THE NERVOUS SYSTEM. 359 



the great cause of creation. The wicked man who holds any of 

 these opinions, in the idea of being loosened from the bonds of 

 virtue, is as ignorant as he is wicked. 



Bishop Butler, in his profound metaphysical sermons, preached 

 at the Roll's Chapel, and which all should study, proves that 

 the natural tendency of all our united faculties and feelings is 

 to virtue and the greatest happiness. r 



r Serm. i. Upon the social nature of Man. Serm. ii iii. Upon the natural 

 supremacy of conscience. 



Some have, in the most Ibigoted manner, denied that there is any foundation 

 for virtue, but in revelation. " I never took any pleasure in moral ethics" says 

 Mr. Gilbert Wakefield (Memoirs of his own Life, vol. i. p. 512.), " and would 

 not give one penny for all the morality in the world." Yet, as the present 

 Dean of Peterborough, Dr. Turton remarks (p. 222.), " this gentleman wrote a 

 book of about 230 pages in defence of Christianity ; and the volume is almost 

 entirely confined to the internal evidences and moral excellence of the system. 

 It is not unpleasant to observe the natural feelings of people thus completely 

 overthrowing their theoretical positions. ' Natural religion,' Dr. Hey observes 

 is pre-supposed in revealed.' " Socinus even declared (Toulmin's Memoirs 

 of Faustus Socinus, p. 216.) that no man could discover the truths of natural 

 religion, not even the being of God, by the light of nature ; " and that the first 

 notices of a Divine Being were derived from Revelation or immediate com- 

 munications from God." Archbishop Magee held the same doctrine; and Bishop 

 Home and the greater defender of the Trinity, Mr. Jones, went further, by be- 

 lieving the Bible to contain a system of natural philosophy (" as certain critics," 

 equally absurd in regard to another book, " are used to say, hyperbolically," that 

 if all sciences were lost, they might be found in Virgil, (Lord Bacon, Advance- 

 ment of Learning}, and, by becoming disciples of a person named Hutchinson, 

 who thought that, by the " light which revelation afforded him, compared with his 

 own observations, he saw farther into the constitution of the universe, and the 

 operations carried on in it, than Sir Isaac Newton had done." (Bishop Home's 

 Works, vol. i. p. 445.) " Mr. Hutchinson looked upon natural religion as an 

 engine of the devil, in these latter days, for the overthrow of the Gospel ; and 

 therefore boldly called it the religion of Satan or Antichrist." The fancy 

 was, however, old. " Paracelsus and some others," says Lord Bacon (1. c.) 

 have pretended to find the truths of all natural philosophy in the Scriptures, 

 scandalising and traducing all other philosophy as heathenish and profane." 

 " But neither do they give honour to the Scriptures, as they suppose, but much 

 embase them." " The scope or purpose of the spirit of God is not to express 

 matters of nature in the Scriptures otherwise than in passage, and for appli- 

 cation to man's capacity and to matters moral and divine ; and it is a true rule 

 auctoris aliud agentis parva auctoritas ; for it were a strange conclusion, if a man 

 should use a similitude for ornament or illustration sake, borrowed from nature 

 or history, according to vulgar conceit, as of a basilisk, an unicorn, a centaur, 

 Briarcus, an Hydra, or the like ; and that therefore he must needs be thought to 

 affirm the matter thereof positively to be true." The mind is a subject of natural 



