REVELATION AND REASON. 9 



slight delicacy, and we differ in many points from his Lordship: 



he says, 



" The ordinary arguments against Natural Theology, with which 

 we have to con tend, are those of atheists and sceptics, of persons who 

 deny a First Cause, or who involve the whole question in doubt, 

 or who consider the reasons on both sides so equally poised, that 

 they cannot decide either way. An objection of a very different 

 nature has sometimes proceeded unexpectedly from a very different 

 quarter the friends of Revelation, who have been known without 

 due reflection to contend ,, that, by the light of unassisted reason, 

 we can know absolute!} ^tiling of God and of a future state." 



We have no hesitation in saying that this is our own opinion ; not 

 to the full, because the savage who knows nothing of Revelation, 

 nevertheless has a God, and believes in a future state but in so 

 far, that, with the light of reason only, we should never have enter- 

 tained precise or consistent notions of the Godhead. We hold this 

 opinion, because, living with the 'Word' before us, we are alto- 

 gether compelled to look to it as the resting-place of our inquiries ; 

 and because neither Lord Brougham, nor any other man who is 

 aided and sustained by Revelation, can estimate what his opinions 

 might have been, had he been unknowing of Scriptural record. It 

 is not enough to say that the greatest advocates for Natural Theology 

 have been sincere and zealous Christians ; they were Christians 

 before they were Theologians ; and we do no discredit to Ray, 

 Clarke, Derham, or Paley the greatest of modern Natural Theo- 

 logists, in placing against them the names of Plato, Aristotle, 

 Lucretius, and Epicurus men of lofty mind and wide intellectual 

 grasp ; yet did these men, by the power of reason alone, attain any 

 certain knowledge of the Deity? Their works, the noblest record of 

 mind, say, No : their ideas concerning God were often sublime, 

 but they were varying, inconsistent, and hardly philosophised by 

 themselves a fact Lord Brougham has recorded in his own pages. 

 Nor must we ever forget, in speaking of the knowledge of man as 

 applied to the Deity, that there can be no dispute but that He 

 himself, in the earlier ages of the world, was the religious instructor 

 of mankind. This is in accordance with the Mosaical account of 

 the patriarchal eras; nor indeed can we suppose, that man, who had 

 been fashioned but a little lower than the angels, and endowed with 

 M.M. No. 7. B 



