inexplicable to him; and shall he despise and deny the truth of verities revealed to him by the Fountain of all Intelligence, because he cannot comprehend them? Is it not an established axiom, that "that which may be comprehended is less than the hands that grasp it; that which may be valued is less than the senses which rate it?" Why, then, should this axiom be annulled, and any thing be rejected as untrue, because it cannot be reduced within the narrow dimensions of human intellect?

It is certain that infinity is not a word void of sense, but a word that expresses something which really exists. Whichever way man turns, immensity presents itself. In vain will he seek a duration which is the term of all duration, a space which shall be the ultimate limit of space: after having wearied itself in its excursions, the mind will find itself limited, but in a new point of duration, a fresh portion of space. Nor can the ideas of duration and of space be annihilated. We may imagine that all motion ceases, that all heat is extinct, that attractions and repulsions are at an end, that all living beings have perished, that all nature is dissolved, and matter no longer exists; but if it were proposed to go on and imagine that the place which these things occupied had itself disappeared, the mind would stop short and withhold its assent. In like manner, we may suppose the sun no longer to shine, the stars no longer to pursue their real or apparent revolutions, that universal lethargy and the profoundest night prevails through all nature. On this hypothesis, it is evident that days and hours would not be known, and time would lose its measure: yet duration would retain its being.

It is obvious, therefore, that neither space nor duration yield their existence to any supposition which the imagination of man, fertile and powerful as it is, can create. They exist, they continue to exist, in all their immense capacity; for to imagine them limited is to conceive the commencement of their non-existence; 1 Tertul. Apol. 17.

and it follows indubitably that neither space nor duration can have bounds.

Infinitude then exists, and it is impossible for man to sound its depths: for while it is easy to convince ourselves of its existence, it is far otherwise to conceive adequately in what it consists. We may rise to the idea of infinity, but we cannot penetrate it. It is not merely in the contemplation of the infinitely great that the intellect fails; it is equally confounded when attempting to investigate the infinitely little.

Man is posited between these two limits, in a sphere which comprehends things finite, and even these evade his ken in a thousand directions. Truth, therefore, is not restricted to the point occupied by man. It soars above him; it lies beyond him; it sinks beneath him; yet it reveals to him so much of its nature, as to reward his industry, to stimulate and gratify his well-directed modest scrutiny: let him but bear in mind incessantly that the finite cannot comprehend the infinite, and he will learn more than by any other process-since he will be prepared to admit that in a world of mystery a Religion without mystery must be an illusion.

I shall not, however, rest satisfied with this general mode of argumentation; but since the subject is one in which mistakes are very prevalent, shall descend into particulars, and demonstrate that those who withhold their assent from any of the propositions of Revealed Religion because they are incomprehensible, act upon a principle which, if they adopted it in other matters, would lead them to the most unbounded and incurable scepticism. This will be effected if I can show that, in Natural Religion, in many branches of Natural Philosophy, and in several parts of pure and mixed mathematics, there are numerous incontrovertible propositions, which are, notwithstanding, incomprehensible.

Many things are now classed under the irrefragable truths of Natural Religion, which are still far beyond our utmost comprehension. Such are God's necessary subsistence, his production of things from nothing, his

ever giving without having ever received, his always sustaining others without being himself sustained by any thing ab extra, his ever acting but never changing, his prescience without necessity of events, his immensity without extension, his eternity without succession, his existing before all ages, and yet never being younger or older, his being in heaven, and yet" about our bed and about our path :" all of which are evidently out of our mental grasp, because finite minds cannot measure infinite subjects, and because the Supreme Being has not seen fit to communicate to us in our present state the faculty of knowing all things that are intelligible. Take God's eternity for example. Suppose a person is disposed to cavil at this great truth, he may ask, “What maxim is less controvertible than this, that nothing can take place without cause?" and again "What can be more staggering to reason, than that a being should exist without a beginning, without a cause?" If it were replied, that God is the cause of his own existence, it would be only such a multiplication of words as would render the subject still more obscure: for the objector might say, If you mean this explanation to remove the difficulty, it must imply these palpable and impious absurdities; that the Supreme Being once did not exist, and yet, before he existed, operated to produce his own existence." Here there are great and acknowledged difficulties: yet, commence your reasoning in another direction, and you establish the disputed position notwithstanding. Deduce from your own existence, and that of the universe, the necessity of the existence of a Creator; and you will soon perceive that the argument is direct, and that it necessarily leads you to conclude that a Being must have existed for ever, without beginning, and without cause; because, if something have not existed from eternity, the things which now are must have arisen from nothing, and without any producing cause. Yet observe, and this is the point to which I would particularly draw your attention, that, though this train of argumentation

firmly establishes the truth in question, it does not remove or diminish one of the difficulties with which it was originally surrounded. You see that it is an irrefragable truth; but you are still incapable of comprehending, much less of elucidating, the mode of the fact. It is obvious, however, and it was for this the example was adduced, that what our reason is incapable of comprehending, and what one train of argument may induce us to reject, another process of reasoning may establish as an indisputable and necessary truth, even while the original difficulties remain undiminished and untouched.

Thus, with regard to the being of God, the general inference is of this kind.-There is, avowedly, something perfectly incomprehensible to us in the attributes of Deity, when contemplated in relation to time; there is also something utterly incomprehensible when we contemplate them in reference to space; there may, then, be something as incomprehensible when we refer them to other metaphysical modes. Why, for example, may they not be as incomprehensible, when contemplated in reference to number? And why should any matter of revelation be rejected on this latter ground, when mysteriousness on the two former accounts does not lead to any such rejection?

Let us now pass from the truths of Natural Religion to the topics of Natural Philosophy, where you will find, or where indeed you know, and only require to be reminded of it, that almost all our knowledge of the universe, its laws, and its phenomena, is but a collection and classification of circumstances of fact, with the consequences resulting from them; some of which lie nearer, and others more remote from view. We may ascertain relations and dependencies, and can often predict what will occur in particular connexions; but we know next to nothing of things in themselves, nor can we penetrate into their real, and sometimes not even into their proximate, causes.

Philosophers and chemists have made very extraor

dinary discoveries respecting the various subjects of their researches, have in many cases determined the laws of their operation, and can frequently predict with perfect confidence what phenomena will occur under certain circumstances. They have demonstrated, for example, that the planetary motions are so regulated, that the squares of the times, in which the planets revolve about the focal luminary, are always proportional to the cubes of their mean distances from that body; that electric and magnetic attractions are inversely as the squares of the distances;-that, within certain limits, the expansive force of gaseous substances is as the force of compression to which they are subjected; that, at certain determinate temperatures, many solids become liquid, and liquids are transformed into aeriform fluids, &c.: and these points are so incontrovertibly established, that no man of competent understanding can possibly refuse his assent to them, though this conviction must be yielded previously to his receiving any satisfactory information as to the real nature of the things to which these propositions relate. For, suppose a student were obstinately to suspend his assent till he received satisfactory answers to the following string of queries, it would inevitably follow, that he must remain perpetually ignorant of almost every useful truth in these sciences. What is the cause of the attraction of gravitation, of cohesion, of electricity, of magnetism, or the cause of congelation, of thawing? How are the constituent gases of the atmosphere intermingled? What is caloric? From what does the essential distinction between solids and liquids, and between liquids and aeriform fluids, arise? Nay, what is the dust which I tread under my feet? What is the impenetrability by which its corpuscles resist, the mobility by which it is capable of changing its place, the attraction by which it draws and is drawn, the affinity by reason of which it is ready to combine with some substances, and not with others? In reply to these, and a hundred such inquiries, the querist proba

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