perform their duty better than they can.

Instead of that, he lets

them do pretty much as they like where he can and ought to control them, and meantime runs about, suspecting everybody, and pretending that no one but himself is to be trusted, even on points on which he cannot judge, and on which he must trust to testimony. All his puzzle is, because he will try, as the saying is, to get a quart pot into a pint pot to see if "Reason" cannot be "Sense"; and he might as well try to smell a rose with his ears, as decide whether the "not me," as he calls it, is any thing else than Sense tells him it is. "A fine thing, truly," Sense may well cry, "that a man should' assume such airs, who does not know chalk when he sees it does not know whether it is out of him or in him whether it is part of the him' or the 'not him.""

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I fancy Reason, being so laughed at, would be apt to be mistaken for Passion.

I confess it makes me angry to hear Reason so often insisting on the deceptions and illusions practised by those poor, faithful drudges, the senses,-when I consider that his worship is deceived, and deceives himself just as often, or much oftener; and above all, when I consider that for half their time, they are all "in the same condemnation," and deceived alike; that is, every night! I seldom wake without feeling inclined to say to this suspicious, truth-loving gentleman, "Pray, your worship, would you have me think all that nonsense which you nightly amuse or terrify me with, and which at the time you take to be all perfectly sensible, for gospel? Tales of dead men talking, and fishes flying, and men changed into cats, - and syllogisms constructed in defiance of all your boasted logic? If all this is a part of your me, I think the not me of honest old Sense is just as trustworthy." To this taunt Reason never made me any rational answer.

By the way, I have been amused when I have sometimes seen the averments of most logical Scepticism that no evidence could ever induce its well-poised judgment to believe in a "miracle," when it has but to lay its head on its pillow, and in half an hour it will believe in a thousand without any evidence at all; thinks

it is talking quite rationally with a dog, or believes that it is itself transformed into a winged monkey.

Such is a brief lucubration, my dear lad, on the "Prima Philosophia," and, like most on the same subject, is nonsensical enough; but if it at all more vividly impresses on you the great lesson of giving to Reason only the things of Reason, and to Sense the things of Sense,-but, above all, to Faith the things of Faith; and, in a word, to every constituent of our nature, the ultimate facts of which it is destined to certify us; if it teaches the duty of resting in these as ultimate facts, which must be accepted whether we like it or not;-the term and limit of all our philosophy, because, right or wrong, the only possible philosophy must be restricted by them and constructed out of them : if it shall prevent you from trying to make things incommensurable, coincide,―squaring the circle,—measuring a curved surface by a straight rule, trying the testimony of Sense by Reason, or the intuitions of Reason by Sense, it may, I think, be as serviceable to you as many a more profound, and much darker, treatise on Absolute Science," and the relations of the me and the not Within its proper province, no more suffer Reason to question the information of Sense, than Sense to question the authority of Reason; and if Reason tell you that the senses often deceive, tell Reason that it deceives just as often, and deceives not only others, but itself into the bargain.

me.

66

Your loving uncle,

R. E. H. G.

LETTER CIX.

To the Same.

1851.

My dear Tom,

Courage! If you choose to read a paper in your little "Debating Society," of the kind you describe, for the benefit of the three or four sucking Atheists you tell me it contains, I am sure you may find plenty to say. If Erasmus could write in "Praise of Folly," it may not be impossible to panegyrise Atheism - indeed it is a branch of the very same subject. There are plenty of topics for your irony, and I do not care if I give you two or three brief hints.

For example:-Atheists, I think, are unjustly accused of having no "faith;" surely there is no class of men who have so much. In the first place: What transcendent faith is required to receive any one of their hypotheses, all of which seem so grotesque and ridiculous to the rest of the world that not one out of a million can be got to believe them, or even to believe that they believe them! What faith is required to believe that exquisite order is the product of Chance; or the exactly opposite hypothesis, that unintelligent Necessity has imposed all-wise law! What faith to believe that men sprang from nothing—or have been an eternal series; or, if you dislike that, that they were "developed" out of monkeys, and all too without intelligence anywhere at all. It is easy for us unbelievers to ridicule these things; but who can estimate the faith necessary to believe them?

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I consider that a still more transcendent exercise of faith is implied in the very prosecution of the Atheist's enterprise. His efforts to convince men of his paradoxes his truly child-like expectation of success, of a universal Atheistical millennium at last, what a gigantic exercise of faith is here! All "induction " would go to prove the hopelessness of his project, if any one fact was ever established by induction. Atheists appear, one or two in an age or so, and when they do appear, the great bulk of

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mankind doubt whether they ever have appeared! The world is so little disposed to listen to them that it pretends to doubt whether the Atheists are really what they affect to be; nay, many doubt whether there can be, or ever was, such a thing as an Atheist; you must take your lantern and search as diligently to find him as Diogenes his honest man. No one affects to doubt whether there be such a thing as a Theist-everybody knows there are millions of them; but as to the unlucky Atheist, his very existence, like that of the Kraken, is a perpetual problem : and yet, faithful soul! he does not doubt that all will at last become orthodox Atheists. Seeing that it is so, what but a "Faith " beyond that of the Syrophenician woman can inspire his hopes of success? Apart from that, and if he listened to Reason only, he would argue that whether there be a God or not, mankind have manifested such an all but uniform and obstinate tendency to believe there is, that we may be as sure as of any fact ever established by "induction" that he will always exhibit it; that he will be always apt to extend his inferences of design, from the analogies of his own actions, to whatever is stamped with the same characteristics in the universe around him, rather than believe in the Atheist's unintelligible "chance" or "necessity," or unintelligent and unintelligible any thing else! Any one, therefore, but an Atheist, "full of faith," would give the thing up as a bad job; he would say, "It is hopeless to contend against what I see is an incurable defect of my 'fortuitous' or 'necessitated ’ human idiot; his cerebral development' does not admit of the TRUTH being established; I shan't waste my breath on the reprobate, nor cast my pearls before swine.'- Though there is no God (that I am privileged to know very well), yet I see that Chance or Necessity has so bungled the matter (as I might justly expect would be the case), that men will perversely believe in one; right or wrong in their conclusion (I know them wrong), yet such is the constitution of their faculties that long experience shows they must and will abide by it; why should I make the hopeless attempt to convert them?" And surely, for the reason just assigned, if an Atheist were but as full of " reason as he is

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full of "faith," he ought cheerfully to acquiesce in this view, and say, "Could I expect it to be otherwise; or why not at least as well expect it so, as any way? If there be no intelligent Cause of all things, ought I not rather to expect that men would think wrong on this subject than right? — Why should I imagine that the blind cause which has fashioned men, has constituted them rather to see the great truth that there is no God than to be blind to it? Could I expect that Chance would not err, or that blind Necessity should infallibly see its way? Plague on the universe! It has so framed itself, and man in it, that man will rather believe that there is a Deity than the contrary!"

a

Now matters being thus hopeless, I say we might naturally expect that an Atheist would quietly "put his candle under his bushel," and not "let his light shine before men "- regarding his " 'teaching as vain, and his "faith" also vain. Yet see the power of "Faith." Every year or so, you get one solitary voice sometimes perhaps two, "crying in the wilderness," wilderness, truly,- and proclaiming the advent of that better age when men will renounce all their puerile ideas of Deity. Even under such desperate circumstances, these faithful souls do not despair of the universal conversion of the human race! I profess to you I do not know anywhere such an instance of simple unreasoning belief. I am sure it may be said of such men "Lo, we have not found so great faith-no, not in Israel, nor even among the Hottentots!"

Another topic of panegyric is, I think, the great fecundity of their theories. Atheists are too often represented as just propounding difficulties and leaving us in difficulties still greater, while they will not readily commit themselves to any positive theory of the universe. On the contrary, I am disposed rather to wonder at the fertility of their hypotheses; for though, unluckily, very discordant, they are various enough in all conscience. I am astounded at the ease with which a universe can be constructed. If we may trust some of these men, to originate a world is a mere bagatelle. Difficult! Why, the Universe may have originated in any of a dozen ways, excepting only from Intelligent Power