THE POWER OF NATURE OVER THE HUMAN MIND. No. I. BY REV. T. H. STOCKTON, PHILADELPHIA. THE works of nature were designed by our Creator to exert a powerful influence over the human mind. They were brought into existence to represent his character and exhibit his ineffable glory. A revelation, spiritual in its nature and objects, would not be suitable to impress us, had it not the material universe for its foundation. The laws of intellect, as found in man, require that there should be an appeal to the senses, before there is an appeal to the spiritual part of our constitution; and consequently, such a system as Christianity presupposes, a prior manifestation of God, through a material medium. Our ideas of omnipotence, omnipresence, and eternity, are inseparably associated with the physical universe. If the mind desire to enlarge these sentiments, it involuntarily resorts to this instrumentality, and amid the wonder of a far extending universe, quickens its conceptions of the native grandeur of Jehovah. It is therefore not strange, that the inspired writers should pay so much deference to nature. If they were not philosophers by profession, they were in fact, and, prompted by its instructions, they maintained the importance and dignity of the elder revelation. Had they depreciated nature to elevate inspiration, there would at once have been an interruption of their harmony, and so far from gaining any advantage thereby, Christianity would have lost its strongest authentications. The introduction of sin has so weakened the intellect and corrupted the heart, that the influence of nature has been diminished. It has not, however, been destroyed. All morbid action of mind and matter is but a diversion of said action from its original law. The power of nature is now seen in the false uses made of it. First of these abuses of the material universe -first in its intellectual connections-and first in its pernicious agency-is the doctrine of Atheism. It is the most remarkable form of that original sentiment—the love of nature. The essence of this system is a subordination of the intellect to the senses. The labored reasonings of an atheistic mind are based on the supposition that nature gives evidence of a God, and thus, the Atheist and the Theist start at the same point. The position of the Atheist is offensive; that of the Theist is defensive. No mortal man is competent to the task of sustaining the withering |