future state. Surely, therefore, there needs no comparison of the superior sanctions to virtue in the gospel scheme and of the glorious superiority of that divine illumination which lights us through the dark valley of the shadow of death. Ignorance and prejudice may, and indeed do, assert, that the ChristianMaterialist, proceeding on the same reasoning with the Sceptical Materialist, would necessarily be subject to the same contempt of revelation and futurity, and which, if pushed to its extent, would lead to the Atheist's creed of a material Deity; but this by no means follows, and we shall give the present controversy in evidence. We strongly contend, on behalf of Christian Materialists, that, as far as revelation is concerned, their opinions make not a shadow of difference. We do not enter into the various theories of Immateriality, which, indeed, is a term for a something of which no one has yet given any distinct explanation. We are ourselves strongly inclined to the hypothesis of Mr. Locke, who thought there was some unknown principle superadded to matter to confer the faculty of thinking; but we do not wish to obtrude our own individual speculations on our readers: we only wish to inculcate Mr. Locke's liberal accompaniment, that these metaphysical riddles have no right to be obtruded as creeds, and that, however that faculty may exist, "it cannot be in any created being but merely by the good pleasure and bounty of the Creator." See Essay on H. Und. B. iv. Ch. 3.

But to exhibit the same evident truism from these metaphysical alarmists themselves, we will quote the following accidental and simple slip of the pen in the very first page of the Quarterly Review, and after which its scurrility requires no other antidote:"It can scarcely be necessary to remind our readers, in limine, that the nature of the living principle is among the subjects which are manifestly beyond the reach of human investigation. The effects and the properties of life are indeed obvious to our senses through the whole range of organized creation; but on what they depend, and how they are produced, never has been discovered, and probably never will"! And again, p. 20: "Immateriality does not necessarily imply immor

tality: they are not convertible terms." So also Mr. Rennell, in his Remarks, p. 113: "The principle of volition, because it is immaterial, is not, therefore, of necessity, immortal.” . These admissions, however, were necessary, since they knew that any argument used to prove the necessary self-existence of the soul, went to prove its preexistence-an absurdity too great for even them to undertake, skilled as they are in maintaining paradoxes. Now, if immateriality be not necessarily immortal, common sense must perceive that it cannot be a requisite or material part of the creed of a Christian; or at all events, that it is equally subject with matter to decay and perish; since, by their confession, immateriality may have a beginning and an end, and yet man attain immortality. Where, then, is the object of dispute, or where any preference of the two opinions? And even had there not been this luckless admission, who would be the sceptic;-the Immaterialist, who reckoned on futurity as the necessary result of an imperishable vital principle; or the Unitarian Christian Materialist, who placed his hope in the power and benevolence of his Creator, and on the fact of one Man, Christ Jesus, having actually risen from the dead? We think St. Paul has answered this: "If Christ be not risen, ye are yet in your sins, and those also who are fallen asleep in Jesus are perished."-" But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept." Did St. Paul believe in futurity on any other trust than that of the resurrection of our Saviour? Did he believe in an intermediate state of the soul, previous to the resurrection of the body? And how many sublime passages in his writings are destroyed by the supposition of an intermediate state!

The Christian Materialist founds his hope on the immediate power of the Deity; the Immaterialist, on the subordinate agency of a supposititious vital principle; yet the latter denounces the former as a sceptic! Mr. Macleay, to whose candour we have before appealed, has stated our own opinions on this head with great force." The necessary immortality of the human soul is a dogma as much in opposition to the idea of Divine Omnipotence, as its necessary mortality. Without the

assurances of revelation, the immortality of the soul could never have been ascertained; nay, perhaps might have been reasonably doubted.”—P. 479.

We fear we have entered too fully into the general question to admit of any quotations from the different works, the particular subject of our review. Of Mr. Lawrence's volumes, we cannot sufficiently express our praise of the scientific knowledge and love of truth which everflows every page; and it is lamentable that the deadly poison of bigotry should have been employed against the works of an author, which bid fair to redeem our character in Comparative Anatomy and Physiology. The lectures on the natural history of man are of course more interesting to the general reader. Mr. Rennell may term the following sentence Atheism, from p. 30 of the two Introductory Lectures, but we do not: "From the modifications of structure, and its constant relation to the wants, habits and powers of animals, there arises the strongest evidence of final purposes, and therefore the strongest proof of an INTELLIGENT FIRST CAUSE." We shall not, however, reflect on the understanding of our readers by further quoting numerous sentences on" that Exalted Power and Wisdom, in testimony of which all nature cries aloud," (to use the words of Mr. Lawrence, p. 52 of his Physiology,) and repeated in language too fervid, pious and eloquent to admit a doubt of his sincerity. He has no where, in matter, that we can discover, impugned the truth of revelation: and whatever may be his opinions, (and they are certainly of comparative insignificancy to the subject of his works,) we are sure Mr. Lawrence has too much common sense to believe that Christianity can be disposed of in a parenthesis. We certainly can discover a detestation of priestcraft, which, whatever may be the policy or propriety of disseminating it through the medium of his Lectures, does honour to him in an age where talent and political prostitution are such saleable commodities in the market of corruption. But we do confess we are somewhat puzzled to discover the relevancy of a note on the Game Laws, which Mr. Lawrence introduces as an alterative to the subject; unless, indeed, it had been a short biographical notice

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of some of those unfortunate young gentlemen who are occasionally introduced to his anatomical inquisition by steel traps, spring guns, and the sentences of Mr. Justice Best. Mr. Lawrence also occasionally volunteers a remark on the comparative anatomy of the American and English governments; and we shrewdly suspect that this effluvia of civil liberty has offended the olfactory nerves of the Quarterly Review and its patrons. We conceive these zealous Immaterialists are just as much interested for religion as the faculty of a northern metropolis, who so memorably opposed the election of Leslie to their mathematical chair on the ground of his Materialism, and have since preferred a candidate for the lectureship of Moral Philosophy, reputed to have made a cock-pit of his drawing-room, parodies on the words of Scripture, and a living by the editorship of Blackwood's Magazine. Such is the physical reward of " plastic natures," and of those who uphold the policy of the "social" system, in thinning his Majesty's redundant population at Tyburn Gate! "RELIGION POLITICS-there's a couple of topics for you, no more like one another than oil and vinegar; and yet, these two, beaten together by a state cook, make sauce for the whole nation." *

Of the part which Mr. Abernethy has written and acted, we cannot give unqualified approbation, highly as we estimate his strong and original talent, and the obligations due to him for his advancement of surgical science. But as a philosopher, he should have supported Mr. Lawrence in maintaining the independence of the chair, however he might have differed from him in opinion. We g. e Mr. Abernethy credit for sincere motives in a wish to secure, as he conceived, the religious principles of the students; but we think he ought rather to have shewn the insignificancy of the dispute as far as concerned religion, on that beautiful sentiment of the pious and philosophical Bonnet, so often quoted by Dr. Priestley and others: "Si quelqu' un démontreroit jamais que l'âme est matérielle, loin de s'en enlarmer, il faudroit admirer la puissance qui auroit donné à la matière la capacité de penser.”

* Congreve's Love for Love.

Mr. Abernethy, on the contrary, like all Immaterialists, edges in his own hypothesis, and endeavours to define that which he pronounces undiscoverable. A theory of Mr. John Hunter's is the grand specific prescribed for the prevention and cure of Mr. Lawrence's influence. He has since exhibited it in several subsequent forms-in a little anonymous tract on the Human Mind, dedicated to (by) himself; and lately in some reflections on Dr. Gall and Spurtzeim's System of Physiognomy and Phrenology. Indeed, from the assiduity with which this grand mental catholicon is published, we expect some morning to see John Hunter's name supersede on the walls and churches of the metropolis, Dr. Eady, Dean Street, Soho." Leucippus, we remember, described the vital principle as a certain blue flame; and this Hunterian hypothesis of Mr. Abernethy's may be termed the PILLULA SALUTARIA, or blue pill of his metaphysics. Whatever effect this physiological opinion may have on his patients, most certain it is that it did not preserve the faith of Mr. Hunter himself, who was a notorious Atheist. And the Deism of Sir William Drummond, enveloped in clouds of immateriality, is a pretty practical proof how little this vaunted nostrum is a stay to infidelity.

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We had intended here to have made some remarks on the scepticism imputed to the medical profession, and to have ventured some observations on the causes of it, and the most probable remedy, but we defer them to some future occasion. The immortal Hartley, Dr. Percival and Dr. Rush, have, however, been distinguished exceptions. In an ingenious work of the latter on the diseases of the mind, he classes one which he calls the "Derangement in the Principle of Faith, or the Believing Faculty," and enumerates two classes of discased-those who believe and report every thing they hear, and those who have an inability to believe things that are supported by all the evidence that usually enforces belief: amongst these last he ranks “persons who refuse to admit human testimony in favour of the truths of the Christian religion, believing in all the events of profane history." Ch. xi.

In the commencement of this paper

we intended also to have quoted at some length from the 9th article in our notice, "The Letter on the reputed Immateriality of the Human Soul." We can now only commend it to our readers as a most impartial and intelligent review, coinciding almost entirely with our own opinions; and we have the greater pleasure in these commendations, understanding its author is a clergyman of the Establishment.

The anonymous author of the "Cursory Remarks," is an alarmist of the old school, and deals wholesale in the odium theologicum. And the "Graduate of Medicine" might have saved himself, the public, the paper manufacturer and printer, much trouble, by not going to press, with the candid confession that he knows nothing of the subject. The remaining volume, "Sketches of the Philosophy of Life," by Sir C. Morgan, though an imposing title, is rather a shallow performance, and exhibits depth only in verbal mystification, as will appear in the following sentence, quoted also by the Quarterly Review; a bog of mystification, in which we think scarcely a recondite German metaphysician could see his way of extrication.

"Essentially linked with the power of loco-motion, relative sensibility is distri buted to the different animals in an exact proportion to the wants of their organization, being resident in a tissue, whose developement is regulated in the various species, by the sphere of activity necessary to their preservation !”—P. 276.

We would now ask the "Christian Advocate of Cambridge," whether he really considers such arrant nonsense as endangering the existence of Christianity; and whether these hopeless disputes of Physiologists (past the comprehension of the "learned" themselves) can possibly influence the religious principles of the poor and unlearned, for whom Christianity was preached?" Certainly," says Bishop Fell, "the first propagators of our faith proceeded at another rate; they well knew, that not the brain but the heart was the proper soil of that celestial plant, and therefore did not amuse their proselytes with curious questions, but set them to the active part of their religion."

We esteem all these metaphysical cobwebs as more fit "to catch flies

the persecution and suffering of the virtuous, and the too frequent success and impunity of the vicious. These arguments, coupled with the power of the Creator, who first made us to recreate us, constitute, in our opinion, a very strong and rational ground for belief in a future state, independent of the evidence of Christianity; and form, also, a very important and secure ground-work for the superstructure of revelation.

These arguments, aided by the tradition of her ancestors, doubtless emboldened that heroic Jewess (whose story is so inimitably related in 2 Maccabees vii.) to encourage the immolation of her children by a foreign tyrant and her own martyrdom, rather than transgress the Mosaic law, and to cheer them in their dying agonies with that pious exhortation" I cannot tell how ye came into my womb; for I neither gave you breath nor life, neither was it I that formed the members of every one of you; but doubtless the Creator of the world, who formed the generations of man, and found out the beginning of all things, will also, of his own mercy, give you breath and life again, as ye now regard not your own selves for his law's sake." This ancient and universal expectation of futurity is what the poetical author of the Cypress Grove, describes as "the voice of nature in almost all the religions of the world, that general testimony charactered in the minds of the most barbarous and savage people; for all have had some roving guesses at ages to come, and a dim, duskish light of another life, all appealing to one general judgment throne. To what else could serve so many expiations, sacrifices, prayers, solemnities and mystical ceremonies? To what such sumptuous temples and care of the dead? To what all religion, if not to shew that they expected a more excellent manner of being, after the navigation of this life did take an end?"

But we should be sorry to rest that belief solely on tradition or metaphysics: we believe it on the authority of the New Testament; and though we are not prepared to say there is a demonstration, yet we do solemnly think it is little short of demonstration, when we duly consider the variety of evidence, from the indisputably recent origin of our race; from the con

nexion of the Jewish and Christian covenants; from the necessity of some super-human communication, (a necessity which sceptics themselves prove to exist by the folly they impute to the whole civilized world for believing revelation); from the evidence of prophecy and miracles; from the single, incomparable and inimitable personal character of our Saviour; from the unrivalled perfection of his moral code, a system of Ethics which, even if not original in all its principles, at all events embodies and concentrates every virtue which natural religion had taught the wise men of all previous ages and countries; the number and disinterestedness of the witnesses who handed down this revelation, and who, the more ignorant and bigoted they may be represented by sceptics, were, therefore, proportionably less able to invent such a system, and promulgate it with consistency and effect; from the numerous historical documents which in regular succession have transmitted these circumstances to the present times; from the peculiarly strong evidence contained in these writings, (the genuineness admitted,) for the grand miracle of the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ; from the final spread of his religion over the whole civilized world; from the effects it has already produced, and those that may be reasonably anticipated; from the remarkable accordance of its principles with those of civil liberty and the signs of the times; from the realization of its promises of hope and consolation to the afflicted and dying ; and, lastly, in the recorded faith of most of the enlightened philosophers of all subsequent ages and countries; although too many of them, it must be admitted, have also given their assent to the most contradictory and unchristian additions.

Many men of distinguished intellect have credited revelation on single parts of this evidence: who, then, can deny Christianity with so much internal light of its own perfections; with so many miraculous, providential attestations, and with a knowledge of its effects? Mr. Lawrence has not inaptly quoted the authority of Socrates, that greatest of the ancient philosophers, as pointing out the surest admission into the temple of wisdom through the portal of doubt. Surely, then, on the