xii.] LIFE IN ST. ANDREWS. 415 



To the Same. 



* PITLOCHRIE, July 20tk, 1862. 



' . . . Mr. Jerram has sent me two copies of his 

 "Thoughts on Revelation/' and his "Thoughts on Mira- 

 cles." 1 admit to you that it is an effort to me to sit down 

 to read carefully books on religion professedly contro- 

 versial. But in this case, I had pleasure in making the 

 effort, and like Mr. Jerram all the better since I did so. 

 I like his style, which is very plain, earnest, unaffected, 

 and self-convinced. Though he can hardly hope to 

 sileucehis opponents whose writings I have purposely 

 not read he may confirm his friends, and by feeling 

 the stability of his own convictions may be thereby 

 much more fitted for a minister of the Gospel in these 

 troubled times. 



' I think I agree with him as to the reasonableness of 

 his argument on every point. On some he expresses 

 convictions which have long been peculiarly my own :-- 

 t p. 12, &c., that a revelation must, to be of use, be 

 kept within the range of what it is possible for us to 

 know and in terms which mankind can understand ; and 

 at page 38, that as we accept the opinion of eminent 

 lawyers on points of law and astronomers on astro- 

 nomy, so the convictions of theologians and of the Chris- 

 tian world ought to have the greatest weight with ev i \ 

 man not inflated with vanity. In the " Thoughts on 

 Miracles," p. 21,1 find a very striking analogical argument 

 from human interference with the ordinary course of 

 laws of nature to the impossibility at least of disproving 

 Divine interference in ordinary providence. I was the 

 more struck with this, because there is a chapter of 

 "Reflections" most inappropriately thrown into J)r. 

 Tyndall'sbook called "Mountaineering in 1861 " on the 

 folly of prayers for fine weather, &c., which even from 

 a purely scientific point of view seems to me far from 

 convincing; and which, if earried out, would suspend 

 prayer in almost every human eontinizeney : Mich as the 

 illness of a child >r a pan-nl, when, incivifullv, 

 the . th-- judgment of the head and 



