1857.] Testimony of tlie Rocks. 279 



Nor has the scientific mind among otir moderns any less cause of 

 complaint against that " greatest evil of all " — " the apotheosis of 

 error." 



Against this deification of pli'dosophic error, no one of his prede- 

 cessors had ever presented an opposition so effectual as did Lord 

 Bacon in his vindication and establishment of the Inductive, and 

 consequent overthrow of the Aristotelean system of dogmatic, 

 philosophy ; and against the similar tendency to the deification of 

 scientific error, it seems to us that no one of his predecessors has 

 ever aimed blows so sturdy and so stunning as those just dealt by 

 Hugh Miller, in his " Testimony of the Rocks." 



The phases of religious skepticism have been as various as the 

 changes in the predominant features of human society. When the 

 world was yet burdened and bowed down by superstitions imposed 

 by a domineering hierarchy, whose whole spiritual life was crushed, 

 like the traitress Tarpeia, beneath the glittering gew-gaws of 

 ceremony, which it had itself invoked, and when unbelief smacked 

 of the spice of bravado, then Atheism, absolute and unmitigated, 

 was the grim yet grinning phase that skepticism took. Anon, when 

 by a succession of social cataclysms, the minds of men were roused 

 from passive obedience, to reasoning upon the philosophy of society 

 and the problems of government, then Rationalism was the modified 

 aspect which skepticism assumed, and " Reason " was the goddess of 

 its creed. And, still again, when the wand of science began to lift 

 the vail that erring philosophy had drawn over the face of Nature — 

 when her symmetry of form, and loveliness of feature began to be 

 made manifest — then skepticism, bowing at her shrine — more prone 

 and prostrate than Parsee before the burning chariot of the Sun — 

 offers up to nature an incense of adoration which he refuses to Na- 

 ture's God ! Exulting in the present and the visible, he scouts and 

 spurns the ideal and eternal ; rejecting Faith, he embraces Science ; 

 and denying revelation as the word of God, he glorifies Nature as 

 God ! And, in this wise. Atheism comes to be resolved into its lat- 

 est and most fashionable phase, Pantheism. The scientific Pantheist, 

 with a manner most reverent, courts familiarity with the archives 

 of creation, and then, with a movement most adroit, arrays them 

 against the records of Revelation : — With pretences most specious 

 he explores the armory of Nature, and then, with ingenuity most 

 subtile, turns the weapons wherewith she has armed him against the 

 " thick bosses of Jehovah's buckler." 



