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alone his attributes can be studied to advantage. Even granting, for the present, 
that the Scriptures are the work of God in the manner sometimes supposed, we 
fearlessly declare our firm conviction, that the study of Nature, in the most ex¬ 
tended sense of the term, is not only the best but the sole method of attaining a 
true, though necessarily imperfect, knowledge of his wisdom and goodness. 
Every one acknowledges the world and all that therein is to be the mighty work 
of the one true God. Why then resort, for scientific information, to a source 
which may be, and probably is, incorrect, or at least which admits not of implicit 
reliance ? The world is open before us, and we have the faculties requisite to 
discover, in a great measure, the nature of its architecture, and the endless 
instances of means to an end observed therein. Some writers are ever on the 
look-out for such 44 surprising instances,” seeming perfectly astonished at the 
circumstance, and pointing it out to their benighted readers, apparently, as an 
unusual occurrence, whereas the real wonder w r ould be the discovery of a fact of 
an opposite tendency. It is hardly necessary to observe—what must be in the 
knowledge of most persons—that such writers are far from being always among 
either the best or most “religious” men. Respecting the probable inaccuracy of 
natural-historical observation, and the various application of which it admits, 
surely the objection applies, with ten-fold force, to the perusal of the scriptures ; 
for not only is our 44 authorised translation” notoriously incorrect in many places, 
but almost every passage in seme chapters admits of half a dozen or more 
different versions. 
Of the wisdom or piety of those who denounce as blasphemous the profound 
deductions of some of our most learned men from careful observation of the vast 
repository of God’s undoubted work, we have but a low opinion. Men bred and 
nurtured in orthodoxy, or in the noxious influence of sectarian bigotry, and whose 
reason has ever been shackled by authority, are not those whom we should select 
as proper judges of truth in any shape. Commonly furnished but with the vicious 
morality of ancient classical writers, and by courses of 44 reading” in the Bible— 
which they have been taught to worship as the neplus ultra of Christian truth— 
and educated with the sole view, not of enabling them to judge respecting the 
relative advantages of the various sects, but of blinding them to the merits of 
everything save orthodoxy, shall they dare to compete with those eminent men 
so immeasurably their superiors in knowledge and true piety whose services to 
Mankind will consecrate their names in the memory of all succeeding ages— 
names which will be uttered with reverence when those of their opponents (once 
triumphant in the eyes of the world) shall have long ceased to be remembered ? 
Shall a man suffer for his humble but|profound and ineffaceable attachment to the 
sublime works of that Almighty Being which can never be contemplated without 
improvement—never studied without advantage? Yes: thus it has ever been. 
The best men of all ages and all countries have, for the time, fallen martyrs to 
