<W!9tmt> RELIGION SUPPORTED BY SCIENCE. 1 17 



the exaltation of God's glory the other affording a singular 

 preservation against unbelief and error." De Augmentis Sci- 

 entiarum. Bacon's Works, London, 1818, vol. vi. p. 63. 



If mammoths have ceased to exist, and that they have only 

 been the precursors of the elephant, and other useful mam- 

 malia which have succeeded them, who is it can question their 

 utility for a time, and the benefit of the exchange ? 



The mask of prejudice is torn away, and we see and admire, 

 from the cultivation of the sciences, all that can inspire us, 

 by opening new sources of intellectual enjoyment, to confirm 

 our faithful dependence on the blessings of a superintending 

 Omnipotent power. 



This is the effect of true philosophy : and its concordance 

 with religion is so well described in the " Lectures on the 

 Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion," by the 

 Rev. Dr. Wiseman, that I beg to give a short extract from that 

 elaborate and valuable work : 



" And thus we come to form a noble and sublime idea of 

 religion, to consider it as the great fixed point round which the 

 moral world revolves, while itself remains unchanged ; or, rather, 

 as the emblem of Him who gave it the all-embracing medium 

 in which every other thing moves, increases, and lessens, is 

 born and destroyed, without communicating to it essential mu- 

 tation, but, at most, transiently altering its outward manifesta- 

 tion. We come to consider it as the last refuge of thought, 

 the binding link between the visible and invisible, the revealed 

 and the discoverable the re-solution of all [anomalies the 

 determination of all problems in outward nature and in the 

 inward soul the fixing and steadying elements of every 

 science the blank and object of every meditation. It appears 

 to us even as the olive, the emblem of peace, is described by 

 Sophocles, a plant not set by human hands, but of sponta- 

 neous and necessary growth in the great order of creative 

 Wisdom ; fearful to its enemies ; and so firmly grounded, as 

 that none, in ancient or later times, hath been able to uproot it," 



