work miracles-attested by scores of eye-witnesses, whose testimony nothing but judicial blindness can withstand." How explain them? "The Talisman is [in small capitals] FAITH!" "All things are possible to him that believeth!" But then, adds Lord Gifford: All "is closely connected with the modern phenomena of mesmerism," etc. It is, perhaps, too late in the day for any one to dispute or deny certain contraventions of the usual on the part of mesmerism; but this was not so at first. The ordinary routine of common sense, which alone was philosophy to the Aufgeklärter, the man of enlightenment then,-in his freedom from prejudice and his hatred of the lie, the ordinary routine of common sense could not be said to be interrupted without a pang to the heart of this Aufgeklärter in the beginning, at the stupidity of the vulgar, caught ever by some new trick! It is told of Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer, -a warm-hearted, honest, able, perfectly admirable man in his day, but still something of that day's Philistine, or something of that day's Aufgeklärter, - that he was loud in his denunciations of mesmerism as mere " collusion and quackery," but that he unwarily undertook to stake the question on trial of himself. "Accordingly the poet," says the narrator and the operator, a man whom I personally knew, "sat down in his chair, and the moment my hand came in contact with his head, he shrunk as if struck by a voltaic pile, uttered a deep sigh, fell back upon his chair, and all consciousness fled from him." We are not surprised to hear, nevertheless, that the poet (Elliott himself), alone of the whole company, remained unconvinced: he only "rubbed his eyes," and "would have it that he had fallen asleep from exhaustion." Lord Gifford, then, has still the substantial enlightenment that is open to all evidence, and will not reject, because of physical facts, others which happen to be psychical.

And with this I will conclude the picture, trusting that you will find it only natural and sufficiently in place that, with this little book before me and the information it extended-I conceived an introductory lecture on the Founder of this Chair only my duty, and the rather that it necessarily involved much of the matter of Natural Theology.

1 GIFFORD LECTURE THE TWELFTH.

A settlement for faith Lord Gifford's object-Of our single theme the negative half now-Objections to, or refutations of, the proofs-Negative not necessarily or predominatingly modern, Kant, Darwin-The ancient negative, the Greeks, Pythagoreans, Ionics, Eleatics, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Democritus, (Bacon), Anaxagoras, Socrates, Sophists, Diagoras, Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Dicaearchus, Strato, (Hume, Cudworth), Aristophanes, etc.,Rome-Modern Europe, France, Hume and the seventeen atheists-Epochs of atheism-David Hume, his influence-То many a passion and a prejudice-Brougham, Buckle-Style!Taste!-Blair-Hume's taste, Pope, Shakespeare, John Home -Othello-The French to Hume-Mr. Pope!-Some bygone litterateurs Personality and character of Hume - Jokes, stories, Kant, Aristotle-The Scotch-The Epigoniad-America -Germany-Generosity, affection, friendship, hospitalitySmollett-Burke--but Hume, honest, genuine, and even religious and pious.

We must now address ourselves to the business proper of the course. I think our shortest statement of the general object of Lord Gifford at any time during last session was this: "Faith, belief, -the production of a living principle that, giving us God in the heart, should, in this world of ours, guide us in peace." I probably did enough then, by way of general explanation and illustrative detail, to enforce and give its own due proportions to this object and this theme, constitutive, as I take it of the entire burden of the bequest itself. But, had I failed in this, had my statement of that object-had my representation of the spirit of Lord Gifford in setting up the exposition of that object as the single and sole duty of a special chair-had statement and representation been insufficient and incomplete, we should have had to acknowledge ample compensation and satisfactory relief in what we saw, in our last lecture, of expressions of Lord Gifford's own. Be the language of the Bequest what it may, that little book, with its seven lectures, as we may say, on law, ethics, and religion, presents us with the full length Lord Gifford, and dispenses us from any relative doubt.

Further, then, now, as regards our treatment of the theme prescribed to us. I also explained last session that I took the theme itself precisely as it was prescribed. That theme, I said, is "Natural Theology and the proofs for the Being of a God. These proofs I follow historically, while the reflection at the same time that we have still before us what Lord Gifford calls the only science, the science of infinite being, may bring with it a certain (complementary) breadth and filling." "This is one half

of my enterprise. The other half, the negative half, shall concern the denial of the proofs. This session (I said then), I confine myself to the affirmative. Next session, I shall conclude with what concerns the negative. In this way we shall have two correspondent and complementary halves: one irenical, and the other polemical; one with the ancients, and the other with the moderns. For I shall bring the affirmative half historically down only "-only, in fact, to within sight again of Raymund of Sabunde.

We have to understand, therefore, that we have now seen the affirmative of our whole theme-the rise, namely, and progress of the proofs or arguments for the being of God as they are thetically presentant in history; and what remains for us at present is the exposition and discussion of the negative. We have to see, that is, what objections or refutations have been brought forward in

KANT-DARWIN.

regard of the proofs; and we have to consider as well what weight attaches to these objections, or what cogency follows these refutations. It appears also that we are now to find ourselves only in the modern world. This does not mean, however, that we are to regard the modern world as only negative in respect of the being That would be a of a God, and never affirmative. singular result of monotheism, universal now, as opposed to polytheism, all but universal then. The reverse is the truth. Up to within a score of years or so we may say that modern writers on religion, while countless in numbers, were, with but few exceptions, affirmative to a man. And this we feel we can hold to in spite of Kant and his Kritik of 1781; for Kant, whatever his negative may be, has his own affirmative at last. It is only since Mr. Darwin that, as the phrase goes, atheism has set in like a flood. It was not, then, because of relative numbers that we made the ancients affirmative and the moderns negative in regard to the belief in a God. The principle of determination did not lie there at all. What alone was considered in the laying out of our theme was the historical course and fortune of the proofs themselves.

And if the modern world is not for a moment to be considered exclusively or predominatingly negative; so neither is the ancient world to be any more considered There were exclusively or predominantly affirmative. I suppose, indeed, atheists then quite as well as now. to the bulk of the Grecian public, every philosopher before Socrates was an atheist, not even excepting the Pythagoreans. Thales and the other Ionics are, as Hylozoists, nothing but atheists; while to call the Eleatics and Heraclitus pantheists is tantamount, for all that, to an admission, as their doctrines were, that they were atheists. Empedocles was no better. Democritus could point to the superhuman powers he believed in, as