NATURAL THKOLOGY. 171 



such, as a truth of universal concern ought to rest 

 upon. " They are sufficiently open to the views 

 and capacities of the unlearned, at the same time 

 that they acquire nev^^ strength and lustre from 

 the discoveries of the learned," If they had been 

 altogether abstruse and recondite, they would not 

 have found their way to the understandings of 

 the mass of mankind ; if they had been merely 

 popular, they might have wanted solidity. 



But, secondly, what is gained by research in 

 the stabihty of our conclusion, is also gained from 

 it in impression,^^ Physicians tell us, that there 



^ We have adverted in a former note (Chap, xxv.) to the la- 

 mented silence of Laplace upon the inferences to which his most 

 important researches so naturally lead. An objection of a kind in 

 some respects similar, but in others materially different, has often 

 been urged against another class of writers, — the historians who 

 record, without observation, events in which pious men are prone 

 to trace the interposition of Providence. This charge was brought, 

 upon one remarkable occasion, against the narrative of a cele- 

 brated voyage of discovery ; and the author. Dr. Hawkesworth, 

 defended himself in an elaborate and ingenious manner : H'e 

 urged that either the event (the ceasing of the wind at a critical 

 moment, by which Captain Cook's ship, after it had struck on a 

 coral rock, was saved, contrary to all expectation) happened in 

 the ordinary course of nature, and then ought no more to be 

 called providential than the rising of the sun upon any given day ; 

 or it was produced by an extraordinary interposition, and then 

 the same power might have rendered this unnecessary by pre- 

 venting the ship from striking. (Voyages, vol. i. p. xxi., second 

 edition.) But this reasoning proceeds upon an entire misappre- 

 hension of the objection. No one denies that the good and the 

 evil come from the same Almighty hand ; but resting in the be- 

 lief, avowed by Dr. Hawkesworth himself in explicit terms, that 

 " the Supreme Being is equally wise and benevolent in the dis- 



