590 PROVINCES OF REASON AND REVELATION. 
of the Inductive Philosophy, thus breathes forth 
his pious meditation, “ Thy creatures have been 
my books, but thy Scriptures much more. I 
have sought thee in the courts, -fields, and gar- 
dens, but I have found thee in thy temples.” 
Bacons Works, V. 4. fol. p. 487. 
The sentiment here quoted had been long 
familiar to him, for it pervades his writings ; it 
is thus strikingly expressed in his immortal 
work. “ Concludamus igitur theologiam sacram 
ex Verbo et Oraculis Dei, non ex lumine Na- 
ture aut Rationis dictamine hauriri debere. 
Scriptum est enim coeli enarrant Gloriam Dei, at 
nusquam scriptum invenitur, coeli enarrant Vo- 
luntatem Dei.”* f 
Having then this broad line marked out before 
us, and with a clear and perfect understanding, as 
to what we ought, and what we ought not to ex- 
* Bacon De Augm. Scient. Lib. IX.,ch. i. 
t “ Nothing,” says Sir I. F. W. Herschel “ can be more un- 
founded than the objection which has been taken in limine, by 
persons, well-meaning perhaps, certainly narrow minded, against 
the study of natural philosophy, and indeed against all science, 
— that it fosters in its cultivators an undue and overween ino- self- 
O 
conceit, leads them to donbt the immortality of the soul, and to 
scotF at revealed religion. Its natural effect, we may confidently 
assert, on every well constituted mind, is and must be the direct 
contrary. No doubt, the testimony of natural reason, on what- 
ever exercised, must of necessity stop short of those truths which 
it is the object of revelation to make known ; but while it places 
the existence and principal attributes of a Deity on such grounds 
as to render doubt absurd and atheism ridiculous, it unquestion- 
