into the world subject to the incidents of that world, and is fairly bound to submit to them, if unavoidable, with as much good grace as you, a guest, are bound in courtesy to conform to family regulations, while under the roof of me your host. A man may as well murmur, because he is born by one law, and dies by another; ungrateful that we are! let us cease to accuse Nature; it is we who, as we deserve, are reproved by her, for want of conformity to her mild dictates. For my own part, I can declare, without misgiving of mind, that if our earth was to part in-sunder, draw to, and amalgamate another orb with itself, or be drawn off to another, (supposing it possible that I could survive the change) I should place such to the account of Nature's works, as part of herself. Nor do I conceive such to be impossible; Nature is an assemblage of counterbalancing powers, of mutabilities resulting from immutabilities; if any single check is outweighed, a variation takes place of course. Since the discoveries demonstrated by the telescope, among the other bodies parts of Nature as we are, some have been observed to be in unusual retardation of motion; others have disappeared entirely. Where are the latter? Can that which is something ever become nonentity? Some of the Hottentots

say, the earth fell from the moon : we know she has oscillated from former position, that her polar inclination is not the same as it was a thousand years back: whence is this, to what stupendous results may it not lead? And this last fact should be a caution to us, not to construe natural phenomena upon the narrow footing of this, or that, being beneficial to this or that part of our planet, or to such and such of our race. You will hear persons descant on our polar inclination, and the consequent variation of our seasons, forgetting that the planet Jupiter, a thousand times larger, has its axis at right angles with its orbit. It has been a bar to discovery and improvement, the curse and bane of science, that man, instead of viewing what he has learned, as a link in the chain of the universe; instead of considering his planet as a speck in the immensity of space, a small part of a boundless whole; has been taught to consider himself as the only object for which all things are, the favourite minion of universality. Man is certainly the masterpiece of the globe he inhabits, and that is all we know: may not higher orders of intelligence exist in other spheres, of whose forms and properties we can have no more idea than a blind man can of colours, than the inferior animals here, have of ourselves?

I spoke just now, of a series of mutabilities resulting from immutabilities. It may sound paradoxical, that what is in itself unchangeable should consist in the sheer action of change; and yet perhaps it is a position more difficult to define than to comprehend. While a man's leg is in a healthy state it holds a certain portion of bone, say, for thirty years together; and yet the bone which is there now, is not the same which will be there ten years hence; for it is proved by experiment, that animal substance vegetates, decays, and is insensibly renewed. Here then is a change of identity, in what is, in the aggregate, unchangeable. And so it seems to be with every part of animation; everlasting, unceasing change, is the order of every day; and still its components are the same. Some doubt the existence of a vacuum, of space unfilled by power; that the system of world within world is infinite: it may be so, but is it not possible that the immense assemblage of bodies subject to ccunteracting powers, (and immense beyond all calculation, even in our present confined state of observation, we know them to be,) at length becomes bounded by some new power at present unknown, generated from their own multitudes of action and re-action ?

Some assert the universe has existed in

some shape from all eternity, of necessity, because it could not be otherwise: that as every thing must exist somehow, if it does exist; all forms are necessitous modes. I confess my own mind refuses to grapple with the notion of existence from all eternity; perhaps that may be from the current of thought being usually impelled the contrary way, that is, to creation on a sudden, by the will of Omnipotence: I think the mind can conceive the idea of Power reducing pre-existing chaos to order; but that the idea of matter being created out of nonentity, is in itself inconceivable. The comprehension of matter lasting to all eternity in some shape, is much easier. That appears to me certain; as certain as that "something can never become nothing." Forms only change; is not principle immutable? Can any thing in materiality or immateriality be otherwise than as it is? Is there any such existence as alternative? Is it not absurd to ask "why things are as they are?" May we not as well ask, “Why do large bodies attract smaller; why does flame ascend; why are all sounds reducible to seven primes ?” Is it, or is it not, "Because they could not be otherwise? Do they not exist from necessity, in those modes?"

You have heard much about Deism, that is,

the doctrine of belief in a supreme First Cause, but not in any particular revelation of his will and attributes: whose followers say, Nature, the established order of the visible and invisible world, is the one, only, and sufficient revelation: that there can be no such person as an Atheist. I can tell you, I am not an Atheist, if by that term is meant, "one who believes, that things exist as they do, from mere tendency of assumption in organic form." It will be some time before I can bring myself to fancy the human body, considered in complicated, functional arrangement and operation, to be only the result of a necessitous combination of atoms, in simultaneous contact and movement. However, the Deists are become sectarian, as well as the revelationists; they are much divided in notion and idea of Deity. They assert belief in a Supreme, but disagree as to his powers and modes: some deify principle, saying, "God and Principle are one.' Others assert the Deity to be tied to principle, and that from the nature of the God-head he cannot subvert it.

Now it strikes me, that the true distinction between the Atheist and the Deist is this:does the latter admit "personal consciousness" in the Supreme? That he can, by the fiat of will, in the twinkling of an eye, as the author