where I am enchanted with the genius that breathes in the marble and radiates from the canvas, and I am told each statue was formed, and each picture drawn and colored, by chance. Or yet again: "Paradise Lost" is in my hand, and I am entranced with the eternal visions mirrored to my fancy; and I am told that the various letters which compose the lofty poem entered into the various words, sentences, and paragraphs, by chance. What should I say to a man who would thus speak to me, either in that city, or in that gallery, or with that immortal volume in my hand? Why, should I not brand him either as a contemptible jester, a brainless madman, or some insolent dolt who sought to insult my reason? Yet what is that city to the architecture of the universe! what that hall of art to the blooming landscape, and the brilliant spheres!-what that poem to those realms of imagination into which every flower introduces me, and that spirit of poetry which haunts the world, and sets the elements to music! Verily, I could sooner believe that chance built Rome than that it constructed an insect's eye.*

Another class is

*

II. THOSE WHO MAINTAIN THAT THE MECHANISM OF THE UNIVERSE SPRUNG FROM A GENERATIVE AFFECTION INHERENT

IN MATTER. ANAXIMANDER of Miletus is the father and type of this class. THALES, his friend and tutor, had pronounced water to be the causative principle of all things; an idea by no means unnatural for an inquiring mind like his to entertain in a foggy age. He saw water everywhere: he observed it going up in the morning mist, and coming down in rain and dew. It seemed to be ubiquitous. If he looked into the depths of the earth, it was there; or to the heavens above, it was charioting in the clouds. He saw no life without it. The green hills and the fruitful valleys withered in its absence, and burst into luxuriance at its return. "Could

*See some excellent remarks on Chance in the first volume of the invaluable work of Dr. M'Culloch, on the "Attributes of God," page 81.

anything be more naturally present to an Ionian mind than the universality of water? Had he not, from boyhood upwards, been familiar with the sea?

"There about the beach he wandered, nourishing a youth sublime With the fairy tales of science, and the long result of time.

When gazing abroad upon the blue expanse, hearing the mighty waters rolling evermore, and seeing the red sun, having spent its fiery energy, sink into the cool bosom of the wave, to rest there in peace, how often must he have been led to contemplate the all-embracing, all-engulfing sea, upon whose throbbing the very earth itself reposed.” * But however universal and mighty the water seemed, it was not sufficiently so to satisfy the more analytical and abstract mind of Anaximander as the cause of things. There must be something greater than water, thought he; something that regulates its motions, guides it in the shower, and controls it in the billows. He supposed a certain infinite materia prima, which was neither air, nor water, nor fire, but indifferent to everything, or a mixture of all, to be the only principle of the universe. This principle he called ARCHE. Hippo, Anaximenes, Diogenes of Apollonia, and others, though differing with him, as Cudworth informs, in some trivial details, agreed in regarding matter, as devoid of understanding and life, as the first principle of all things. This form of antitheism is called the hylopathian, because it refers everything to some generative affection in matter.

Now, it appears to me that this ARCHE of the ancient antitheists is the same as the NATURE of the moderns. Both are an inanimate, unintelligent, undefinable, infinite, something in matter, the producer of all things. In order to see their correspondence, and, at the same time, the sublime folly of the men who deny the existence of a God, let us hear each party explaining the way in which his mysterious force

*See a "Biographical History of Philosophy," by G. H. Lewes, one of the most philosophic thinkers and vigorous writers of the present day.

originated the universe. Anaximander asserted that his ARCHE "made the celestial bodies, and infinite worlds, by secretion, and that generation and corruption proceeded from their moving circularly together from eternity. He also asserted that the generative principles of heat and cold being separated when this world was made, a certain sphere of fire first arose, and encompassed the air which surrounds the earth as the bark doth a tree. This being afterwards broken, and divided into smaller spherical bodies, formed the sun, moon, and stars. He held also that the first animals were generated in moisture, and encompassed with certain thorny backs, by which they were defended; which, after further growth, becoming more dry, and cracking, they issued forth, but lived only a short time: that men were at first generated in the bellies of fishes; and being there nourished till they grew strong, and were able to support themselves, they were afterwards cast upon dry land." And thus humanity, in its first stage, like Jonah, was tossed about in the deep, until at length the good maternal fish threw it on the dry land, and thus our ADAM was born.

This is the way in which the ancient ARCHE reared creation's noble superstructure. Let us now inquire, How does modern NATURE Work? I find, in a work bearing the name of Mirabeau, but said to have been written by Holbach, and which is called the "System of Nature," and generally regarded as the Bible of modern anti-theists, the following statements concerning the origin of things:-"If flour be wetted with water, and the mixture be closed up, it will be found, after some little lapse of time, by the aid of a microscope, to have produced organized beings that enjoy life, of which the water and the flour were incapable. It is thus that inanimate matter can pass into life. Fermentation and putrefaction evidently produce living animals." We have neither space nor soul for more lengthened extracts. The meaning of the writer is obviously this: that there is, in

* "Universal History," vol. i. p. 38.

the pre-existent elements of the universe, a generative affection, which he designates NATURE, like that which is found in fermenting and putrefying matter. That all life, including men, sprung out of primitive chaos as worms from corrupting dough. This is, perhaps, the most prevalent form of antitheism in modern times; * indeed, even in the present day, I find the following language employed by one of its chief apostles :"Why I suppose nature is equal to the performance of all things is, not because the matter has a certain form, and does not do certain things now. If the world could wait long enough— if time were given sufficient for the purpose-we should find that this matter would change without help on our part, and would become we know not what; because it has already become what it is from what we are not able to explain. We look at it, and call it inanimate, because it continues in a set form, and of a certain nature; but there is nothing in the world, so far as we know, that is not subject to change, and does not seem, by its own innate power, to become, at one time or other, various beings."+

The other class is

III. THOSE WHO REFER ALL TO AN INNATE VITALITY IN THE PRE-EXISTENT ETERNITY OF THE UNIVERSE. This class is divided into three subordinate classes-those who refer all to a vitality peculiar to every part of matter, and developing itself by chance; those who refer all to a vitality common to every part of matter, and developing itself by necessity; and those who refer all to a vitality essential to matter, and developing itself by volition.

First. STRATO, of Lampsacus-who, from the third to the twenty-first year of the hundred and twenty-third Olympiad, presided, with far-famed ability, over the peripatetic school of

* Diderot, Lagrange, Grimm, D'Alembert, Mirabeau, Buffon, and others who contributed to the French Encyclopædia, seem to have adopted this view.

† See "Atheistic Controversy between Townley and Holyoake," of which we hope to say something in a future number of the Homilist.

philosophy-was the first anti-theist who held the first opinion. "He did not," says a writer whom we have before quoted, "fetch the original of all things, as the Democratic and Epicurean atheists, from a fortuitous motion of atoms-by means whereof he bore some slight semblance of a theist--but yet he was a downright atheist for all that, his God being no other than such a life of nature in matter as both devoid of sense and consciousness, and also multiplied together with the several parts of it; that in every particle of original matter there was the principle of life."* This STRATO speaks of the PHUsIs and the TUCHE as the originators of the organic universe. If we understand his notion, it is this: that his phusis is a principle of vitality essential to every particle of matter. It is in every atom, but more dormant and insentient than a chrysalis, and would have remained so for ever but for the tuche-the chance that quickened it into the expanding throbs of life. This tuche, like a trumpet, roused the atom-sleepers from the eternal slumbers of primeval night; or, like the breath of spring, touched the sterile deserts of chaos into a universe blooming with beauty, and redolent with the music of new and happy life.

Second. The other class-namely, those who refer all to a vitality common to every part of matter, and developing itself by necessity-is far the most numerous. The idea here is, that there is ONE great parent, or stock, principle of life, unconscious and unintelligent, plantal or animal, from which all things have emanated; that the countless motions and forms in the universe are but the pulsations and evolutions of this common life. So that, in the words of Seneca, as translated by an eminent writer:-" Whatsoever, from the beginning to the end of it, it can either do or suffer, it was all at first included in the nature of the whole: as in the seed is contained the whole delineation of the future man; and the embryo, or unborn infant, hath already in it the law of a beard and gray hairs-the lineaments of the whole body, and of its following age, being there disclosed, as it were, in a

* Cudworth, vol. i., pp. 148, 149.