to have been of celestial 
 temper. Alternately, in short, the Fathers trespass against 
 those affections which furnish to Christianity its moving 
 powers, and against those truths which furnish to Christianity 
 its guiding lights." 
 
 In
 
 Essay XXIV.] APOSTOLICAL SUCCESSION. 99 
 
 In Christ's teaching we find that the principles He incul- 
 cated, instead of being involved in mystery, were simplified and 
 systematically brought down to the level of the meanest capa- 
 cities, ever led to the justest sense of human infirmities, and 
 were illustrated by examples which the humblest and most un- 
 lettered disciple coiJd fully comprehend. The Prodigal Son, the 
 Dying Beggar, the Unjust Steward, the Good Samaritan, and 
 finally that Universal Prayer he bequeathed his followers, all 
 without doctrinal subtlety or metaphysical reasoning appeal 
 directly to the imiversal heart and the universal understanding. 
 
 Let us then adopt the earnest advice of St. Paul to Timothy, 
 not to "give heed to fables and endless genealogies, which 
 minister questions, rather than godly edifying which is in 
 faith," and beware lest we be found with those who " turn 
 aside into vain jangling, desiring to be teachers of the law, 
 understanding neither what they say, nor whereof they affirm." 
 
 " Bring forth, therefore, fruits meet for repentance, and think 
 not to say within yourselves, we have Abraham to our father ; 
 for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up 
 children unto Abraham." Matt., iii. 8, 9. 
 
 S^ 
 
 H 2
 
 ESSAY XXV. 
 
 KEPENTANCE OF NECESSITY PROGRESSIVE. 
 
 d. 
 
 And one of the malefactors which were hanged, railed on him, saying. 
 If thou be the Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering 
 rebuked him, saying. Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the 
 same condemnation ? And we indeed justly ; for we receive the due 
 reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing amiss. And 
 he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy 
 kingdom. And Jesus said unto him. To-day shalt thou be with me in 
 paradise. LvKE, xxiii. 39, 40, 41, 42, & 43. 
 
 FEW passages in Holy Writ have been the subject of greater 
 misapprehension, or led to more fatal delusion, than those 
 which stand at the head of this paper. 
 
 By the worldly-minded, who are unable to exclude from their 
 thoughts the apprehension of a future judgment, but who are too 
 much devoted to the pursuits they are engaged in, to conform 
 to the rules laid down in the Scriptures for our guidance, they 
 have always been thought to afford the assurance that the full 
 repentance which secures forgiveness may be accomplished in 
 a moment. It has been imagined that there is a tendency in the 
 
 example
 
 Essay XXV.] REPENTANCE OF NECESSITY, ETC. 101 
 
 example given on so solemn an occasion as that on which our 
 Lord finished his mission on earth, to show that the devotion of 
 a whole life to the hopes that lie beyond this world cannot be 
 expected of frail humanity, and is perhaps even unnecessary. 
 
 This view of the sudden reformation of the thief is one too 
 commonly entertained by sincere Christians, and they tremble 
 only lest the moment of repentance should be cut off. But, 
 surely, neither the worldling nor the Christian is warranted in 
 arriving at such a conclusion, nor entitled to slumber on the 
 belief that a transition from enmity against God to Christian 
 holiness can be so suddenly effected. 
 
 To the Christian the error, if it be one, is of more moment in 
 a tlieoretical than in a moral point of view. To the man of the 
 world, it is one of infinite concern. He may find, too late, the 
 slender ground on which he rests his hope of pardon slip from 
 under him, and the support springing from these words altogether 
 imaginary. 
 
 On what ground is the suddenness of the repentance of the 
 thief assumed? What is the evidence of the wickedness of 
 his life ? His condemnation by a legal tribunal ? With the 
 example of that of our Lord before us, we need hardly stop to 
 consider the careless manner in which justice was administered 
 by the riders of Judea, nor to recollect the indifference to human 
 suffering which prevailed throughout the whole world at that 
 time. The manner indeed in which criminal law was within the 
 last century administered in Christian England, ought to warn 
 us against too much reliance on the judgment even of a British 
 tribunal. But the thief, it will be urged, acknowledged his guilt. 
 What did he acknowledge an offence that involved entire moral 
 obliquity ? Certainly not. He acknowledged what he might have 
 conceived to be a just judgment on a life he, if indeed a penitent, 
 
 felt
 
 102 REPENTANCE OF [Essay XXV. 
 
 felt to be stained with crime and rebellion against Ms God. 
 But suppose he had really been convicted of a crime of such 
 turpitude as to justify the penalty of death : suppose that crime 
 to have been murder what then ? Had he no under current of 
 feeling that might have brought him to the throne of Grace ? 
 Was there no circumstance that might tend to mitigate the 
 horror and indignation of righteous Christians at the deed? 
 Who that knows the depravity of his own heart that mysterious 
 compound of good and evil, can venture to pronounce that such 
 was not the case ? Let us imagine that this crucified offender 
 was an obscure, humble, and uncrowned David will erring 
 human judgment dare affirm that the forgiveness our Lord 
 pronounced might not as certainly have been accorded to his 
 whole life as that pardon which was conveyed to the Jewish 
 monarch through the prophet Nathan? 
 
 It is our crimes that pronounce upon us the fatal judgment ; 
 and we can conceive of no restoration to the favour of a holy and 
 just God, without deep and earnest and abiding repentance of 
 our guilt. 
 
 The conversion of St. Paul may be thought to support the 
 view that is generally taken of the sudden penitence and forgive- 
 ness of the thief; but there is no analogy between the circum- 
 stances which attended the misdirected devotion of that holy man 
 and the supposed vicious career of the latter, to warrant such a 
 conclusion. That Paul was grievously mistaken and fearfully 
 misled, none can doubt, still less his sincerity in the cause he 
 believed it his duty to support. " I verily thought with my- 
 self," said that earnest man, " that I ought to do many things 
 contrary to the name of Jesus of Nazareth." His conversion 
 was but the direction of a holy zeal into its proper channel. 
 
 If the history of the Penitent Thief presents only another 
 
 example
 
 Essay XXV.] NECESSITY PROGRESSIVE. 103 
 
 example of the frailty of those who in a life comparatively 
 blameless, are found to deny their Lord who are carried by 
 impulses into the commission of crime farewell to the soothing 
 hopes which the vicious and the careless entertain of a late but 
 effectual repentance ; farewell to a pardon only to be secured 
 when vice shall have lost her charms, when the self-deluded 
 victim shall be no longer interested in the world he is about to 
 leave, when his day of probation shall have closed ! What, 
 when awakened to a sense of his awful condition, shall he have 
 to fall back upon ? Not on years of devotion in the service of 
 his Maker, chequered indeed by the infirmities of his whole 
 life, but like the rich man who enlarged his barns like him 
 who was clothed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously 
 every day the remembrance only of a life spent in the gratifica- 
 tion of his appetites. 
 
 " Whose judgment now of a long time lingereth not, and their 
 damnation slimibereth not." 2 Peter, ii. 3. 
 
 ^ _^
 
 ESSAY XXVl. 
 
 IDLE WORDS. 
 
 But I say unto you. That every idle word that men shall speak, they shall 
 give account thereof in the day of judgment. Matt,, xii. 36. 
 
 WE turn from this startling declaration with the hope, if 
 not the belief, that a record will not be kept by the 
 Almighty of the inconceivable number of " idle words " spoken 
 from the earliest age by the whole human race. 
 
 But a very slight examination of the works of the Creator 
 will effectually correct this delusion, and convince us that we 
 have nothing to hope from the failure of that Eye which is 
 never closed, of that Arm which alike sustains the heavenly 
 bodies in their noiseless but mighty revolutions, and provides 
 for the wants of creatures so minute as, without the aid of a 
 microscope, to be invisible to the human eye. 
 
 If the works of the Almighty which surround us fail to 
 awaken a sense of the Divine Infinity if their ten thousand 
 voices have been addressed to us in vain, an inquiry into that 
 
 bygone
 
 Essay XXVI.] IDLE WORDS. 105 
 
 bygone condition of the earth which the researches of the 
 geologists have disclosed will afford too conclusive evidence of 
 the control exercised by Omnipotent Intelligence over things 
 apparently unimportant to leave any lingering hope that a 
 thought, however idle, however transitory, can fail to bear its 
 record to the " Judge of all the earth." 
 
 Even the contemplation of the powers of memory with which 
 God has endowed us ought to impress us with a more exalted 
 sense of His unceasing vigilance powers which for years have 
 not only preserved the evidence of thousands of occurrences we 
 have witnessed, but have enabled us to recall a look a gesture 
 a tone, with a mysterious accuracy that no pencil, no music can 
 rival 
 
 Professor Ehrenberg ascertained that the polishing slate of 
 Bilin in Bohemia, which is of great extent, and forms strata 
 fourteen feet thick, consists almost entirely of an aggregation of 
 the siHceoTis shells of the G-aillonella distans. The size of these 
 animalcules ^^ of line, is but equal to \ of the thickness of a, 
 human hair. Twenty -three millions are contained in a cubic 
 line, or forty-one thousand millions in a cubic inch. 
 
 Remote as the period must be at which this accumulation 
 commenced, the preservation, nay, the identity of these minute 
 creatures is perfect. Evidence, if possible more extraordinary 
 and equally indisputable, is extant of the habits of animals that 
 for millions of years have ceased to exist. Imbedded in the 
 solid rock, innumerable bodies of animals have been discovered 
 that could not exist in the present condition of the earth, and 
 on some occasions, with the stomach containing half-masticated 
 bones, the remains of prey. 
 
 But the memorials of Divine Power do not end here. Rocks, 
 on being separated, have disclosed the footmarks of birds and of 
 
 animals^
 
 106 IDLE WORDS. [Essay XXVI. 
 
 animals now unknown, and, what is still more marvellous, the 
 impression made upon sand by drops of rain; nay more, the 
 direction of the currents of air that prevailed at the time those 
 drops were falling for impelled in a slanting direction the sides 
 of the impression are unequally raised. 
 
 The same slab has, in some instances, exhibited footprints 
 made before, and others after the rain had ceased (the former 
 indicated by the partially-obliterated impression of the animal's 
 feet, the latter, by a clear uninterrupted track). Even the deli- 
 cate impressions received from the body and ethereal wings of 
 the mayfly have been found, preserving through coimtless ages, 
 in tablets of stone, evidence of the existence of an insect, the 
 whole life of which was comprised in a single day. 
 
 If it has been the will of the Creator to engrave on His works 
 so lasting a history of things of such minor importance, surely 
 those words which, flowing from the abvindance of the heart, 
 evidence our inmost thoughts, will not, cannot be unrecorded. 
 If five sparrows are sold for two farthings, and not one of them 
 is forgotten before God, how shall words be disregarded that 
 shall affect our state when even this stupendous creation shall 
 have passed away. 
 
 *' Even the very hairs of your head are all numbered." 
 Luke, xii. 7.
 
 e^ 
 
 ESSAY XXVII 
 
 PEISONERS OP HOPE. 
 
 Turn ye to the stronghold, ye prisoners of hope. Zechariah, ix. 12. 
 
 IF the weaknesses of our nature are such that we know not 
 how often we offend ; if the utmost we can accomplish, even 
 with the assistance of Divine Love, is to lay hold of the hope 
 that is set before us, how truly is our condition in this body 
 that of prisoners ; and if we believe we are making progress 
 in that narrow way which leads through the strait gate to 
 eternal life, then are we indeed prisoners of hope ! 
 
 " Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul." Hebeews, 
 vi. 19.
 
 ESSAY XXVIII. 
 
 THE KESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 
 
 For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we 
 have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the 
 heavens. 2 Cor., v. 1. 
 
 THAT the material world and all it contains consist of vari- 
 ous combinations of a gaseous matter capable of extension 
 into nebulae, so difiused as to be detected at enormous distances 
 only, and of being so condensed as to constitute the almost 
 imperishable diamond, combinations that are perpetually 
 changing and are daily presented to us in a thousand shapes, 
 is now less a subject of inquiry than of admiration. And it 
 has long been understood that the human body, composed of 
 the same elements, is altered by every act of inspiration, and 
 is totally changed many times during an ordinary life. 
 
 That a thing so constituted should accompany into an eternal 
 state the immortal principle of which it is under the physical 
 conditions of this life the tenement that it should find a place 
 in that kingdom, which Saint Paul assures us, flesh and blood 
 
 cannot
 
 Essay XXVII F.] RESUREECTION OF THE BODY. 109 
 
 cannot inherit, is opposed to all probability. Yet such a belief 
 is, nevertheless, so earnestly insisted on by well-meaning Chris- 
 tians, that we are led to look for a solution of the mystery to 
 our only infallible source of information, the Holy Scriptures, 
 There, notwithstanding the metaphorical language with which, 
 as is frequently the case, an abstract doctrine is clothed, evi- 
 dence will be found sufficient to dispel eveiy doubt of the 
 untenableness of the opinion, that the Soul, in its future and 
 eternal condition, will be reunited to the matter which at pre- 
 sent constitutes the body. 
 
 Great want of genuine Christianity is frequently exhibited in 
 construing the language of Scripture, and nothing is more dan- 
 gerous than to allow our apprehension of the idea sought to be 
 conveyed, to be wholly governed by the figure with which it is 
 invested. Too many have industriously laboured to confound a 
 doctrine with a metaphor merely intended as a vehicle of ex- 
 pression, and from a possible want of aptness in the image made 
 use of, instead of advancing the cause of truth, created myste- 
 ries calculated to keep the human mind in darkness. They 
 would prevent the exercise of the understanding in those grand 
 modem discoveries of science, which have made us more inti- 
 mately acquainted with the vastness of the works of the Creator, 
 and have enabled us to contemplate His infinite wisdom and 
 power in the records He has left of the Creation. 
 
 So figurative is even modern language, that expressions which 
 the advanced state of our knowledge alone prevents from mis- 
 leading us, are in daily use. We have only to turn over a few 
 pages of history, to find that Galileo, for demonstrating the now 
 universally acknowledged truth, that the motion of the earth 
 and not that of the sun causes the phenomena we daily witness, 
 was exposed to the horrors of the Inquisition. This was justi- 
 fied,
 
 110 EESUKEECTION OF THE BODY. [Essay XXVIII. 
 
 fied on the ground that his views were opposed to statements 
 contained in the Holy Scriptures. 
 
 Too many in this age, not less narrow-minded than the perse- 
 cutors of Galileo, anxiously cling to the letter when it assumes 
 the mystical reject it when it appeals directly to the reason. 
 They insist on the resurrection of the identical human body, 
 rejecting the assurance of St. Paul that it is not this body but 
 a spiritual body that is, a Spirit, that shall be raised from the 
 dead. Not unfrequently do they confound the rational inqui- 
 ries of the believer in the great doctrines of Christianity, with 
 the infidelity of the Sadducee, who questioned not the resurrec- 
 tion of the body but the existence of a future state. 
 
 It would have been difficult for the Apostles to convey an 
 idea of the great general judgment, involved in the Christian 
 doctrine of a retributive future state, to a people eminently sen- 
 suous and altogether unprepared to receive abstract spiritual 
 doctrine, without the use of language somewhat calculated to 
 strengthen a belief in the actual resurrection of the body. Con- 
 scious of the tendency of the figurative language he unavoidably 
 used, Saint Paul endeavoured, in his first epistle to the Corin- 
 thians, to point out the difference between a corporeal and a 
 spiritual state. 
 
 It is too evident, however, that he was unable to correct the 
 popular notion that the material person should become the 
 denizen of a perfect and eternal state a belief that has unac- 
 countably resisted inquiries that ought, at least in our time, to 
 have led to more rational conclusions. 
 
 We are frequently told from the pulpit, that the body will 
 be collected from the ocean and the mountain, and that the 
 soul, or spiritual principle, will be mysteriously reincorporated 
 with the identical matter which in this life constituted the 
 
 material
 
 L 
 
 Essay XXVIII.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. Ill 
 
 material person. This implied rejection of our Lord's assurance 
 that a Spirit hath not flesh and blood, forcibly recalls the anec- 
 dote of that besotted victim of Hindu superstition who, believ- 
 ing the destruction of animal life unwarranted, on being 
 presented with a microscope too obviously revealing to him, 
 that with every herb he ate he exterminated millions of crea- 
 tures, instead of altering his belief, dashed the instrument to the 
 ground. 
 
 For what end present to its Creator, the spirit clothed in one 
 of the ten thousand combinations of gas which had in this life 
 constituted the body, does Infinite Wisdom, in the economy of 
 another existence, require evidence of identity ? What piirpose 
 would be served by the physical apparatus for receiving nourish- 
 ment or the canine teeth ; why the pecidiarities that dis- 
 tinguish the sexes, that constitute the difference between a 
 Hercules and a Venus in a state in which " they neither marry 
 nor are given in marriage, but are as the Angels of God ? " 
 What need of legs to a spirit traversing all space in an instant ? 
 How unlike all the acts of the Creator we are acquainted 
 with ! 
 
 But if the soul were again to tenant the body, where would 
 that body be found ? Small is the frame of the new-born infant, 
 and it is when beholding it that the ephemeral character of 
 mere physical organization most forcibly strikes the mind. 
 How rapid is the change that takes place ! every hour alters 
 its appearance and enlarges it. At a later period this change 
 is less striking in old age hardly perceptible the principle of 
 change is exhausted, and the body dies. At the resurrection, 
 which of the displaced and worn-out apparatuses of a material 
 existence, is it contemplated, should be reunited to the soul ? 
 Surely not that which it left at the time the connexion between 
 
 body 
 
 d^
 
 112 RESUKRECTION OF THE BODY. [Essay XXVIII. 
 
 body and soul ceased, the worst of all the combinations of 
 matter that had been used even in this life ; and where is this 
 used-up matter to be found ? 
 
 The Creator, in his infinite wisdom, allows nothing to be lost, 
 nothing to remain unemployed; and matter for a moment 
 appropriated to the human body when discharged by respira- 
 tion or otherwise, is immediately subjected to fresh processes 
 is now the man the horse the tree, by unceasing novelty of 
 combination producing endless variety of form. Where then is 
 the identity ? From the same matter a thousand bodies have 
 been framed matter which, like the atmosphere we breathe, is 
 used but not retained. The human body is to the casual eye, 
 as the waters of a river to one who gazes on their placid 
 surface, unconscious of a current that produces unceasing 
 change. 
 
 The body, in fact, constitutes as much a part of the material 
 system of things in the world we inhabit, as the land, the 
 ocean, or the atmosphere. Is it possible that in our future 
 our eternal condition, in the Heaven of Heavens a part of this 
 perishing world should find a place? 
 
 Whatever may be the condition of man in his future state, it 
 is quite certain that it will be spiritual and not corporeal that 
 his person will not be composed of flesh and blood will not be 
 made up of machinery for receiving matter for the sustenance of 
 animal life and the continuation of the species. In short, that 
 such an identity as some Christians have pertinaciously con- 
 tended for, is utterly unfitted to a condition in which no change 
 can take place. 
 
 Happily for him who runs that he may obtain a heavenly 
 crown, the state of our future being, for all purposes of practical 
 religion, requires no definition can aifect no Christian duty, 
 
 and
 
 Essay XXVITI.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 113 
 
 and will assuredly be provided for by the infinite wisdom and 
 goodness of God. 
 
 " Jesus answered and said unto them, Ye do err, not know- 
 ing the Scriptures, nor the power of God. For in the resur- 
 rection they neither marry, nor are given in marriage, but are 
 as the angels of God in heaven." Matt,, xxii. 29, 30.
 
 ESSAY XXIX. 
 
 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE RESURRECTION 
 OF THE BODY. 
 
 " Truth crushed to earth shall rige again, 
 The eternal years of God are hei-s : 
 Whilst Error wounded, writhes in pain. 
 
 And dies amidst his worshippers," Bryant. 
 
 IN the Scriptural statements that the body will enter the 
 kingdom of Heaven, figurative language was used, I con- 
 ceive, with no other object than that of conveying to the minds 
 of the people to whom Christ and his Apostles preached, the 
 only idea of an after-state of existence they were capable of 
 receiving. 
 
 It is difficult to reconcile any other view of the language of 
 Scripture with the condition of the Penitent Thief, who received 
 from Christ assurance that he should be " this day with him in 
 paradise," and whose hody no one supposes to have been included 
 in this promise, or with that of Moses and Elias, who appeared 
 to Jesus during his Transfiguration. 
 
 The
 
 "^ 
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 115 
 
 The whole tendency of Scripture is opposed to the doctrine 
 of a material resurrection. We find in Matthew, xxii. 31, 32, 
 these words : " But as touching the resurrection of the dead, 
 have ye not read that which was spoken to you by God, saying, 
 I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God 
 of Jacob : God is not the God of the dead but of the living." 
 What meaning, consistent with a preservation of the body, can 
 we assign to these words ? " Think not," said Christ to the 
 Jews, " to say within youtselves, we have Abraham to our 
 father ; for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to 
 raise up children unto Abraham." The obvious intention of 
 this declaration was to correct, in the minds of his hearers, the 
 idea they entertained of the absolute importance of their rela- 
 tionship to the head and founder of their nation, and to assure 
 them that God could at any time, without the instrumentality 
 of the body, raise up or create beings as spiritually worthy in 
 his sight as Abraham or his descendants. 
 
 We are too apt to forget the frailty of our present condition, 
 and appear to be unaware that our senses are but ^instruments 
 the Creator has provided for our use in this world, and were 
 never intended to circumscribe our higher powers in a future 
 and perfect state of existence. How short is the distance to 
 which the most perfect of these instruments, the eye, can carry 
 us. Aided by the telescope, we discover a vast creation of 
 which we had previously no idea ; but even with this assistance, 
 the eye falls far short of the point which is reached by the 
 thought by the mind. The eye requires eight minutes to 
 travel to the sun, but in how much less time the mind reaches 
 the remotest conceivable bounds of the creation ! 
 
 In a future and perfect condition, why should our powers of 
 enjoying the works of the Creator be limited by instruments so 
 
 I 2 imperfect
 
 116 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXTX. 
 
 imperfect? Why, in traversing the eternal spaces, should we 
 be circumscribed by material bodies ? What in this life thinks 
 what enjoys, but the Soul, the powers of which, here below, 
 are only too limited by its prison house, the body ! 
 
 Nature, even in the humblest of her works, effects changes 
 the least to be imagined. What idea can the grub, moving 
 with difficulty and seeing but the object immediately in contact 
 with it, have of its future condition as a butterfly of its 
 glorious wings, its unrestrained powers of motion, its capacity 
 for enjoying the beauty of a thousand flowers? What, the 
 insect which passes the first stages of its existence in a muddy 
 pool, of the joyous flights of its after condition ? If a change 
 so glorious is worked for the after stage of existence of an 
 insect, whose life is but that of a day, how reasonable to believe 
 that the Creator will endow beings to whom he has promised 
 eternal life and happiness, and a dwelling in his own celestial 
 tabernacles, with powers suited to their future condition ! 
 
 Many who maintain the necessity of the resurrection of the 
 body, urge the sacred character of what has been the tenement 
 of the immortal principle of the soul. Others insist on the 
 necessity of identity, as it were for purposes of recognition, 
 between those who are brought together in the after-life. Too 
 much is involved in either supposition. If the body has acquired 
 a sacred character merely as having been the tenement of the 
 soul, that character must attach to every particle that at any 
 time composed it. He, therefore, who shall in this life have 
 attained great age, must appear in a body enlarged to gigantic 
 dimensions. He must, as a necessary consequence, take with 
 him, into the heavenly and eternal state, all the physical diseases 
 with which he had in this life been afflicted, the tumour, the 
 wen, the elephantiasis, which certainly constituted part of his 
 
 body
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 117 
 
 body, so sanctified by the mere fact of having encased the 
 immortal soul. 
 
 If, on the other hand, the identity of the body be contended 
 for, it is obvious that our human body must be presented in 
 every stage of its earthly career, and become a multitude instead 
 of a person. How, otherwise, could recognition take place? 
 How could a child who died at the age of six years, recognize, 
 in the attenuated crone of eighty, the bloom and freshness of the 
 young mother it parted from in this world ? Who could trace, 
 in the decrepit old man, the sturdy ruffian who at the age of 
 thirty had assassinated him ? 
 
 It is said we shall not all sleep, but that " in the twinkling of 
 an eye we shall all be changed." If the object were to present 
 the spirit to its Maker in the body it occupied in this life, why 
 a change ? If it be admitted that so great a change will take 
 place as to alter the entire construction of the body, in order to 
 fit it for an eternal condition, where then is the identity ? In 
 truth, the word " resurrection " was intended only to express 
 the change which takes place on the dissolution of the body. 
 
 All language is as essentially figurative as it is imperfect, 
 that of Scripture strikingly so, and most of all those parts of it in 
 which anything connected with our future condition is described 
 or alluded to. Who can literally understand that the dead 
 shall be judged out of those things which are " written in the 
 books according to their works ? " Who supposes that God, 
 who knoweth the inmost thoughts of the heart, has need of 
 material archives or written records? His sentence on the 
 guilty is indelibly recorded on their own consciences, and they 
 themselves bear it with them beyond the grave. 
 
 We are unwilling to surrender the delusions which have 
 accompanied us through life ; and we cling most pertinaciously 
 
 to
 
 118 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXIX. 
 
 to those prejudices which spring from early training. But as 
 our capabilities of appreciating Infinite Wisdom and Power are 
 enlarged, we daily correct some error, and become more 
 conscious of the narrow-mindedness of those who perplex and 
 entangle the great Christian assurances so full of cheerful 
 certainty, with doctrines it is impossible to reconcile with the 
 reason conferred by the Creator. 
 
 " Progress I 'tis the life that rages 
 Through the world's predestined ages, 
 Never resting, 
 Ever breasting, 
 The unrefluent waves of Time, 
 At the Almighty word sublime 
 
 God's great one word. 
 Silent never, pealing ever 
 ' Onward ! Onward !' " * 
 
 EXTRACTS FROM A LETTER TO JAMES NORTON, ESQ., 
 AUTHOR OF AN ESSAY ON THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 
 
 " (1) It occurred to me, as I read your remarks on the 
 evanescent character of the body, may not the same be said, 
 in a certain high sense, of thes oul P Is not it also ' altered by 
 every inspiration ? ' Are not our ideas being altered, modified, 
 rearranged, dail^, hourly ? Is there a soul on earth, of which 
 it can be affirmed, that its ' stand-point,' its position in respect 
 to the universe, has been the same in any two successive hours 
 of its existence, to say nothing of years and decades ? I suppose 
 not ; and yet, no man dreams that this proteous and shifting 
 
 * Charles Harpur. 
 
 experience
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESUKRECTION OF THE BODY. 119 
 
 experience of the soiil subverts the doctrine of (2) ' personal 
 identity.' Now may there not be amid all the changes affecting 
 the body, some (3) hidden stratum that does not waste away 
 some essential characteristic portion of A which can never be 
 appropriated by B or C ? 
 
 " It seems to you preposterous to imagine that the soul will 
 be accompanied in its eternal pilgrimage of being by any kind 
 of body, and you cite the words, ' Flesh and blood shall not 
 inherit, &c. In regard to this point, I would say, that I have a 
 strong impression of having seen, in the works of our most able 
 and Platonic thinkers, the sentiment, ' that the Supreme alone 
 is a pure absolute, spirit,' (4) and that it is probable that all 
 finite minds, whether human or angelic, must have a certain 
 material vehicle as the necessary medium of their communion 
 with the great and beautiful creations of Divine power. I 
 cannot specify names; for this kind of reading has not been 
 common with me of late years. My ' impression' is, however, 
 I believe correct ; at any rate, certain it is, that as far as mat- 
 ters have hitherto gone, we have no reason to regard this, 
 ' torpid ass,' the body, with contempt. (5) The senses have 
 evidently been the great inlets of the sublimest ideas of such 
 men as Bacon, Milton, &c., or of the rough materials out of 
 which such ideas have been manufactured. Can we then spare 
 I will not say the present body, but a body of some kind ? Is 
 not some organization, however attenuated however nearly 
 approaching the nature of spirit, absolutely necessary, judging 
 from analogy, to the immortal advancement which we hope for ? 
 
 "I quite agree with you in denouncing the folly that would 
 silence or in any way ignore the utterances of * modem science.' 
 Still let us not outrun the light it supplies to the thoughtful 
 rational man in (6) Biblical interpretation. There is darkness 
 
 and
 
 120 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXIX. 
 
 and peril ahead of the scientific procession as well as in its 
 rear. 
 
 " The passage in your Essay that most startles me is the fifth 
 paragraph, in which, with apparent gravity, (7) you say that 
 the ' spiritual body ' mentioned by the Apostle, and which is to 
 be raised at the 'sound of the trumpet' 'is a spirit!' Had 
 you forgotten, when you penned these words, that the New 
 Testament teaches that (8) pious souls are not in the grave, but 
 with Crod? Had you forgotten the words of Jesus in his all- 
 admirable refutation of the Pharisees ? ' Crod,^ saith he, ' is not 
 the God of" the dead but of the living.' These words seem to me 
 fatal to your theory. Then there are Paul's words (9), ' Absent 
 from the body, present with the Lord.' Surely the phrase, ' with 
 the Lord,' is somewhat more luminous and consolatory than the 
 phrase ' in the grave.' Again, he says, ' I have a desire to 
 depart and to be with Christ, which is far better.' Mark the 
 prodigious force of the original here, a force defying transla- 
 tion ; now it would not have been better but immensely worse 
 to lie in the grave as compared with his active and useful life 
 in the Church on earth. 
 
 "(10) May I refer you to 2 Pet. i. 14, 15? Mark the 
 beautiful allusion running through the whole to a tent and its 
 occupant. I would especially refer you to the word rendered 
 ' decease! It is the same word as is employed by the Septua- 
 gint to denote the ' outgoing ' of the Israelites from Egypt. It 
 is the same word as is used in the narrative of the Transfigura- 
 tion, for, says Luke, ' They spake of his " decease " which he 
 was to accomplish,' &c., see ch. ix. 31 ; and accordingly when 
 the event took place, it is said, ' he gave up the gJwst (11),' or 
 ' dismissed his spirit,^ see Doddridge and others. Jesus' body 
 was laid in a tomb, his spirit he had dismissed ' commended 
 
 to
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 121 
 
 to the hands of God.' Now these and similar passages seem to 
 me wholly inconsistent with your idea (12) of a spirit's being 
 raised from the grave. 
 
 " I do not quite understand your remark about the ' eminently 
 sensuous people,' and the associated suggestion that this sen- 
 suousness made it necessary for the Apostles to give ' body ' to 
 their idea of future existence. I believe the most abstract and 
 incomprehensible of all ideas is the absolute spirituahty of the 
 Diviue nature. After that, the separate existence of a created 
 mind is a trifle, that is as an intelligible and manageable object 
 of conception. But the spirituality of God is one of the most 
 fundamental and ' unclothed ' of the New Testament. The ' sen- 
 suous people' (13) were expected to understand it, and I sup- 
 pose they did. John, iv. 24, Paul's Speech on Mars' Hill, &c. 
 
 " ' For what purpose,' say you, ' should we have a body?' 
 and you allude to Hercules, Venus, teeth, &c. Here, you seem 
 to me to do what so many have done before you, but you have 
 not the excuse of slender intellect and scanty furniture or 
 avowed hostility, that may be pleaded for them that is, you 
 draw a doctrine of Scripture out of its sublime and impressive 
 generality, and so make the venerable ludicrous. (14) You 
 have rudely struck the elegant and polished vase, and have 
 shivered it into a shapeless mass of fragments, an experiment 
 which the feeblest coidd repeat ad libitum. But the question 
 is neither so absurd nor so unanswerable as it seems 'What 
 good arise from a body ? ' Consider ! Bacon in sixty-two years 
 became what he was. Suppose, now, that I had a body, not of 
 the Hercules, the brute-force order not of the Venus, of the 
 seducingly-charming order but a body * made like the Saviour's 
 glorious body ;' and through that body, suppose I could be look- 
 ing at the works of God as they will be exhibited in the world 
 
 to
 
 122 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXIX. 
 
 to come. If I could double the acquisitions of my earthly life 
 in the same space of time, my soul increasing in strength, eleva- 
 tion, and possession ; and suppose I could go on at that rate 
 through 'ages to come,' would that be 'nothing?' (15). 
 
 " (16) Your allusion to the state of the body when dead is 
 not may I say so? in your usual good taste. True, a dead 
 body soon becomes an odious mass. So before the birth of a 
 child, there are states, perhaps, not very pleasant to look upon, 
 but that shapeless nondescript may in a few years become a 
 model of beauty and a museum of Divine contrivance ; and is 
 there no power, no Divine chemistry that can evoke from the 
 loathsome tomb forms of angelic loveliness no possibility of the 
 ' vile ' body being made ' a glorious body,' as the Apostle so 
 ardently anticipated? 
 
 " I would add, with respect, that I think, aU philosophic 
 refinements, apart or included, that the Eedemption of Christ is 
 the redemption of humanity. I think Christ is the brother, the 
 hoTid fide representative of man at the right hand of God that 
 he has carried humanity ' within the veil,' that it is my duty, 
 in imitation of the holy Apostle, to ' look for him who shall ' 
 not destroy, annihilate, or disperse, (17) but ' change this vile 
 body that it may be fashioned like unto his glorious body by 
 the mighty power,' &c. &c. &c. See Philippians, iii. 20, 21." 
 
 The foregoing strictures on my paper on the Eesurrection of 
 the Body, from the pen of an accomplished clergyman, were put 
 into my hands, with a message from the writer informing me, 
 that if there were no other ground for his belief in the resurrec- 
 tion of the material body than that of the reappearance of Christ 
 alter the Crucifi^xion, that alone would prevent his belief being 
 
 shaken
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 123 
 
 shaken by arguments, however learned or ingenious. He also 
 remarked that the assurance that our " vile bodies " shall be 
 fashioned like unto "Christ's glorious body," placed, in his 
 opinion, an actual corporeal resurrection beyond question. 
 
 A similar view of the subject was also communicated to me 
 by another clergyman, who expressed his conviction that it 
 admitted of no refutation. Indeed, I believe the opinion 
 expressed by these gentlemen is one that very generally obtains. 
 But surely the conclusions from the reappearance of Christ in 
 the body, upon which it seems to rest, have been too hastily drawn. 
 
 It is admitted that Christ's body, in likeness to which ours is 
 to be fashioned, is a " glorious body," and that to effect this 
 object some change must be undergone by our vile bodies 
 some adaptation must take place. In this adaptation, those 
 organs which are intended for the uses of a condition of earthly 
 life only, will be changed to suit an eternal state. Now that 
 such was not the condition of our Lord's body before the Cruci- 
 fixion, we gather from the whole of the Gospels, and we are 
 especially informed that Christ was subject to hunger and priva- 
 tions, and that he suffered intense agony, that " he took not on 
 him the nature of angels, but the seed of Abraham," and that 
 being "found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself and 
 became obedient unto death." Up to his decease, therefore, it 
 is evident that his body was not " the glorious body " which we 
 desire ours to resemble, but a mere human body. And it is 
 equally evident that such was the condition of that body which 
 reappeared to his disciples after his Crucifixion, as it not only 
 retained the marks the nails had made on his hands, but even 
 the wound inflicted by the spear of the Roman soldier : and 
 we find, probably to convince his disciples of his identity, that 
 he ate a piece of broiled fish and a honeycomb.. Certain, 
 
 therefore,
 
 124 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXIX. 
 
 therefore, it is, that the body of Christ must at that time have 
 had all those corporeal organs, my allusion to which called forth 
 from my reverend friend somewhat not unlike an expression of 
 indignation. 
 
 If, as I understand, he thinks with me that such a body 
 could not without very great change be fitted for a future state, 
 the condition of Christ's glorious body remains unsettled, and all 
 arguments for the resurrection of the human and material body 
 founded on his reappearance must fail. 
 
 Christ ascended into heaven to continue the office that brought 
 him to the world ; but that he took with him the physical 
 apparatus he used on this earth even after his resurrection, will 
 hardly be contended for, even by those who are far less dis- 
 tinguished for piety and reflection than the gentleman whose 
 strictures are under consideration. 
 
 That we should slowly and reluctantly surrender a belief that 
 has so long gained ascendency over the carnal mind, as that of 
 the resurrection of the material person, that we should not with- 
 out a struggle give up hopes and ideas and expectations, ten- 
 derly associated with the personal appearances of those we loved, 
 might naturally be expected. But delusion is not less delusion 
 because bound up with affections, with dear hopes and pious 
 feelings. It is our duty to reject error, in all things approving 
 ourselves " by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good 
 report, as deceivers and yet true." 
 
 My reverend friend explains that the New Testament teaches 
 that pious souls are not in the grave, but with God. This belief 
 appears to me to be irreconcileable with the doctrine of the 
 resurrection of the body at some final day of general judgment. 
 That event, should the words in which it is stated have a literal 
 instead of a figurative meaning, must be so remote from the 
 
 period
 
 Essay XXTX.J RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 125 
 
 period at which Abraham and the Patriarchs, and the still 
 earlier inhabitants of the earth died, that if the reunion of the 
 soul with the body were part of the Divine scheme, it is hardly 
 conceivable that that reunion should be so long postponed, nor is 
 it easy to imagine that such a reincorporation could add to the 
 happiness of those who are " present with the Lord." 
 
 To avoid any misstatement of the arguments and objections 
 put forth by my friendly critic, I have numbered such parts of 
 his paper as appear to call for a reply, and I have noticed them 
 in the order in which they are made. 
 
 (1) The body, like a river, every moment discharges the 
 matter it has used. The soul retains all it receives. If the 
 first cease to acquire, it dies ; if the soul, it nevertheless retains 
 what it had acquired, and ceases only to increase. 
 
 (2, 3) I have endeavoured to show that personal identity is quite 
 inconsistent with the reappearance of the body in a future state. 
 
 (4) Although I do not see the necessity of furnishing the 
 spirit with a material vehicle, that is not involved in the doc- 
 trine of the non-resurrection of the body. That ** house not 
 made with hands, eternal in the heavens " may, for anything I 
 have contended for, be a " material vehicle." 
 
 (5) " Man," says Emerson, " is endogenous ; a name applied 
 to a class of plants that increase from within." In Bacon and 
 Milton, the senses were not the inlets of the ideas, but tJieir 
 minds enabled them to use their senses. 
 
 (6) The peril of the inquiry should not check the inquiry. God 
 has given us faculties to be used, not " to be buried in a napkin.'' 
 
 (7) The gravity is not less real than apparent. "I cannot 
 conceive," says Coleridge, " a better definition of body than 
 ' spirit appearing,' or of a flesh-and-blood man than a rational 
 spirit apparent." 
 
 (8,9)
 
 126 FURTHER OBSERVATIONS ON THE [Essay XXIX. 
 
 (8, 9) I have no idea that the soul accompanies or remains 
 with the body for a moment after death. I think Paul's ex- 
 pression, " that when absent from the body he should be present 
 with the Lord," fatal to a belief in the resurrection of the 
 material body. What more could he desire than to be present 
 with the Lord ? 
 
 (10) 2 Pet. i. 14, 15. Peter speaks of the putting oiF the 
 tabernacle of the body, as though all connection should for ever 
 cease. Surely in applying this expression to the exodus of the 
 Israelites, it will not be contended that siaj future connection 
 with Egypt was contemplated ? 
 
 (11) Jesus did not commend his body but his " spirit " only 
 to God. 
 
 (12) See answer to 8. 
 
 (13) It is one thing to believe that God is a spirit, a very 
 different one to conceive that the creatures of earth shall become 
 such, and it must not be forgotten that the Jews always looked 
 to the Messiah to establish their earthly kingdom. They were 
 quite unprepared for that kingdom which Christ preached. 
 
 (14) God forbid that I should attempt to strike at any one 
 scriptural doctrine. If it be conceded that no part of the body 
 that is unsuited to a heavenly condition can accompany the 
 spirit into the life to come, I have succeeded in overcoming 
 long-standing prejudices beyond my utmost expectation. What 
 part of the body is not " of the earth earthy ? " What part is 
 not so organized as to show the necessity of constant change 
 constant renewal ? Leaving out of consideration the less im- 
 portant corporeal parts, let us come at once to the brain. Is 
 that fit for an eternal condition is that anything more than 
 the tabernacle that the Apostle Peter spoke of " putting off ? " 
 
 (15) Bacon and Newton were, while in the body, in the con- 
 dition
 
 Essay XXIX.] RESURRECTION OF THE BODY. 127 
 
 dition that St. Paul tells us it were " better to be absent from." 
 The Saviour's " glorious body " may, in the sense in which we 
 at present use the words, be not a body at all. It is certainly 
 not the body in which he appeared to his disciples after his 
 resurrection. If it be contended that he still retains that body 
 unchanged, in what way did I incur the charge of irreverence 
 by asking to what use could be applied those parts of our 
 material persons to which offices in this life only were assigned ? 
 
 (16) I must have been misunderstood. I deny the existence 
 of the body after death. It has, in fact, returned to its elements. 
 The river when it reaches the sea is a river no longer. 
 
 (17) My inquiries did not extend to the ultimate fate of the 
 matter of which the body is composed ; on the other hand, I 
 expressed my belief that, like everything that God has created, 
 it never becomes useless. 
 
 Note. Amongst other arguments that have been urged 
 against the views I have taken of the corporeal resurrection, is 
 one springing from words that occur in the Book of Job, which 
 are translated as follows in the received version of the Bible : 
 *' And though after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in 
 my flesh shall I see God." (Job xix. 26.) I think it is as 
 erroneous to take the highly-imaginative language here used by 
 Job, in its literal sense, as that describing interviews between 
 God and the Devil, which occurs in an earlier portion of the 
 book. But even if a literal sense were intended, no believer 
 in the doctrines of Christianity could allow the opinions of the 
 Chaldean poet to outweigh the assurance of St. Paul, that the 
 body to be raised is a spiritual body. However widely different 
 views Christians may entertain of the nature of that body, all 
 agree that flesh will form no part of it.
 
 ESSAY XXX. 
 
 THE EEDEMPTION : A VISION. 
 
 God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and 
 delivered them into chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgment. 
 2 Peter, ii. 4. 
 
 WITH what darker chains than the lusts of the flesh the 
 infirmities of our human nature could the angels that 
 kept not their first estate have been boimd ? And for what were 
 they reserved ? If for judgment, how were they to be disposed 
 of until the day of judgment should arrive? 
 
 Lost in the contemplation of this mysterious subject, I fell 
 into some such state as that which has been described by 
 persons who have recovered from drowning, during which all 
 the circumstances of their lives appeared to be simultaneously 
 presented to the mind just about to be disengaged from the 
 body. 
 
 Time had ceased to be. I gazed upon the Panorama of 
 
 Eternity
 
 Essay XXX.] THE REDEMPTION. 129 
 
 Eternity. All stood still. The first thoughts of my infancy, 
 the last scene in which I had moved, my long-forgotten errors, 
 my ill-performed duties, the weaknesses, the follies, of my whole 
 life, all were portrayed. 
 
 From the contemplation of this picture I turned to that of 
 events that had preceded my existence of those which were to 
 follow ; and I beheld the things angels desire to look into. 
 
 I saw Satan and an innumerable company of his deluded 
 followers fall as lightning from heaven. I beheld the Lamb of 
 God, not then within the shades of time and passion. I heard 
 his intercession for the fallen his prayer that they should have 
 probation still. Then, at the fiat of the Almighty Judge, I saw 
 this earth and suns and worlds unnumbered burst into new 
 existence. 
 
 I saw the fallen clothed in our nature, human and infirm. 
 
 I saw a ray. of light from heaven guiding the hapless wanderers 
 from the fold, and shedding peace on earth, still lead them to 
 the truth that they had lost ; and I beheld the Lamb of God 
 veiled in our nature, and on earth proclaim pardon for sins, 
 remission for our guilt. 
 
 I heard the angelic host praise God on high, and sing of 
 peace on earth, and of good will towards men. 
 
 I saw the Sun of Eighteousness expire, his mission end upon 
 the Cross the chains of our dark nature broken gone. 
 
 I saw the Son of God ascend to heaven, and thither lead the 
 myriads He had saved. 
 
 Again, I heard the angels sing, '"Lift up your heads ye 
 gates." Then, opened wide, I saw the everlasting doors that 
 never more should close, and from the Mediator shine a light 
 upon that narrow way that through the labyrinths of this world 
 leads up to pardon and eternal peace. 
 
 K I heard
 
 130 
 
 THE EEDEMPTION. 
 
 [Essay XXX. 
 
 I heard the judgment on the fallen the lost, that would not 
 Jiear. 
 
 " Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity captive ; 
 thou hast received gifts for men." Psalm, Ixviii. 18.
 
 ESSAY XXXI. 
 
 THE AtT^ER-STATE OP THE WICKED : A VISION. 
 
 Cast him into outer darkness: there shall be weeping and gnashing of 
 teeth. Matthew, xxii. 13. 
 
 FALLING into a state of dreamy abstraction I conceived that 
 my probation in this world was at an end. I dreamt that 
 I had for ever closed my eyes upon the objects with which I had 
 been too fatally engrossed during a long life of prosperity and 
 selfish gratification. For a moment I felt utterly bewildered, 
 but I suddenly became conscious that I was accompanied by a 
 being, under whose control I was borne onward with incon- 
 ceivable velocity. 
 
 It was very long before I recovered the power of articulation, 
 but when at length I had suificient strength and courage to in- 
 quire where I was, and whither we were speeding, the only 
 answer I received from my awful companion was an indication 
 by his finger of the mysterious distance which lay before us. 
 How long we proceeded in this manner I was incapable of 
 
 apprehending,
 
 132 THE AFTER-STATE OF THE WICKED. [Essay XXXI. 
 
 apprehending, but I observed more than one star increase to 
 intense brilliancy recede, and become invisible ; and I could 
 not suppress a terrible foreboding that the stupendous creation of 
 the heavens was gradually disappearing from ray view. The 
 vast array of suns and worlds was at length reduced to a single 
 star even that grew dim ; and now it was that my companion 
 for the first time stayed our flight and broke the silence by thus 
 addressing me : 
 
 " Fallen from your first estate, the Creator of the universe 
 granted you a place of probation in the world you have left, 
 endowed you with sentiments and feelings capable of a pure 
 and holy direction, enlightened you with the knowledge of His 
 will, and pointed out to you the means by which you might be 
 restored to the happiness you had forfeited. You despised His 
 mercy, and employed the time allotted to you in the gratifica- 
 tion of your lusts and passions. Surrounded by objects of 
 suffering and of crime, your life was spent in adding to the 
 nimiber ; while your desire was bounded only by your power to 
 violate the laws of God and man to trample upon all obligation 
 human and Divine. 
 
 " This is the punishment annexed to your guilt. The self you 
 have worshipped shall to all eternity be your sole companion. 
 You have been borne hitherward with the velocity assigned by 
 the Creator to the progress of light; you see the last of His 
 created suns, and you are henceforth to proceed with unabated 
 velocity through all eternity, into the infinitude of space. This 
 IS THE Outer Darkness." 
 
 While these words still sounded in my ears, my guide dis- 
 appeared, and I again felt myself urged on with the same terrific 
 rapidity. For a time I was overwhelmed ; but a glimpse I 
 obtained of the last and fast-receding star recalled me to the 
 
 consciousness
 
 Essay XXXI.] THE AFTER-STATE OF THE WICKED. 133 
 
 consciousness of my unutterable misery, and I fixed my eyes 
 upon this object as I would have fixed them on the face of a 
 friend in that illimitable solitude. So intense was my gaze, 
 that as the twinkle of this star became imcertain, my eyes were 
 strained in their sockets. I would have given worlds to retain 
 the slightest glimpse of the only object that was left; that 
 twuikle disappeared, and with a burst of agony I started from 
 my dream.
 
 ESSAY XXXII. 
 
 THE JOY OF THE EIGHTEOUS : A VISION. 
 
 Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of 
 man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. 
 1 Corinthians, ii. 9. 
 
 MUSING on these words, I became unconscious of surround- 
 ing objects, and imagined that I had passed into that 
 eternal state, for which this life of probation is intended to 
 prepare us. 
 
 I had belonged to a very large class of human beings, the 
 poor and the friendless, and might have sunk under the tempta- 
 tions to which I was exposed, if the sufferings of my parents and 
 the necessity of providing for their support had not given con- 
 stant exercise to the better part of my nature, and, when I was 
 at length deprived of them, impressed upon my mind so deep a 
 conviction of the vanity of all worldly objects, that I sometimes 
 felt what might be almost called a longing for that place, where 
 the wicked cease from troubling and the weary are at rest. 
 
 A delightful
 
 Essay XXXH.] THE JOY OF THE RIGHTEOUS. 135 
 
 A delightful sense of harmony and repose stole over me, the 
 dimness that had overspread my faculties seemed gradually to 
 pass away, and I was struck with wonder and admiration at the 
 things I beheld. 
 
 Eich and varied scenery burst upon my view, thousands 
 of flowers diffused the most exquisite perfume, and birds of 
 ethereal lightness, arrayed in delicate and gorgeous plumage, 
 filled the air with music. 
 
 Wliile in this state of rapture, I was joined by companions of 
 angelic beauty, one of whom took my hand, and I immediately 
 became conscious that I had indeed put on immortality that I 
 was to dwell for ever in the presence of my Creator. With 
 a voice of harmonious sweetness that thrilled through my whole 
 being, he explained to me that I was now amongst the number 
 of those whose garments had been washed in the blood of 
 the Lamb ! that my sufferings had been the means appointed 
 by Divine love, for purifying me from the stains of selfishness 
 and sin, and that my light afiliction, which had been but for 
 a moment, had worked for me a far more exceeding and eternal 
 weight of glory. 
 
 My companion pointed out to me the vast creation of suns 
 and worlds, of which I had descried only a very inconsiderable 
 part, but which I was now enabled to contemplate with an in- 
 tuitive power of comprehending their beauty in its ennobling 
 relations to the infinite wisdom that was displayed in their 
 arrangement ; then emphatically, the morning stars sang toge- 
 ther, and all the Sons of God shouted for joy. 
 
 He explained to me, that the objects I beheld were all instinct 
 with life, and that even the trees and flowers were conscious of 
 their glory, that many of the beautiful birds which flitted around 
 us were the spiritual forms of those untaught children of nature 
 
 who
 
 136 THE JOY OF THE RIGHTEOUS. [Essay XXXIl. 
 
 who had made the best use of the imperfect light which had 
 been shed upon their path, and that, without partaking the 
 exalted character of the angelic host, they felt the privilege of 
 Divine mercy, and added their tribute to the chorus of angelic 
 adoration. While my heavenly companion continued to speak, 
 my whole soul became concentrated and absorbed in an over- 
 powering sense of love. 
 
 It is impossible for the human understanding to comprehend 
 the scenes and objects that engaged my attention, the deaf 
 have not less idea of the sweetness or the power of sounds the 
 blind of the beauty of colours nor would the contemplation of 
 the bayk. or even the leaf of the tree, convey a less perfect idea 
 of its bl> 'Ssoms or its fruit. 
 
 But come, said my heavenly companion, and join the Angelic 
 Host in offering up praises to the Lamb the Redeemer of the 
 world to that God who is love. Upon these words, delightful 
 harmony burst upon my ears the whole atmosphere became 
 one brilliant heaven of light and love, and with a thrill of extacy 
 I awoke. 
 
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