absurdum. He shows that there are so many incidental, and as it were accidental, coincidences and confirmatory passages, in the writings of St. Paul, of the truth of the Acts of the Apostles, that 'tis far more absurd to suppose that the Epistles and Acts are the joint productions of impostors, than to believe the wonderful story of the Cross, and God's strange love to guilty man. There is not a mathematician upon earth, who will not acknowledge the force of Paley's argument, but the mere man of letters cannot appreciate it, or feel its power.

It has been our privilege to have had access to many of the standard writers on the Evidences of Christianity, and the reasoning in all is precisely the same as that employed in Geometry. A ripe scholar has said that this brief summary might be made of all that had been written in support of the truth of the religion of Jesus: "the writers of the New Testament were either deluded men, bad men, or good men. They were not deluded men, for the miracles they professed to have witnessed were of such a character as to admit of no illusion of the senses. They were not the tricks of the juggler. A juggler could not have walked upon a troubled sea and calmed its angry waves. A juggler could not have raised the dead and opened the eyes of the blind. The first hypothesis must then be rejected. 2dly. They were not bad men, for bad men never contended for holiness, justice, purity and truth, and sealed their doctrines with their blood. The second hypothesis must also be rejected. The third hypothesis is then established by the negation of the other two. The Apostles, then, were good men, and their testimony must be received." Exactly thus reasons Legendre, to show that if two angles of a triangle be unequal, the side opposite the greater angle will be greater than the side opposite the other angle; for the side opposite the greater angle must be equal to, less, or greater than the side opposite the less angle.The first two suppositions are shown to be impossible, therefore the third is established to be correct. A little learning is a dangerous thing. The poor buffoon, Thomas Paine, probably knew the difference between a straight line and an angle, and in his scurrilous attacks upon Christianity, affected great veneration for the de

monstrations of Euclid, and pretended to employ_geometrical reasoning in his foul essays. But Bishop Watson exposed the sciolism of the creature, and demonstrated to the world that the obscene wretch knew more of vulgarity than of Euclid.

2d. The peculiar habit of thinking, induced by mathematical studies, is favourable to the reception, without cavil or gainsaying, of the incomprehensible doctrine of the Christian religion.

The mathematician is accustomed to acquiesce in any conclusion, to which he is legitimately led, by his scientific investigations; whether that conclusion conflict with his previous opinions, or even, apparently, with the evidence of his senses. The simple question with the man of science is, "have I reasoned correctly from correct data?"—satisfied, on these two points, he unhesitatingly accepts the result as true, though he may not be able to understand it in all its bearings and relations. Thus, he believes as firmly as in his own existence, that two columns of water, having the same base and the same altitude, will exert the same pressure upon that base, and lift equal weights; though a pint cup be capable of containing one column, and the bed of the Pacific be too small for the other. The thing seems absurd and impossible, but he has no doubt of the truth of the paradoxical conclusion to which he has been led, because he knows that he has reasoned correctly from admitted facts.

Nor is his belief merely speculative, accepting the conclusion as undoubtedly true, though mysterious and incomprehensible, he has gone to work and constructed a machine, (Bramah's Press,) which, in the hands of the greatest Engineer of his age, was used at the Menai Straits in raising masses of iron, far exceeding in weight the heaviest stones in the pyramid of Cheops. 'Tis impossible for any man, not absolutely an Atheist, to become entangled in the meshes of Deism, Pantheism and other forms of Infidelity, who will manifest in the search after Eternal truth, the spirit, which, as we have just seen, is exhibited by the philosopher in his mathematical investigations. Let his data be, the existence of a God, and the necessity of a revelation of God's will and character to his rational creatures; reasoning mathe

matically upon these premises, he will be convinced that the Bible is that revelation; then, if he acts as the mathematician, he will receive the whole as true, though there be many things that he cannot understand, many that are contrary to his preconceived notions, and some even that seem impossible.

We showed in our first proposition, that the Mathematician must abandon his own principles and mode of reasoning, before he can become an Atheist; because the existence of a God has been again and again demonstrated in a strictly mathematical manner. Our second proposition establishes that the Mathematician can only reject the Bible, by being grossly inconsistent with himself, and by doing violence to his peculiar habit of thought. It follows, then, that the man of true science, of all men in the world, ought to be the least liable to fall into scepticism. We will show hereafter, that the facts agree with this conclusion, and that in every age of the Church, since the man of Calvary cried "it is finished," upon the cross, the profoundest mathematicians have been his most humble and devoted followers. It can not be otherwise: the difficulties of the Bible, which prove stumbling blocks in the path of the belles-lettres scholar, are no impediments to the faith of the devotee of science. He has become accustomed to them in his daily pursuits, he has learned to reject false reasoning, but, at the same time, not to be startled by strange and even incomprehensible conclusions.

Our position is not a novel one: our views are not new. Dugald Stewart said thirty years ago, "Mathematicians have been led to acquiesce in conclusions which appear ludicrous to men of different habits." Let us examine some of these conclusions, to which the great metaphysician alludes, and see whether the matheinatician can, with any sort of consistency, throw away the word of God because of its incomprehensible doctrines.

The time was, when sciolists attacked Newton's Doctrine of Fluxions, the Calculus of Leibnitz; but now, even that most impudent class have not the hardihood and effrontery to say a word against that great invention, which, says Herschel, "enables the mathematician

ther than abandon his worthless theory. It was so in the days of the Apostle, and he raised his warning voice against "the opposition of science falsely so called,"-it is so now, it will always be so. Thus the sickly sentimentality of the abolitionist leads him to fancy that God created all men free and equal, and finding that he cannot bend and twist the plain instructions of the Bible to harmonize with his notions, he throws away that which ought to be "a lamp to his feet and a light to his path," as the "device of men's hands." The anti-slavery men of the North are, accordingly, infidel in heart, speech and behaviour. The mathematician pursues an entirely different course from that adopted by the weak, drivelling dreamer. The former does not, like the latter, begin with his theory, and bend facts to suit that theory, but starting with a few well-established or self-evident truths, he reasons logically upon them, and then accepts the conclusion, to which he is led, as unquestionably true, though it may be strange and incomprehensible, and even contrary to his expectations. The latter may be capable of reasoning upon the same premises, but he will not believe in the truth of the result, unless it agree with his pre-formed theory. The abolitionist, the speculative inquirer, will admit that there is no flaw in the argument by which the Bible is proved to be the Word of God, but he will not receive it as such, because some of its teachings are plainly in opposition to his preconceived fancies. The true man of science, unless his understanding is darkened by sin, cannot be led astray by speculation. He will say to the man in the clouds, "Sir, your theory is beautiful, charming, enchanting, but how did you construct it? by what train of thought did you arrive at it? where are your data?" We have heard of a good old elder, in the county of Rockbridge, who said, "I am not afraid of the New-light Preachers, I try all their sermons by the Shorter Catechism, and write Mene: Tekel: Upharsin, upon those that do not agree with it." Though we belong to the school of blue-stocking Presbyterians, we think that the venerable deacon might have gone further and brought all suspected doctrines to the test of the Scriptures of truth. At any rate, he had his guide. So it is with the mathematician. He brings

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all speculation to the test of the data, and of the reason-
ing upon that data. Not a fragment, not a shred, of an
infidel theory will be left, after passing through so fiery
an ordeal. No wonder that Rousseau hated mathemat-
ics, and that in writing against science, he infused into
his style some of that bitterness, which his colleague,
Voltaire, poured out in his celebrated circular to the in-
fidels of France, ending in these words, "spare no pains,
leave no effort untried to crush the wretch." [It is
scarcely necessary to say that the wretch alluded to,
was he, who lived a life of suffering, and died a death of
shame to save guilty man from a world of endless woe.]
Rosseau well knew that his sneers at Christianity could
have no weight with a well-trained mathematician, ac-
customed to deal in arguments, and that his crude, ill-
digested, ever-shifting theories, upon the relations of the
creature to the Creator, however they might please the
idealist, could make no impression upon the man of sci-
ence, who had long relied upon judgment rather than
fancy. Nor was Rosseau wrong. All the world knows
that the heaviest blow infidelity has ever received, was
inflicted by the inductive philosophy of Bacon, a man as
preeminent in mathematical attainments as in the other
departments of knowledge. And what is the inductive
philosophy, but the application of mathematical reason-
ing to any subject under investigation? An eminent
British Essayist has said that for centuries previous to
the Baconian era, the world made but little progress in
true knowledge. 'Twas a period of doubt, conjecture,
scepticism, infidelity; the human mind was tossed upon
a troubled sea of visionary speculation. More advances
have been made in the arts and sciences, and in all that
conduces to the well-being of man, in a quarter of a cen-
tury, since the general adoption of the inductive philoso-
phy, than were made for hundreds of years before.

We do not wish to be misunderstood. We are far from thinking or maintaining that mathematicians alone apply the inductive method of reasoning, and we are still farther from supposing that all, who have not had their fancy crushed out by the tread-mill of mathematics, are disposed to speculative inquiry. But we do contend