625 



[Muhlenberg. 



indelible marks of his power and varied learning. He has left behind 

 him no regular system, and this is a matter to be regretted, except so far 

 as it can be gathered from his annotated works, and the notes and recol- 

 lections of his pupils. These, with his favorite authors, in this depart-, 

 ment, will always show us the genuine Christian philosopher. Butler's 

 Analogy was one of his favorite books, we see its principles brought out 

 in his discussion of Original sin ; in his Introduction to Strauss and in his 

 last poetic effusions, and we are gratified to quote his own words on this 

 subject, to this effect : "that he regarded this as a monument to the truth 

 of the Christian religion, which shall endure to the end of time." 



The edition of Ulrici's Strauss, which he superintended, translated and 

 furnished with an introduction, is a work of immense practical value. It is 

 small in form, but on this account, not less, but more valuable. Ponder- 

 ous volumes, like heavy artillery, are hard to manage, and have but few 

 readers, but the smaller ones, which you can take with you to the fireside, 

 are popular and effective with the largest number, like the small arms ia 

 the close and well-contested battle. The reader of the introduction con- 

 templates with wonder the immense, almost boundless extent of the au- 

 thor's reading in physiology and philosophy. As he was regarded and 

 called in early life a "voracious" reader in literature and the department 

 of the imagination, so his appetite in later life was equally insatiate in 

 physiology and philosophy. He seems to have sounded with his plum- 

 met the subject in its profoundest depths, and widest extent, and after all 

 his studies he remains the Christian philosopher still. It is gratifying to 

 find a gentleman of such breadth of culture, defeating, on their own soil, 

 and with their own weapons, the enemies of truth, of God and of man. 

 He is, in his own peculiar style, severe on materialism, and still more 

 severe on Strauss, the great advocate of infidelity and atheism. Speaking 

 of the union of the supernatural, everywhere with the natural, in Butler's 

 line of thought, but his own words, he says : "Science moves ever to- 

 ward the proof, how supernatural is the natural ; religion moves toward 

 the proof, how natural is the supernatural. For nature, in the narrow 

 sense, is in her spring, supernatural." To expose such a system as mate- 

 rialism "would involve the compression of a world to the dimensions of 

 a pea." "Without the metaphysical spirit, the geologist possesses the 

 penetration of an artesian auger, no more." "The intellectual beats the 

 material in all long races." The "new faith " of Strauss is characterized 

 "as conscious matter, reverencing and worshiping unconscious matter," 

 "as reason bowed at the altar of unreason, which had given it being ;" as 

 "without God, without Providence, without spirit, freedom or accounta- 

 bility ;" "recognizing no creation or redemption or sanctification ;" "no 

 heaven, no hell, * * * whose last enemy is not death, but immor- 

 tality, its goal, extinction." These and a long list of other features, se- 

 verely yet truthfully present, in the language of the author, the repulsive 

 deformity of this proposed "new faith." 



The volumes, on which the Doctor's fame will chiefly rest, are the three 



