OF MICHIGE

STYOF

bears no other burden with it. It has not been elicited or elaborated from the universe, or the mind of man-it has come into both from a higher region, and it is not amenable to the laws of this cold and cloudy clime. Shake its power over the moral nature, and you destroy its essence; but, as long as this remains, all minor difficulties and objections pass by like the idle wind.

Dr. Chalmers does not seem, at least when writing his "Astronomical Discourses," to have been sufficiently impressed with these views of Christianity. He was, on the contrary, anxious to find for it a scientific basis, and to answer all scientific objections. He found one of these floating about in conversation-it had probably often impressed his own mind-and he must drag it forth and put it to death. This attempt he has made with prodigious energy, but, we humbly think, with indifferent success. He has mangled, it may be, the neck of the victim with his steel, but he has not deprived it even of the little life it had.

The first of these famous sermons is a powerful sketch of the modern astronomy. It blazes like a January Heaven. He mounts up toward his magnificent theme like a strong eagle toward the sun, and his eye never winks, and his wing never for a moment flags. We, who have been so long familiar with the facts of astronomy, have no conception of the freshness and the overwhelming force with which, in Chalmers's style, they fell on a Presbyterian Glasgow audience in the year 1817. Few of the common class of Calvinists in Scotland, at that date, were even Copernicans; down as far as the year 1825 or 1826, we have heard some of them gravely maintaining that there were only "two worlds-that which is, and that which is to come." How amazed must these readers of Boston's "Fourfold State" have been, to hear their most admired divine pouring out his sublime Newtonics from the Tron Church pulpit with such fearlessness and freedom! What had seemed heresy from any other man, seemed from Chalmers revelation. He stood up week after week, and read off to astonished crowds the burning hieroglyphics of the orbs of heaven. The excitement was unparalleled. The novelty of the theme the daring of some of the individual flights— the apparent force of the argumentation-the almost super

human excitation of the orator, who seemed to heave, and leap, and swelter, and burn, and groan under the burden of immediate inspiration, carried Glasgow away in a whirlwind. We were then mere children, nor did we hear Chalmers till fourteen years later; but, great as his excitement continued, we were assured by those who had heard him in earlier days, that it was calmness compared to the prophetic fury with which he delivered his " Astronomical Discourses."

Professor Nichol has come after, and in some measure supplanted Chalmers as an eloquent interpreter to the language of the stars. Without the rapt and rushing force of Chalmers's style, he has a calm and deep hush of manner as he walks under the stupendous sublimities of his subject, which is very thrilling, Chalmers claps his hands in enthusiastic joy, as he looks up toward the gleaming midnight; Nichol bows his head before it. Chalmers is moved and moves us most to rapture; Nichol is moved and moves us most to wonder. Chalmers plunges like a strong swimmer into the stellar ocean, and ploughs his nervous way through its burning waves; Nichol walks beside it on tiptoe, and points in silent awe to its unutterable grandeur. While Chalmers shouts, "Glorious!"-while Carlyle sighs, "Ah! it's a sad sight"-Nichol, perhaps more forcibly, expresses his emotion by folding his arms, and speaking in whispers, or remaining dumb.

The second discourse is on the "Modesty of True Science,” and is chiefly remarkable for its panegyric on Sir Isaac Newton-certainly the noblest tribute to that illustrious man ever paid, unless we except Thomson's fervid poem on his death. Yet, while panegyrising "modesty," the author makes one or two rather bold and unwarranted suppositions; for instance, that sin has probably found its way into other worlds-that the Eternal Son "may have had the government of many sinful worlds laid upon his shoulders"-and that the Spirit "may now be working with the fragments of another chaos, and educing order, and obedience, and harmony out of the wrecks of a moral rebellion, which reaches through all these spheres, and spreads disorder to the uttermost limits of our astronomy." Indeed, the great defect of these discourses is, that he is perpetually meeting assumptions with assumptions, and repelling one conjecture by another equally groundless.

In the third sermon he states the infidel argument as follows: "Such a humble portion of the universe as ours could never have been the object of such high and distinguishing attentions as Christianity has assigned to it. God would not have manifested himself in the flesh for the salvation of so paltry a world. The monarch of a whole continent would never move from his capital, and lay aside the splendor of royalty, and subject himself for months or for years to perils, and poverty, and persecution, and take up his abode in some small islet of his dominions, which, though swallowed by an earthquake, could not be missed amid the glories of so wide an empire; and all this to regain the lost affection of a few families upon its surface. And neither would the Eternal Son of God-he who is revealed to us as having made all worlds, and as holding an empire amid the splendors of which the globe that we inherit is shaded in insignificance-neither would he strip himself of the glory he had with the Father before the world was, and light on this lower scene, for the purpose imputed to him in the New Testament. Impossible that the concerns of this puny ball, which floats its little round among an infinity of larger worlds, should be of such mighty account in the plans of the Eternal, or should have given birth in heaven to so wonderful a movement as the Son of God putting on the form of our degraded species, and sojourning among us, and sharing in all our infirmities, and crowning the whole scene of humiliation, by the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyrdom." We will not stop to object to the theological mis-statement in one of the sentences of this passage. Christ did not, could not lay aside the "splendor of royalty"-he merely veiled it from the eyes of men, and it was not "himself," in the whole meaning of that expression, but simply his human nature, that was subjected to "perils, and poverty, and persecution."

But, waiving this, let us notice how Chalmers proceeds to answer the objection. He does this first by dwelling, with much munificence and rhythmical flow of language, upon the extent of the Divine condescension; and his picture of the powers and achievements of the microscope is exceedingly beautiful. Yet it is one-sided. For, if the microscope shows us Divine Providence watching over the very lowest hem and skirts of animal existence, does it not also show us rage, ani

mosity, evil, and death burning on the very brink of nothing -a Waterloo in every water drop? Besides, the microscope serves only to prove the universal prevalence of certain laws; it does not discover any analogy to that special love and supernatural interference found in the history of Christianity. It proves simply that God condescends to care for every being he has condescended to create; but would never, previous to experience, suggest the possibility of God saving, by a peculiar and abnormal method, a race that had fallen. On such a subject, telescope and miscroscope are alike silent; they say nothing for it, but they say nothing against it. The whole discourse, therefore, we consider an eloquent evasion of the question, notwithstanding the magnificent burst with which it closes, the reading of which, by himself, we have already described.

In his fourth discourse he attempts to prove that man's moral history is known in distant parts of the creation; and thence to argue its vast importance and general bearings. The evidence he produces is entirely derived from Scripture, and is neither very abundant nor very strong. He tries to show, first, that "the history of the redemption of our species. is known in other and distant parts of the creation; and then, secondly, indistinctly to guess at the fact that the redemption itself may stretch beyond the limits of the world we occupy."

In reference to the first, he tells us that Scripture "speaks most clearly and most decisively about the knowledge of man's redemption being disseminated among other orders of created intelligence than our own." And yet, strange to say, the first proof he produces of this is the conversation on Mount Tabor between Moses and Elias with Jesus, on the "decease to be accomplished at Jerusalem," as if these two glorified beings belonged to another "order of created intelligence" than ours-as if they were not the "spirits of just MEN made perfect." He next introduces the song of the angels, and the text "unto these things the angels desire to look"-forgetting that the angels are circulating perpetually through the universe; that they are the servants-the ministering spiritsof the good; and that it is impossible to argue from their knowledge of our earthly affairs to that of the myriads of stationary inhabitants of space-if such there be in the other

planets and systems of the universe. There had not then appeared Isaac Taylor's admirable paper entitled the "State of Seclusion," in which the author shows so strikingly the advantages which have accrued from the insulated position of the various worlds of space, as securing more completely the probation of moral beings. What Taylor means is this: could we, from this isle of earth, see all the consequences, whether of good or of bad, as manifested in the innumerable orbs, which he supposes to be replete with intellectual and. moral life, we should be driven, not led, from vice and into virtue-so enormous would appear the superiority of the one over the other in its effects. But God has secluded us from other worlds, and them from us, that our will may have freer play in choosing good and refusing evil; that the great irrevocable choice may be less a matter of necessity and of terror, and more of voluntary consent. Hence, too, the deep shroud of darkness which Scripture keeps suspended over the secrets of the future world. Dr. Chalmers, too, in the passages he quotes about Christ's gathering into one all things in heaven and in earth, and about "every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them," saying "Blessing, and honor, and glory, and power be unto him that sitteth on the throne; and unto the Lamb for ever and ever"-does not advert to the fact that all this is to be done, and said, and sung, after this present system has passed. Meanwhile, there is not the most distant evidence that the inhabitants of other worlds, if such there be (for this, too, is a point of extreme uncertainty), know more of our moral state than we do of theirs, which is precisely nothing at all.

The fifth discourse of the series contains some most melting and eloquent descriptions of the sympathy felt for man in the distant places of the creation. Still, so far as argument is concerned, it does not help forward his point one step. For that man alone has fallen, is one assumption; and even supposing that he has, that this is known throughout the whole universe is another. Angels do know indeed that man is a sinner, and do feel for us; but angels can hardly be called inhabitants of the material creation at all; they are celestial couriers, winged flames passing through it; and it is only in