6 REVELATION AND REASON. 



iion of the means to the end, the inference is, that some being has 

 acted as we should ourselves act, and with the same views. But 

 when we so speak, and so reason, we are all the while referring to our 

 mind, and not to our bodily frame. The agency which we infer 

 from this reasoning is, therefore, a spiritual and immaterial agency, 

 the working of something like our own mind, an intelligence like our 

 own, though incomparably more powerful and more skilful. The be- 

 ing of whom we thus acquire a knowledge, and whose operations, as 

 well as existence, we thus deduce from a process of inductive reason- 

 ing, must be a spirit, and wholly immaterial ; but his being such is only 

 inferred, because we set out with assuming- the separate existence 

 of our own mind, independently of ma* .^Y : without that, we never 

 could conclude that superior intelligence existed or acted. The 

 belief that mind exists is essential to the whole argument, by which 

 we infer that Deity exists ; it is the foundation of Natural Theology 

 in all its branches; and upon the scheme of materialism no rational 

 indeed, no intelligible account can be given of a First Cause, or of 

 the creation or government of the universe. 



******* 



" All the proofs of the Deity's personality, that is, his indivi- 

 duality, his unity, all the evidence which we have of his works, 

 showing throughout, not only that they proceeded from design, but 

 that the design is one of one distinctive kind, that they came from 

 the hand, not only of an intelligent being, but of a being whose in- 

 tellect is specifically peculiar, and always of the same character : 

 all these proofs are in the most rigorous sense inductive." 



If his Lordship, in closely urging his argument, thus at times 

 makes the Supreme Intelligence reason like ourselves, he can never- 

 theless so express himself as to convey to us a proper sense of the 

 Deity, and to convince us that he has felt the sublimity of his 

 subject. 



We pass over his Lordship's expositions of the reasoning of Dr. 

 Clarke, Mr. Locke, and Dr. Cudworth, on the argument d 

 priori, as also the chapter he devotes to Lord Bacon's doctrine of 

 Final Causes, with the section on the moral or ethical branch of 

 Natural Theology though full of fine argumentation, and abounding 

 in felicitous and philosophic illustration ; and come to the third 

 section of the second part of the work being the connexion be- 

 tween natural and revealed religion. The subject is one of no 



