standard of the mediocre to a nobler level.
There would be fewer Amys in life if there were
no Lilian! as there were would be far fewer
good men of sense if there were no erring
dreamer of genius!"

"You say well, Allen Penwick. And who
should be so indulgent to the vagaries of the
imagination as the philosophers who taught
your youth to doubt everything in the Maker's
plan of creation which could not be mathematically
proved. 'The human mind,' said Luther,
'is like a drunkard on horseback; prop it on
one side, and it falls on the other.' So the man
who is much too enlightened to believe in a
peasant's religion, is always sure to set up some inane
superstition of his own. Open biographical
volumes wherever you please, and the man who
has no faith in religion, is a man who has faith
in a nightmare. See that type of the elegant
sceptics—Lord Herbert, of Cherbury. He is
writing a book against Revelation; he asks a
sign from heaven to tell him if his book is
approved by his Maker, and the man who
cannot believe in the miracles performed by
his Saviour, gravely tells us of a miracle
vouchsafed to himself. Take the hardest and
strongest intellect which the hardest and
strongest race of mankind ever schooled and
accomplished. See the greatest of great men,
the great Julius Cæsar! Publicly he asserts in
the Senate that the immortality of the soul is
a vain chimera. He professes the creed which
Roman voluptuaries deduced from Epicurus,
and denies all divine interference in the affairs
of the earth. A great authority for the
materialists—they have none greater! They can show
on their side no intellect equal to Cæsar's! and
yet this magnificent free-thinker, rejecting a soul
and a Deity, habitually, on entering his chariot,
muttered a charm; crawled on his knees up
the steps of a temple to propitiate the abstraction
called ' Nemesis;' and did not cross the Rubicon
till he had consulted the omens. What does
all this prove?—a very simple truth. Man has
some instincts with the brutes; for instance,
hunger and sexual love. Man has one instinct
peculiar to himself, found universally (or with
alleged exceptions in savage states so rare, that
they do not affect the general law*) an instinct
of an invisible power without this earth, and of
a life beyond the grave, which that power
vouchsafes to his spirit. But the best of us
cannot violate an instinct with impunity.
Resist hunger as long as you can, and, rather than
die of starvation, your instinct will make you a
cannibal; resist love when youth and nature
impel to it, and what pathologist does not
track one broad path into madness or crime?
So with the noblest instinct of all. Reject the
internal conviction by which the grandest
thinkers have sanctioned the hope of the
humblest Christian, and you are servile at once
to some faith inconceivably more hard to
believe. The imagination will not be withheld
from its yearning for vistas beyond the walls
of the flesh and the span of the present hour.
Philosophy itself, in rejecting the healthful
creeds by which man finds his safeguards in
sober prayer, and his guide through the wilderness
of visionary doubt, invents systems
compared to which the mysteries of theology are
simple. Suppose any man of strong, plain
understanding had never heard of a Deity like
Him whom we Christians adore, then ask this
man which he can the better comprehend in his
mind, and accept as a natural faith, viz. the simple
Christianity of your shepherd or the Pantheism of
Spinoza? Place before an accomplished critic
(who comes with a perfectly unprejudiced mind
to either inquiry), first, the arguments of David
Hume against the Gospel miracles, and then the
metaphysical crotchets of David Hume himself.
This subtle philosopher, not content, with
Berkeley, to get rid of matter—not content,
with Condillac, to get rid of spirit or mind—
proceeds to a miracle greater than any his Maker
has yet vouchsafed to reveal. He, being then
alive and in the act of writing, gets rid of
himself altogether. Nay, he confesses he cannot
reason with any one who is stupid enough to
think he has a self. His words are: 'What we
call a mind is nothing but a heap or collection
of different perceptions or objects united
together by certain relations, and supposed, though
falsely, to be endowed with perfect simplicity
and identity. If any one upon serious and
candid reflection thinks he has a different
notion of himself, I must confess I can reason
with him no longer.' Certainly I would rather
believe all the ghost stories upon record, than
believe that I am not even a ghost, distinct and
apart from the perceptions conveyed to me, no
matter how—just as I am distinct and apart
from the furniture in my room, no matter
whether I found it there or whether I bought it.
If some old cosmogonist asked you to believe
that the primitive cause of the solar system
was not to be traced to a Divine Intelligence,
but to a nebulosity, originally so diffuse that its
existence can with difficulty be conceived, and
that the origin of the present system of organized
beings equally dispensed with the agency of a
Creative Mind, and could be referred to molecules
formed in the water by the power of attraction,
till, by modifications of cellular tissue in the
gradual lapse of ages, one monad became an

* It seems extremely doubtful whether the very
few instances in which it has been asserted that a
savage race has been found without recognition of a
Deity and a future state would bear searching
examination. It is set forth, for example, in most of
the popular works on Australia, that the Australian
savages have no notion of a Deity or a Hereafter,
that they only worship a devil, or evil spirit.
This assumption, though made more peremptorily,
and by a greater number of writers than any similar
one regarding other savages, is altogether erroneous,
and has no other foundation than the ignorance of
the writers. The Australian savages recognise a
Deity, but He is too august for a name in their own
language; in English they call Him The Great
Master—an expression synonymous with " The
Great Lord." They believe in a hereafter of eternal
joy, and place it amongst the stars.—See Strzelecki's
Physical Description ot New South Wales.