only had they abandoned christianity in their audacious theories, they had denied the existence of the living God, man's liberty and responsibility, the immortality of the soul, and preached the most hideous pantheism with all its consequences." Even now, the prevailing philosophy is a pantheistic perversion of the terms of christianity.

It is, therefore, very doubtful, whether human reason, if left entirely unassisted, could ever have arrived at any definite, fixed, or certain knowledge even, of the EXISTENCE of God.

The existence of atheism, says John Randolph, in his celebrated letters to H. St. G. Tucker, Esq., published in the Washington Union, by Septimus Tustin, has been denied, but I was an honest atheist. Hume began, and Hobbes finished me. I read Spinoza and all the tribe. Surely I fell by no ignoble hand. And the very man (- -) who gave me Hume's "Essay upon Nature" to read, administered "Beattie upon Truth," as the antidote-Venice treacle against arsenic and the essential oil of bitter almonds-bread and milk poultice for the "bite of the cobra capello."

Had I remained a successful political leader, I might never have been a christian. But it pleased God that my pride should be mortified; that by death and desertion I should lose my friends; that, except in the veins of a maniac, and he too, possessed "of a child by a deaf and dumb spirit," there should not run one drop of my father's blood in any living creature besides myself. The death of Tudor finished my humiliation. I had tried all things but the refuge to Christ, and to that, with parental stripes, was I driven. Often did I cry out with the father of that wretched boy, "Lord! I believe-help thou mine unbelief;" and the gracious mercy of our Lord to this wavering faith, staggering under the force of the hard heart of unbelief, I humbly hoped would, in his good time, be extended to me also. St. Mark, vii: 17-29.

"Throw Revelation aside, and I can drive any man by irresistible induction to atheism. John Marshall could not resist me. When I say any man, I mean a man capable of logical and consequential reasoning. Deism is the refuge of those that startle at atheism, and can't believe Revelation: and my

(may God have forgiven us both,) and myself used, with Diderot & Co., to laugh at the deistical bigots who must have milk, not being able to digest meat. All theism is derived from Revelation that of the laws confessedly. Our own is from

the same source-so is the false revelation of Mahomet; and I can't much blame the Turks for considering the Franks and Greeks to be idolators. Every other idea of one God that floats in the world is derived from the tradition of the sons of Noah handed down to their posterity."

So much for the question of the EXISTENCE of God, a truth which, while it is most agreeable to human reason, requires the light of revelation to present it clear and evident to the eye of reason, and to enable that eye to see the invisible things of God. “even his eternal power and God-head, by the things that are made."

Nature, and time, and earth, and skies,
God's heavenly skill proclaim;

What shall we do to make us wise

But learn to read thy name!

To fear thy power, to trust thy grace,

Is our divinest skill:

And he's the wisest of our race

That best obeys thy will.

But we may bring this question to the test of experiment. As all the knowledge of God found among men may be accounted for by an original divine teaching and communicated knowledge, to which even language itself must, in all probability, be ascribed, this knowledge is no certain proof of what unassisted human reason can attain.

But there are and have been human beings who, by the want of the powers of speech and hearing, have been cut off from the instruction of their fellow men, and left to the powers of their own natural understanding. What, then, I ask, is the fact in relation to them?

We will present an account sent by Mr. Fellebien to the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and printed in their Memoirs, by which is fully evinced the absolute incapacity of man, uninstructed, for making or thinking of any religion. The son of a tradesman in Chartres, who had been deaf from his birth, and consequently dumb, when he was about twenty-three or twentyfour years of age, began on a sudden to speak, without its being known that he had ever heard. This event drew the attention

*Mr. Charles Rosenkrantz, a distinguished disciple of Hegel, has published two books, one entitled "The System of Science," and the other "My Reform of Hegel's Philosophy." He admits that the opinions of his master, interpreted by ignorant or rash scholars, have favoured the materialist tendencies of our age. He avows, also, that Hegel errs in trying to form an idea of the mere force of human intelligence, of the Infinite and the finite, God, man and the universe.

See The Scholar Armed, vol. i: p. 180, 181.

of every one, and many believed it to be miraculous. The young man, however, gave a plain and rational account, by which it appeared to proceed from natural causes. He said, that about four months before, he was surprised by a new and pleasing sensation, which he afterwards discovered to arise from a ring of bells: that as yet, he heard only with one ear, but afterwards a kind of water came from his left ear, and then he could hear distinctly with both; that from this time he listened, with the utmost curiosity and attention, to the sounds which accompany those motions of the lips, which he had before remarked to convey ideas from one person to another. In short, he was able to understand them, by noting the things to which they related, and the action they produced. And after repeated attempts to imitate them when alone, at the end of four months he thought himself able to talk. He therefore, without having intimated what had happened, began at once to speak, and affected to join in conversation, though with much more imperfection than he was aware of.

Many Divines immediately visited him, and questioned him about God, and the soul, moral good and evil, and many other subjects of the same kind; but of all this, they found him totally ignorant, though he had been used to go to mass, and had been instructed in all the externals of devotion, and making the sign of the cross, looking upwards, kneeling at proper seasons, and using gestures of penitence and prayer. Of death itself, which may be considered as a sensible object, he had very confused and imperfect ideas, nor did it appear that he had ever reflected upon it. His life was little more than animal and sensitive. He seemed to be content with the simple perception of such objects as he could perceive, and did not compare his ideas with each other, nor draw inferences, as might have been expected from him. It appeared, however, that his understanding was vigorous, and his apprehension quick; so that his intellectual defects must have been caused, not by the barrenness of the soil, but merely by the want of necessary cultivation.

The case of this young man was not peculiar. What was true of him is true of every human being born in his circumstances. An individual who is cut off by total deafness and speechlessness from all instruction, is destitute of the knowledge of God, and incapable, by any exercise of his own reason, even with all the phenomena of the heavens and the earth

4-Vol. IX.

before him, of finding out God. His mind is a blank, in reference to all things supernatural and divine. The power of consciousness, the principle of causation, and the faculty of judgment, fail to lead him up from "the things that are made," to "the invisible things, even the eternal power and God-head" of Him that made them. It is only when, by the wonderful genius of modern philanthropy, he is brought into communication with other minds, with the fact of the existence of God, and with the evidences by which that fact is proved, that his mind is aroused to the deep and powerful conviction of this Such is the invariable and universal fact.*

Here then is a test, and the only test, we believe, of the real, intuitive, unaided, and uninstructed ability of human reason, to arrive at the certain knowledge of the existence of God. The inference from it, therefore, is, that while this truth commends itself to the intuitive powers of human reason, when brought, with its evidence before them, that, nevertheless, reason alone, unaided and uninstructed, is incapable of arriving at the sublime truth, that there is a God, who is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

Nay, more. We may venture to bring this question to the standard of reason, even in christian lands. For, in the very bosom of Christendom, how many are there, in the lanes and alleys of our cities, in our woods and forests, in mines and cellars, and among the young, ignorant and vicious every where, who are "without God," and "atheists in the world." "Talk," says Locke, "but with the country people, almost of any age,

*The following communication is from Dr. Howe, the celebrated Teacher of Laura Bridgman, the deaf, dumb and blind mute, written in reply to my inquiries on this subject:

"Boston, Feb. 26, 1853.

Dear Sir.-I send you such of our Reports as I can find which mention the case of Laura Bridgman. You know it was laid down by Blackstone, and generally received as true, that a person born deaf and blind must necessarily be an idiot. Laura Bridgman was the first person who found her way out of the dreary isolation into the light of knowledge, and into communion with her fellows. By the way she came, others have followed; but it may safely be said that deaf and blind children would remain in idiocy, and of course in ignorance of the existence and attributes of God, unless their faculties are developed by special instruction. Laura's case proved very clearly the innateness of the capacity for religious ideas; for, without such capacity deeply seated in the moral nature, our instructions might have as well been given to a dog.

You will find some remarks germane to the subject of your inquiry, in some of the accompanying Reports.

If I can be of the slightest use to you in any way, please count upon my readiness. Faithfully yours, S. G. HOWE.

REV. DR. SMYTH."

and with young people, almost of any condition, and you shall find that though the name of God be frequently in their mouths, yet the notions they apply this name to, are so odd, low and pitiful, that no body can imagine they were taught by a rational man.' Man, with all his searching, cannot find out his own spirit which is in him: and how then can he find out the Great Spirit, who is infinitely above and beyond, in His invisible and unapproachable greatness! He needs that one should teach him wherein be the first principles of the oracles of God. He is a babe, and has need of milk. His reason, therefore, should be employed, not in the vain attempts to penetrate the clouds and darkness which are round about the Deity, but, renouncing all imaginations of his own, in following that light which has shone forth from God's shrouded glory, and which alone reveals any part of His ways.

Such has, we may venture to say, been the prevailing doctrine among the ablest writers in the christian church. These have ever maintained that the great principles of what is called natural religion, could never have been represented to the human mind, nor known by man, if God himself had not first taught them, and if they had not been preserved by a traditional, or an existing written revelation. This is perfectly consistent with the fact, which they also believed, that reason is an innate, natural faculty, for knowing the truth, and distinguishing truth from error, when that truth and its evidences are fairly and fully brought before it. The existence of God, like all other truths of natural religion, when thus represented to the human mind, is rationally demonstrable and intuitively believed, and can be proved to the intellect and become a part of its intuitive inherent beliefs. But, until thus represented to the mind, we only maintain the approved sentiment of Christendom, in maintaining that man has not and cannot find out for, and by himself, any truth which respects things supernatural and divine. And if any parties should object to this conclusion, it ought not to be the Unitarians, since it was held by the fathers of their theology. Socinus says, "that to man naturally and by his own. reason or mind, there is no rooted, settled, or self-originated opinion of the Deity." Ostodorus, his fellow believer, says also, "what men know of God they do not derive from nature, neither from the consideration of the creation, but from

*Essay L. 1; c. 4: § 16.