ART. Iỵ. THE INTELLECTUAL DEPendence of Men ON GOD. By W. B. HACKETT, Mt. Hope College, Baltimore, Md. IT does not belong to the present design, to discuss any of those questions, which speculative men have raised in regard to the manner in which events are dependent upon the will of the Creator. "It is enough for our devotion," says Brown, "to trace everywhere the characters of the Divinity, of provident arrangement prior to this system of things, and to know therefore that without that divine will as antecedent, nothing could have been." We admit this to be true. Every one however, conversant at all with the history of opinions on this subject, knows, that a class of philosophers as respectable as any other, either in numbers, or weight of authority, have been disposed "to ascribe every change in the universe, material or intellectual, not to the original foresight and arrangement merely, but to the direct operation of the Creator and Sovereign of the world." It is not necessary to avow a partiality for one of these theories, more than another. It is sufficient for our purpose to say, that a practical, abiding sense of the agency of God, as extending in some way to all events, pervading minutely every department of the worlds of matter and mind, in every instance executing, as well as ordaining the laws which govern their operations, is not only a sentiment of vigorous piety when cherished in a high degree, but in some degree, higher or lower, essential to the very existence of piety. No person can be wholly deficient in this feeling, who is not wanting also in every other religious sentiment. That man must be a stranger to all the practical impressions of piety, and living in a state of mind essentially atheistic, who is habitually unobservant of the relations, which as a creature he sustains to the Creator, who witnesses the events, which take place around him without ever being reminded of the divine efficiency which causes them, and who is conscious too of processes within him, which he supposes perhaps, if he has any precise belief about them, may be self-originated and self-directed. Regarded in one point of view, the great difference between the truly religious and irreligious lies chiefly in this, that while the former are penetrated more or less deeply with a sense of God's universal presence and their own reliance upon him, the latter, if they feel these truths at all, feel them only in a low degree. To the eye of the Christian every operation of nature discloses some trace of the Deity. These, he exclaims, as the changes of the year pass before him, "These Almighty Father, these Are but the varied God. The rolling year It is man, on the contrary, "wandering" emphatically, "with brute, unconscious gaze," who, "Marks not the mighty Hand, That, ever busy, wheels the silent spheres ; Works in the secret deep; shoots, streaming thence Characteristic however as it is of the truly religious, that they have always some impression, stronger or weaker, of God's all pervading energy, there is still something disproportionate often in the development of this impression even in their minds. Instead of manifesting, as we should expect, an equal sensibility to all the relations of their dependent state, it is more common to see them comparatively indifferent to some of these relations, although as important and as practical as those which they fully appreciate. We have an example of this deficiency in the inadequate views, which the great body even of religious men, entertain in regard to the extent of their intellectual dependence on God. It would almost seem as if the good were in league with the wicked, to exclude the Creator altogether from this department of his agency. They claim for their minds, if we may infer their pretensions from their feelings, a constitution wholly unlike that, which they claim either for their bodies, or the physical world, or the course of events; a constitution, which removes the Infinite Ruler from all concern in the intellectual acts of his creatures, and which invests them with a self-sufficiency as to such acts, which these very individuals who exercise it, would deem it the madness of impiety to arrogate in respect to any thing else. The majority,-we would leave room for some and honourable exceptions,-but the majority even of those who are really devout, who carry the sentiment of dependence so far as to recognise it in all the common occurrences of life, virtually disown this sentiment the moment they come to act as intellectual beings, as if they had now passed beyond the limits of God's dominion, and were in regions, to which his eye seldom wanders, and where the pressure of his arm, elsewhere ever upon them, has ceased to be felt. We deem it unnecessary to go minutely into the proof of these remarks. The bare statement of them will suggest to the reader the general evidence of their truth. No person especially, we think, will call for confirmation of them, who has been himself addicted to the pursuits of study, and is a believer in that dependence upon the Creator for all capacity of action, arising from the very nature of derived existence. His own experience establishes the point. He cannot but be conscious, that however deficient he may have been in acknowledging his other relations as a created being, he has still been less deficient there, than in respect to his inability to think and reason, except as God gives him the power. At the very time when he would have been absolutely shocked at the thought of his own presumption, had he merely undertaken a journey, or changed his place of residence, or performed some similar thing without confessing his need of higher wisdom than his own, it has been, perhaps, his habit to apply himself to the study of the profoundest truths, and yet feel as much dependent upon his own resources for success, as though he believed mind were a thing which Deity itself could not influence. It would be easy for us to trace developments of the disposition which has now been mentioned, in numberless ways. After what has been said, a single illustration will suffice. Were men equally susceptible of impressions of their dependence, from the various modes in which God exerts his energy upon them, we should see them as much affected by witnessing striking displays of intellectual power, as those which are purely physical. Instead of this, the reverse, as every one knows, is true. Let a person, with such habits of religious association as intelligent Christians generally possess, read such a work, for example, as Henderson's "Journal of a residence in Iceland,"-a work abounding in descriptions of the most remarkable natural phenomena, and without a single comment from the author to direct his thoughts to God, how frequently during the perusal will his thoughts of their own accord take this direction. To say nothing of the manner, in which the scenes there described would be likely to impress an eye-witness, how impossible for any serious reader to peruse even the description itself, without being led, through these works of nature, up to nature's God. What levity, what skepticism, yea, we will add, what atheism itself, can prevent his mind from recurring instantly to that Omnipotent Being, whose agents he sees, through the medium of the narrative, at work on every side of him, shaking the earth, and rending the mountains, and convulsing the heavens, in the potency of their strength ? Interdumque atram prorumpit ad aethera nubem, But let this same individual now, whom we have supposed to be thus affected by an exhibition of mere physical power, contemplate some of the mightier movements of mind, let him study, for instance, such a performance as Butler's Analogy, or the Paradise Lost of Milton;-let him reflect what various and wonderful powers must have been exerted to produce it, what discriminating there must have been of reason, what recollecting of memory, what imagination, what skill in language, what vigorous exercise, in short, of every part of the intellectual man ;-suppose him fully able to follow the track of these, or any of the other great masters of thought and expression, keenly sensible to whatever is excellent in style, or powerful in argument, so that the displays of their taste shall delight him, and the grandeur of their conceptions amaze him, and his captivated soul yield to them the homage, which genius like theirs exacts; and yet in all this idolatry of men, how little adoration is there likely to be of God? How improbable is it, that it will even once occur to him, that there has been any co-operation of divine with human agency, in the production of what is thus exciting his wonder? How much reason to fear, that so far from having this tendency, such feats of intellectual strength will raise unduly his conceptions of the creature's power of achievement, and in this way diminish his sense of the necessity of interpositions on the part of the Creator? A mind, it is needless to say, affected thus from viewing the mental efforts of others, is in any state but one VOL. I. 74 favourable to just impressions of its own dependence. We have proposed a trial for testing the correctness of these remarks, which every one can apply for himself; and if doubted, we have only to request that the trial may be made. It does not comport with our design to dwell at any great length on the reasons, which account for this propensity of men to overlook their intellectual dependence. The apology for a thing, however, is sometimes to be found in its explanation. We shall attempt, therefore, to give so much of the explanation as may serve to show, that if the propensity in question be defensible, it must be on some other ground than that of its origin. It would be strictly true, but not pertinent, to adduce, as its principal cause, that disposition of men to exclude God from all superintendence of the universe, which, as Scripture affirms, makes part of their depravity, and as all history teaches, gives place only to the re-creating energy of the Gospel. This account of the matter does not meet the peculiarity of the case. It suggests a reason, indeed, for the blindness of men to the footsteps of Deity throughout the creation at large, but leaves it unexplained, that there should be so much more of it in this particular department which we speak of, than any where else. To account for this, we must resort to other causes, more specific than this general one; causes which, although they may derive an increased activity from this leading one, would still exercise a degree of influence, even if that had no existence. We have not to look far in searching for such causes. In the first place, all those circumstances which lead to the neglect of mental science in general, prevent also attention to this connexion, whatever it be, between God's agency and the agency of man in these intellectual acts, with which mental science is concerned. The philosophy of mind, it is well known, has ever had, in comparison with other branches of study, but few votaries. Its inquiries are too abstract, of course, for the bulk of mankind. But even as to professed students, they are so far partakers of that tendency of our nature to be more attentive to things around us, than within us, that they are commonly better acquainted with all other subjects than with their own minds. A consequence of this must be, that our mental acts will suggest to us the idea of God less fre |