PRINCIPLES OF THINGS. 



35 



standing all the pains and calamities, the tumults and disorders of nature, has 

 made the most of matter that it would admit of, and has tempered it not only 

 with a positive predominancy of good over evil, but with as much and as 

 real good as could possibly be infused into it. 



To argue thus is to revive the theory of pure Platonism, far too extensively 

 introduced into the Christian world, as I hinted in our last lecture, upon the 

 first conversion of the Grecian philosophers, who had been chiefly students 

 in the Platonic school ; and to suppose the existence of matter as an inde- 

 pendent and eternal principle. " God," says the sublime but mistaken foun- 

 der of this school, " wills, as for as it is possible, every thing good and 

 nothing evil ;"* " but it cannot be that evil should be destroyed, for there 

 must always be a something contrary to good,"f a IvixcpvTog imOvnca, " an in- 

 nate propensity to disorder,"! in that eternal and independent principle of 

 matter out of which all visible things are created. 



How much more consolatory, as well as agreeable to right reason, is the 

 view taken of this abstruse subject in the pages of genuine, unsophisticated, 

 and unphilosophized revelation, in which the present is represented as a state, 

 not of actual necessity, but of preordained probation ; willed, in infinite 

 wisdom, by the great First Cause, to promote the best ultimate happiness of 

 man: and matter as a substance produced out of nothing by his almighty 

 fiat ! It was one of the express objects of the preceding lecture to prove, not 

 only that matter does exist, in opposition to those who have thought it expe- 

 dient to deny the being of a sensible and material world, but that it could not 

 exist by any other means ; and that, while there is no self-contradiction or 

 absurdity in contending that matter, and that ten thousand other substances 

 than matter, may be produced out of nothing by the energy of an infinite 

 and omnipotent intelligence, there is so pure and perfect an absurdity in en- 

 deavouring to account for its existence upon every other theory which has 

 hitherto been invented, that right reason should induce us to embrace the 

 former opinion with the same promptitude with which we fly from every 

 opinion that opposes it. 



Matter, then, is the production of an almighty intelligence, and as such is 

 entitled to our reverence; although, from a just abhorrence of many ancient, 

 and not a few modern errors, it has too often been regarded in a low and 

 contemptible light. Though not essentially eternal, as was contended for 

 by all the schools of Greece and Asia, nor essentially intelligent, as was 

 contended for by several of them, it evinces in every part and in every ope- 

 ration the impress of a divine origin, and is the only pathway vouchsafed to 

 our external senses by which we can walk- 

 Through nature up to nature's God ; 



that God whom we behold equally in the painted pebble and the painted 

 flower — in the volcano and in the cornfield — in the wild winter storm and in 

 the soft summer moonlight. Although, when contemplated in its aggregate 

 mass, and especially in its organized form, it is perpetually changing, it is 

 every where perfect in its kind, and even at present bears indubitable proofs 

 of being capacified for incorruptibility. In its elementary principles it is 

 maintained by the best schools of both ancient and modern times to be solid 

 and unchangeable ; and, even in many of its compound forms, it discovers 

 an obvious approach to the same character. The firm and mighty mass that 

 constitutes the pyramids of Egypt has resisted the assaults of time and of 

 tempests for, perhaps, upwards of four thousand years, and by many critical 

 antiquaries is supposed to have triumphed over the deluge itself. While 

 there is little doubt that the hard and closely crystallized granitic mountains 

 of every country in which they occur, " the everlasting hills," to copy a cor- 

 rect and beautiful figure from the pages of Hebrew poetry, are coeval with 

 the creation, and form at this moment, as they formed at first, the lowest 

 depths, as well as the topmost peaks of the globe. That they are in 



• Theoat. t i. p. 176. t Ibid. i Phileb. See also Brucher, Hist. Phil. lib. ii. cap. vui. <5 1. 



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