OF MORAL AND MENTAL PHILOSOPHY: THEIR CONNECTION WITH EACH OTHER; DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL CHRISTIANITY. BY THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D. & LL.D. PROFESSOR OF THEOLOGY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, NEW YORK: ROBERT CARTER, 58 CANAL STREET, 1847. 51 C438ok PREFACE THERE seems a special necessity in the present times, for laying open to the light of day every possible connexion, which might be fancied or alleged between Theology and the other Sciences. All must be aware of a certain rampant infidelity that is now abroad, which, if neither so cultured nor so profound as in the days of our forefathers, is still unquelled and resolute as ever; and is now making fearful havoc, both among the disciples of the other learned professions, and among the half educated classés of British society. The truth is, that infidelity, foiled in its repeated attacks on the main citadel of the Christian argument, now seeks for auxiliaries from every quarter however remote of human speculation. There is not perhaps one of the sciences which has not, at some time or other, been pressed into the service; and the mischief is, that, in very proportion to their ignorance of these sciences, might the faith of men be unsettled by the imagination of a certain wizard power, that each of them, on the authority of some great infidel name, has been said to possess—a power, not only to cast obscuration over the truth of Christianity, but bid the visionary fiction altogether away into the shades from which it had been conjured. And accordingly, at one time there arose Geology from the depths of the earth, and entered into combat with a revelation, which, pillared on the evidence of history, has withstood the onset. At another, from the altitudes of the upper firmament was Astronomy brought down, and placed in hostile array against the records of our faith; and this assault also has proved powerless as the former. Then, from the mysteries of the human spirit has it been attempted, to educe some discovery of wondrous spell by which to disenchant the world of its confidence in the gospel of Jesus Christ; and many an argument of metaphysic form has been taken from this department of philosophy, to discredit both the contents and the credentials of that wondrous manifestation; and these have been successively, though perhaps not yet fully or finally disposed of. Even, in quest of argument by which to prop the cause of infidelity or to find some new plausibility in its favour, the recesses of physiology have been explored; and from Lecture-rooms of Anatomy, both in London and elsewhere, have the lessons of materialism been given, and that to the conclusion of putting a mockery on all religion, and if possible expelling it from the face of the earth. But perhaps the most singular attempt to graft infidelity on any thing called a science, is by those who associate their denial of the Christian Revelation with the doctrines of Phrenology-as if there were any earthly connexion between the form of the human skull, or its effect upon the human character upon the one hand, and the truth or falsehood of our religion upon the other. For, granting them all their organs, it no more tells either to the confirmation or disparagement of our historical evidence for the visitation of this earth by a messenger from Heaven, than it tells on the historical evidence for the invasion of Britain by Julius Cæsar. And we venture to affirm of all the other sciences, that no discovery has been made in any of them, which is not in every way as inconsequential to the point at issue; and that the truths of all Philosophy put together as little interfere with the truths of the Gospel, as the discoveries of the astronomer interfere with the discov eries of the anatomist. But so it is. While each science rests on an evidence of its own, and, confining itself to its own legitimate province, leaves all the other sciences to their own proper credentials and their own claims-the science of Theology has been converted into a sort of play-ground for all sorts of inroads, and that from every quarter of human speculation. Nor are we aware of a single science in the vast encyclopedia of human knowledge, which has not, in some shape or other, been turned, by one or more of its perverse disciples, into an instrument of hostility against the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless it too has an evidence of its own, alike unassailable and beyond the reach of violence from without. It is not by the hammer of the mineralogist, that this evidence can be broken. It is not by the telescope of the astronomer, that we can be made to descry in it any character of falsehood. It is not by the knife of the anatomist, that we can find our way to the alleged rottenness which lies at its core. Most ridiculous of all, it is not by his recently invented cranioscope, that the phrenologist can take the dimensions of it and find them to be utterly awant ing. And lastly, may it be shown, that it is not by a dissecting metaphysics, that the philosopher of the human mind can probe his way to the |
