absurdities bare and absolute beyond all parallel, must of course be dismissed with contempt.

If matter, as the necessary result of its organization, be capable of thought, spirit or an immaterial principle is at once annihilated, and consequently one first, eternal, and independent cause, one source of life and intellect, no longer exists. Here the sceptic triumphs, because he has gotten rid, as he conceives, of what he cannot perfectly comprehend. But mark the result of the expedient to which he is driven. In order to account for the origin and perpetuity of life, he is compelled to have recourse to the doctrine of successive and infinite generation, a theory which, when traced to its ultimate consequence, necessarily leads to the substitution of many thousand first causes instead of one. For as infinite succession can have no beginning, it must of course inevitably follow, that every species of existence, vegetable or animal, must have been from all eternity, a self-independent being, a first cause as to itself, without commencement or termination!

In comparison with this substitution, the dernier resource of the infidel, and which, in' fact, converts matter into a million of indepen

dent deities, how simple is the doctrine of religion and of immaterialism! And this follows from refusing to believe in one Eternal spirit as the Creator of all things, merely because we cannot understand his essence, because eternity, and therefore infinity, falls not within the comprehension of a finite mind.

Not in this manner philosophized Sir Thomas Browne, who, speaking of the inadequacy of the human intellect in its efforts to comprehend the nature of the Deity, sublimely observes, "My philosophy dares not say the angels can do it; God hath not made a creature that can comprehend him; it is a privilege of his own nature; I am that I am, was his own definition unto Moses; and it was a short one to confound mortality, that durst question God, or ask him what he was. Indeed he only is; all others have, and shall be; but in eternity there is no distinction of tenses; and therefore that terrible term predestination, which hath troubled so many weak heads to conceive, and the wisest to explain, is, in respect to God, no prescious determination of our estates to come, but a definitive blast of his will already fulfilled, and at the instant that

he first decreed it; for to his eternity, which is indivisible, and altogether, the last trump is already sounded, the reprobates in the flame, and the blessed in Abraham's bosom. St. Peter speaks modestly, when he saith, a thousand years to God are but as one day. For, to speak like a philosopher, those continued instances of time which flow into thousands of years, make not to him one moment; what to us is to come, to his eternity is present, his whole duration being but one permanent point without succession, parts, flux, or division."

The doctrine of organization, as the cause and source of thought, appears to have arisen from confounding connection with identity; from inferring that, as in the visible universe, mind is found always connected with organic matter; it is, therefore, the result of structure, and has consequently no separate or independent origin.

A sound and correct view, however, of the attributes of the Deity, such as they appear, both from reason and scripture, would, whilst it pointed out the mutual connection of mind and matter, as clearly and as satisfactorily display their mutual independence.

I will venture, therefore, following the example of the great author who has so nobly expatiated on subjects of a similar nature, to give an outline of what may seem warranted, both by reason, analogy, and revelation, concerning the existence and operating powers of one Supreme, Almighty Cause, the source of life and motion.

It would appear, then, from a due consideration of the data, which these channels of intelligence afford us, that God is the only pure and disembodied spirit in the universe, occupying and pervading all space, but necessarily, from the perfect immateriality of his essence, invisible; and therefore he is emphatically and correctly designated by the appellation of the invisible God.

The visible world, therefore, could only start into existence at the creation of matter by the fiat or volition of the Deity, who, by organizing it in every possible variety of form, has rendered it the recipient of mind or thought, or, to speak more properly, of his own essence or vis divina.

How the great primary being, the fountain of self-agency, a being purely spiritual, and,

therefore, in his own essence perfectly invisible, unites himself with matter, must ever remain beyond our comprehension; but the fact is ever before us; for no one, I presume, will deny that an idea is incorporeal, and yet the action of idea or thought on our bodily frame is hourly and momentarily manifest, and effectuated in a mode, no doubt, similar to that by which the Almighty first acted on organized

matter.

It is our belief, indeed, that life, with all its properties, vegetable, animal, and intellectual, is nothing more than a manifestation of the vis divina, varied or limited according to the organization which it informs and regulates; that intellectual life, or that integral portion of the Divine Being which constitutes the soul of man, is, as the result of its endowment with consciousness, and moral responsibility, destined to distinct personal individuation throughout all eternity, and that consequently it will be for ever accompanied by some system of organization as the instrument of visible identity; whilst animal life, as exhibiting only the sentient principle, and possessing neither reflection, abstrac