the congeries of animal substance which forms a human body, or the human brain: that, being so, it may transfer a proper identity to whatever shall hereafter be united to it: may be safe amidst the destruction of its integuments: may connect the natural with the spiritual, the corruptible with the glorified body. If it be said, that the mode and means of all this is imperceptible by our senses, it is only what is true of the most important agencies and operations. The great powers of nature are all invisible. Gravitation, electricity, magnetism, though constantly present, and constantly exerting their influence; though within us, near us, and about us; though diffused throughout all space, overspreading the surface, or penetrating the contexture of all bodies with which we are acquainted, depend upon substances and actions which are totally concealed from our senses. The Supreme Intelligence is so Himself.

But whether these or any other attempts to satisfy the imagination, bear any resemblance to the truth, or whether the imagination, which, as I have said before, is the mere slave of habit, can be satisfied or not; when a future state, and the revelation of a future state, is not only perfectly consistent with the attributes of the Being who governs the universe; but when it is more; when it alone removes the appearances of con

trariety which attend the operations of His will towards creatures capable of comparative merit and demerit, of reward and punishment; when a strong body of historical evidence, confirmed by many internal tokens of truth and authenticity, gives us just reason to believe that such a revelation has actually been made;-we ought to set our minds at rest with the assurance, that in the resources of Creative Wisdom, expedients cannot be wanted to carry into effect what the Deity has purposed; that either a new and mighty influence will descend upon the human world to resuscitate extinguished consciousness; or, that, amidst the other wonderful contrivances with which the universe abounds, and by some of which we see animal life, in many instances, assuming improved forms of existence, acquiring new organs, new perceptions, and new sources of enjoyment, provision is also made, though by methods secret to us (as all the great processes of nature are), for conducting the objects of God's moral government, through the necessary changes of their frame, to those final distinctions of happiness and misery, which He has declared to be reserved for obedience and transgression, for virtue and vice, for the use and the neglect, the right and the wrong employment, of the faculties and opportunities with which He has been pleased, severally, to entrust, and to try us.

APPENDIX I.

MIRACLES.

PALEY argues rightly that Miracles can be pronounced impossible only on the negation of a personal Deity. Atheism alone is, on this point, consistent with itself. If we profess belief in a personal God, endowed with intelligence and absolute freedom of will, we must admit that He who established the laws of nature can temporarily suspend them, on fitting occasions and for adequate purposes. Otherwise we deny to God what we are compelled to grant to man. For experience teaches us that human volition can, to a certain extent, suspend the laws of nature; as when a stone rests on the outstretched hand, and the law of gravitation is thereby suspended; or when the supremacy of conscience overpowers natural impulses. As man is said to have been created in the image of God, we naturally invest the Creator with the same attributes which we observe in the creature, though in an infinitely higher degree; and so ascend from free, but limited, volition in man to free, but unlimited, volition in God. And as experience proves that man's free will moves amidst the blind forces of nature without permanent disturbance thereof, so direct interpositions of Almighty power, or in other words miracles, may take place, and still suffer the course of nature to proceed without disarrange

ment. But Paley has not, perhaps, pointed out with sufficient clearness wherein the proper evidential force of miracles lies. It consists in this;-that they are the natural accompaniments of a revelation at its first entrance into the world; for a revelation is analogous to an act of creation, and all creative agency, as distinguished from mere sustaining, partakes of the miraculous. Thus each of the successive stages by which our globe was prepared for the habitation of man, in the formation of vegetable and animal life, exhibited a direct interposition of Almighty power, as contrasted with the " course of nature" previously existing; and thus the formation. and nourishment of the fœtus in the womb proceed without the co-operation of those agents and elements (air, food, &c.), which, after the birth, become indispensable; i. e. as contrasted with the ordinary conditions of existence they assume a miraculous character. In all cases in which the commencement of a new link in a natural series is before us, a miracle, i. e. a more immediate exercise of Almighty power, forces itself on our attention. If Christianity then be, as we affirm, a revelation in the true sense of the word, i. e. the commencement of an epoch in the spiritual history of the race, we should expect from analogy that its entrance into the world would be signalized by events which would not necessarily be repeated after its career had begun. And this disposes of the objection that miracles are "against nature:" they may be so, if regarded as isolated marvels (répara), which stand in no connexion with a mission or a revelation; they are not so, but rather

quite according to nature, when viewed as accompanying the introduction of a religion into the world (onpeia). They assume the character of a law when viewed in this connexion. Were Christ's mission, e. g. to repeat itself, it would be natural that it should be again accompanied by miracles. If Christianity be a special product, resting on influences and producing effects altogether its own, the analogies of nature lead us to expect miraculous agency in connexion with it; just as the appearance of any special force in nature (e. g. electricity) leads our minds directly to creative agency as the source of it. And so miracles are not merely possible, but they are the natural evidence of a revelation properly so called they are homogeneous with the subjectmatter: they are the visible tokens that God is working invisibly in an extraordinary manner (as, e. g. in the Incarnation). A fact, constituting a new era in the history of the human race, such as God's becoming incarnate-a very different thing from a mere doctrine-could only be suitably attested by kindred facts, i. e. subordinate miracles clustering round the principal one. Hence the "story of Christ" could hardly be other than a miraculous one; and hence the connexion between Socinian tendencies and the denial, or explaining away, of the miraculous element in the Gospels. Hume's sophism, which Paley proceeds to notice, attracted more attention in Scotland than in England, and Dr. Campbell, in his work on Miracles, has devoted a considerable space to it. It rests partly on a petitio principii, and partly on a con