person, (admitting that such an one could be found) to wish it to be true, we think the answer is very obvious. It claims to be a remedy for certain evils which, as no human being is wholly exempt from them, so no rational one will ever dispute their existence! That sin is in the world is a fact beyond dispute that misery has followed in its train, and that both these evils are as prevalent and extensive as the existence of the human race, needs no other proof than the testimony of our senses, and the records of our species. It is a fact too, that we must all die! "The fathers, where are they? And the prophets, do they live for ever?" "What man is he that liveth and shall not see death?" Here then revelation comes in, arrayed in all the majesty of divine truth-not to deny the existence of evil, either natural or moral; but to ratify and confirm our strongest impressions of it, and strengthen our fears of its consequences hereafter; yet at the same instant, opening up an unexpected source of relief to the view of the guiltiest of the human race, and bringing "life and immortality to light." But here arises the perplexity; 'How shall we account for the conduct of those persons, who instead of hailing with every grateful emotion of the heart, a discovery so full of mercy and goodwill to men, are continually raising objections against it; and whose conduct would induce the persuasion, that their first wish concerning it is, that they could prove it to be false!' Such is the fact; but the Bible gives a satisfactory solution of this difficulty. It declares that "light is come into the world; but that men love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil; neither come they to the light, lest their deeds be reproved.' Awful infatuation, which leads us to despise our own mercies! Christianity is of an humbling tendency; it calls for self-denial, the mortification of every sinful propensity, and the pursuit of holiness and this is at the foundation of every cavil against it.

The gospel has been attacked in ways as multifarious, as are the weapons that have been used to overturn it. Adopting the foolish maxim that "ridicule in the test of truth,' some of its adversaries have tried it by that touchstone; but the subject is

rather too serious for such a ludicrous process. Others, with more decency at least, have gone to work in order to undermine its foundation, and with a view to that, they have industriously laboured to subvert the various branches of evidence by which it is supported. Its miracles and prophecies; the resurrection of its divine founder; and the testimony of his Apostles, have all been made to pass through a fiery ordeal; but the faith once delivered to the saints has survived the process, and come out of the crucible like gold from the furnace; purified and rendered more brilliant than ever.

God

Yet the ingenuity of its enemies was not fully exhausted. After being foiled in all their former attacks, there still remained an objection against its pretensions, founded on the discoveries which have recently been made in the science of Astronomy. This objection which is specious and imposing, is thus stated by Dr. Chalmers, p. 97. of the volume before us. “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. 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 splendour 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 affections of a few families upon its surface. And neither would the Son of God-he who is revealed to us as having made all worlds, and as holding an empire, amid the splendours 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 amongst us, and sharing in all our infirmities, and crowning the whole scene of his humiliation, by the disgrace and the agonies of a cruel martyrdom.

"This has been started as a difficulty in the way of the Christian Revelation; and it is the boast of many of our philosophical Infidels, that by the light of modern discovery, the light of the New Testament is eclipsed and overborne; and the mischief is not confined to philosophers; for the argument has got into other hands, and the popular illustrations that are now given to the sublimest truths of science, have widely disseminated all the Deism that has been grafted upon it; and the high tone of a decided contempt for the Gospel, is now associated with the flippancy of superficial acquirements; and, while the venerable Newton, whose genius threw open those mighty fields of contemplation, found a fit exercise for his powers in the interpretation of the Bible, there are thousands and tens of thousands, who, though walking in the light which he holds out to them, are seduced by a comp acency which he never felt, and inflated by a pride which never entered into his pious and philosophical bosom, and whose only notice of the Bible, is to depreciate, and to deride, and to disown it."

The present performance of Dr. Chalmers, consists of seven Discourses, and an Appendix. Diss. I. is entitled A Sketch of the modern Astronomy, text, Ps. viii. 3, 4. Diss. II. The modesty of true science, 1 Cor. viii. 2. Diss. III. On the extent of the divine condescension, Ps. cxiii. 5, 6. DISS. IV. On the knowledge of man's moral history in the distant places of creation, 1 Pet. i. 12. Diss. V. On the sympathy that is felt for man in the distant places of creation, Luke xv. 7. Diss. VI. On the contest for an ascendancy over man, amongst the higher orders of intelligence, Col. ii. 15. Diss. VII. On the slender influence of mere taste and sensibility, in matters of religion, Ezek. xxxiii. 32. The Appendix is intended to supply a series of passages of Scripture, which serve to illustrate or to confirm the leading

arguments which are employed in each separate division of the subject.

In attempting to furnish our readers with such an account of the volume before us as shall do any thing like justice to the subject, we feel to be a task of no ordinary magnitude. For whether we consider the sublimity of the topics which are illustrated in these Discourses; the irresistible torrent of masterly reasoning that pervades the whole volume; or the fascinating eloquence of the preacher's style; we are at a loss which of them most to admire, and do think that, taking it all in all, the whole round of English literature cannot produce any thing equal to it. This is not the language of panegyric-it is the sober verdict of truth; and we must pity the dulness of that man, who can go through the volume, as we have done, and hesitate a moment to yield his assent to what we have now said of it.

In the first Discourse, Dr. Chalmers has given a Sketch of the Modern Astronomy, founded on the Newtonian discoveries, with which he has fully evinced his intimate acquaintance, in all its ramifications. Adopting as the foundation of his discourse, the fine address of the Psalmist, "When I consider thy heavens, &c. &c." he, in a striking exordium, pertinently remarks that

"It is a most Christian exercise, to ex tract a sentiment of piety from the works and appearances of nature. It has the authority of the Sacred Writers upon its side, and even our Saviour himself gives it the weight and the solemnity of his example. "Behold the lilies of the field; they toil not, neither do they spin, yet your heavenly Father careth for them." He expatiates on the beauty of a single flower, and draws from it the delightful argument of confidence in God. He gives us to see that taste may be combined with piety, and that

the same heart may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations of religion, and be at the same time alive to the charms and the loveliness of nature.

which it inherits, shrinks into littleness at a contemplation so vast and so overpowering. He wonders that he is not overlooked amid the grandeur and the variety which are on every side of him, and passing upward from the majesty of nature to the majesty of nature's Architect, he exclaims, What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou shouldest deign to visit him?" "

This leads the preacher to some very just and pertinent remarks on the magnificent objects that present themselves to our contemplation on a survey of the firmament-" the scenery of a nocturnal sky.” “That moon and these stars, what are they? They are detached from the world, and they lift you above it. You feel withdrawn from the earth, and rise in lofty abstraction above this little theatre of human passions and human anxieties. The mind abandons itself to reverie, and is transformed in the ecstacy of its thoughts to distant and unexplored regions. It sees nature in the simplicity of her great elements, and it sees the God of nature invested with the high attributes of wisdom and majesty." But now comes in the interesting enquiry, "What can these lights be?" The answer to this question naturally leads Dr. Chalmers, to remark the number and magnitude of the planets, and the grand and interesting discoveries that have been made respecting them by means of the Telescope. But there are only five, or at most six of the planetary orbs visible to the naked eye. What then is that multitude of other lights which sparkle in our firmament with innumerable splendours? The planets are all attached to the sun; and in circling around him, they do homage to that influence which binds them to perpetual attendance on this great luminary: but the other stars do not Own his dominion-they do not circle around him-what mean these unnumerable fires lighted up in the distant parts of the universe? In answer to this let Dr. Chalmers speak,

take hundreds of thousands of years be fore it described that mighty interval which separates the nearest of the fixed stars from our sun and from our system. If this earth, which moves at more than the inconceivable velocity of a million and a half of miles a-day, were to be hurried from its orbit, and to take the same rapid flight over this immense tract, it would not have arrived at the termination of its journey, after taking all the time which has elapsed since the creation of the world. These are great numbers, and great calculations, and the mind feels its own impotency in attempting to grasp them. We can state them in words. We can exhibit them in figures. We can demonstrate them by the powers of a most rigid and infallible geometry. But no human fancy can summon up a lively its ideal flight over this immeasurable or an adequate conception-can roam in largeness-can take in this mighty space in all its grandeur, and in all its immensity-can sweep the outer boundaries of such a creation-or lift itself up to the majesty of that great and invisible arm, on which all is suspended.

"The first thing which strikes a scientific observer of the fixed stars, is their immeasurable distance. If the whole planetary system were lighted up into a globe of fire, it would exceed, by many millions of times, the magnitude of this world, and yet only appear a small lucid point from the nearest of them. If a body were projected from the sun with the velocity of a cannon-ball, it would

"But what can those stars be which are seated so far beyond the limits of our of immense magnitude, or they could not planetary system? They must be masses be seen at the distance of place which they occupy. The light which they give must proceed from themselves, for the feeble reflection of light from some other quarter, would not carry through such mighty tracts to the eye of an observer. A body may be visible in two ways. It may be visible from its own light, as the flame of a candle or the brightness of a fire, or the brilliancy of yonder glorious sun which lightens all below, and is the lamp of the world. Or it may be visible from the light which falls upon it, as the body which receives its light from the taper that falls upon it-or the whole assemblage of objects on the surface of the earth, which appear only when the light of the day rests upon them—or the moon, which, in that part of it that is towards the sun, gives out a silvery whiteness to the eye of the observer, while the other part forms a black and invisible space in the firmament-or as the planets, which shine only because the sun shines upon them, present the appearance of a dark spot on the side that is turned away from it, Now apply this question to the fixed stars, Are they luminous of themselves, or do they derive their light from the sun, like the bodies of our planetary system? Think of their immense distance, and the solution of this question becomes evident. The sun, like any other body, must dwindle into a less apparent magnitude as you retire from it. At the prodigious distance even of the very nearest of the fixed stars, it must have shrunk into a small indivisible point.

In short, it must have become a star itself, and could shed no more light than a single individual of those glimmering myriads, the whole assemblage of which cannot dissipate and can scarcely alleviate the midnight darkness of our world. These stars are visible to us, not because the sun shines upon them, but because they shine of themselves, because they are so many luminous bodies scattered over the tracts of immensity-in a word, because they are so many suns, each throned in the centre of his own dominions, and pouring a flood of light over his own portion of these unlimitable regions.

mers.

We know that our sun turns round upon himself, in a regular period of time. We also know, that there are dark spots scattered over his surface, which, though invisible to the naked eye, are perfectly noticeable by our instruments. If these spots existed in greater quantity upon one side than upon the other, it would have the general effect of making that side darker, and the revolution of the sun must, in such a case, give us a brighter and a fainter side, by regular alternations. Now, there are some of the fixed stars which present this appearance. They present us with periodical variations of light. From the splendour of a star of the first or second magnitude, they fade away into some of the inferior magnitudes—and one, by becoming invisible, might give reason to apprehend that we had lost him altogether-but we can still recognize him by the telescope, till at length he reappears in his own place, and, after a regular lapse of so many days and hours, recovers his original brightness. Now, the fair inference from this, is, that the fixed stars, as they resemble our sun in being so many luminous masses of immense magnitude, they resemble him in this also, that each of them turns round upon his own axis: so that if any of them should have an inequality in the brightness of their sides, this revolution is rendered evident, by the regular variations in the degree of light which it undergoes.

"Shall we say, then, of these vast luminaries, that they were created in vain? Were they called into existence for no other purpose than to throw a tide of useles splendour over the solitudes of immensity? Our sun is only one of these luminaries, and we know that he has worlds in his train. Why should we strip the rest of this princely attendance? Why may not each of them be the cen

may be the token of a system as vast and as splendid as the one which we inhabit. Worlds roll in these distant regions; and these worlds must be the mansions of life and of intelligence. In yon gilded canopy of heaven, we see the broad aspect of the universe, where each shining point presents us with a sun, and each sun with a system of worlds---where the Divinity reigns in all the grandeur of his attributes-where he peoples immensity with his wonders; and travels in the greatness of his strength through the dominions of one vast and unlimited monarchy.

If

"The contemplation has no limits. we ask the number of suns and of systems, the unassisted eye of man can take in a thousand, and the best telescope which the genius of man has constructed can take in eighty millions. But why subject the dominions of the universe to the eye of man, or to the powers of his genius? Fancy may take its flight far beyond the ken of eye or of telescope. It may expatiate in the outer regions of all that is visible-and shall we have the boldness to say, that there is nothing there? that the wonders of the Almighty are at an end, because we can no longer trace his footsteps? that his omnipotence is exhausted, because human art can no longer follow him? that the creative energy of God has sunk into repose, because the imagination is enfeebled by the magnitude of its efforts, and can keep no longer on the wing through those mighty tracts, which shoot far beyond what eye hath seen, or the heart of man hath conceived— which sweep endlessly along, and merge into an awful and mysterious infinity?"

From this our eloquent divine extends his view to à consideration of the nebulae, which constitute what is commonly termed "the milky way"-a field of expansive and lofty contemplation, where the mind is left wildering in the uncertainty, whether here the wonderful progres sion be ended.