ART. II. PHILOSOPHY AND SCIENCE AUXILIARY TO CHRISTIANITY IN PAGAN LANDS.

By Cyrus Hamlin, Waterford, Me.

Ir is a just remark of Schlegel that, without the Christian system, "the whole history of the world would be nought else than an insoluble enigma-an inextricable labyrinth-a huge pile of the blocks and fragments of an unfinished edifice and the great tragedy of humanity would remain devoid of all proper result." Moral and political movements are rapidly developing this inseparable connexion of Christianity with the history and destinies of the world; and are presenting indications, that the Christian faith is to extend its power through all lands, and into all departments of human activity.

It is the duty of the Church to understand and direct these movements, or to avail herself of their impulses, so as to accelerate her own advancement. She must study the moral, intellectual, and political, as well as the physical geography of the world, that she may wisely adapt her measures to the end proposed-the world's conversion. Her reliance is indeed to be placed on the influences of the Holy Spirit, accompanying the faithful preaching of the doctrines of the cross. The gospel will cease to be the power of God unto salvation, when human instrumentality, instead of the Divine Spirit, and a worldly wisdom, instead of the ordinances of God, shall be relied upon to secure success.

But, although the outward form and inward power of Christianity will remain the same, the means of hastening her progress will in some respects vary, as the heathen world puts on new aspects and passes into new eras of its history. When she first announced herself to the Pagan world, a system of external agency was required to promote her interests, which would be ill-adapted to the present age. The universal mind was then disposed to some form of religious faith. It was the testimony of St. Paul that it was "too religious."

There was a perverse seeking after God, or rather an intense activity of the religious sentiment which appeared in

the splendour and magnificence of idolatrous rites, and combined itself with every form and manifestation of human virtue and human depravity. That expectation of a Divine deliverer, which sprang out of the primitive revelation and the Jewish prophecies, had inwoven itself with all the systems of religion, and prepared the world for its consummation in the advent of Jesus Christ. To this posture of the universal mind, the use of miracles was admirably adapted. It was an agency which the world was prepared to receive with the profoundest reverence and awe. It was looking for supernatural manifestations from all its deities, and would have regarded a religion without miracles, as a religion without a God. The rapid success of the primitive faith may doubtless be ascribed in part to the skilful adaptation of miraculous agency to the state, the attitude of the pagan mind.

But the heathen world has now passed into a new era. It is the era, not of faith, but of unbelief. That thirsting after Divinity which constituted the life and power of heathen systems, has been quenched in almost universal skepticism. Idolatry is now an exanimate form. Its temples are abandoned, its altars and its idols prostrate, its feasts deserted, and where it still retains the flickering breath of an exhausted life, it is held back from its grave by some traitorous Christian power. The triumphal cars of India's gods are decaying by their temples, except when the mercenary bayonets of the British Government compel the natives to drag them forth, with Satanic rites, to insult Jehovah. It is not the free-will of the idolator, but the lash of the British soldier, which moves the nerves that impel them in the unblest procession. The fact that Asiatic idolatry is dependent for its existence upon English government is the highest demonstration that its vital power is gone. And the heathen world is every where in a transitional state from idolatry to skepticism. It is in a waiting attitude to receive some new system. In this transitional movement, Christianity may be most successfully presented, and Philosophy and Science are peculiarly adapted to aid her progress, and to become, in this age, the same auxiliaries which miracles were in a former and different age. For in that transition, the mind is still conscious of restless, unsatisfied wants. The bonds of superstition are relaxed, the mind is liberalized, and takes a wider range of thought, and begins to ques

tion nature and its own consciousness. Let the system of our holy faith now be presented, with its sublime mysteries, its divine harmony and simplicity, and let science present the parallel harmonies of the material world, and a true and a just philosophy direct the mind to its own consciousness, and thus from out "the triple fount of truth"-revelation— the universe-and inward experience-pour the waters of life upon the soul, and it will be emancipated from the pagan's gloom and the sceptic's doubts. The intellectual reception of the gospel will be secured, and the way prepared for the saving influences of the Spirit.

In the primitive and superstitious age, the mind was intent upon the spiritual world. It loved supernatural attestations to truth, and miracles had a consequent power to command its faith.

In the present sceptical age, the mind is inclined to materialism. As it emerges from idolatry, and finally assumes the attitude of fixed unbelief, it will neglect its consciousness, and its inward cravings after spiritual light and freedom, and will assimilate itself to the outward world. When, therefore, philosophy presents the outward world in the full power of its evidence against unbelief, and makes it radiant with the proofs of the Christian scheme, it meets the mind with that same correspondency of evidence to its inward state which was secured in the superstitious age by miracles.

Idolatry and scepticism are unnatural and discordant. states of the soul's faculties. Faith is their perfected and harmonized state. It restores them to the peacefulness of a blessed union with the universe and its author. Christianity may, therefore, be presented to the heathen mind emerging from idolatry, as the heavenly guide of the intellectual as well as the moral powers, fitted to restore the mind to a true philosophy as well as a true religion, and to harmonize all the antagonisms of human nature. A correct science finds a power to aid Christianity in the fact that the science of the pagan world is false and pernicious, and is so intimately connected with its religion, that both must stand or fall together. Demonstrate the falseness of its science, and its religion can claim no respect. And the Christian philosopher, like Henry Martyn, and many who have followed him, has therefore been able to meet the proud and learned Persian, and the Indian Brahmins with weapons which they

could neither parry nor resist, and which compelled them to acknowledge the superiour claims of the Christian faith.

In the accomplishment of their divine mission to the heathen world, science and philosophy must be more strictly analogical. The visible things in this world are manifestations of the invisible things of the spiritual world. They are the shadows of eternal truths darkly falling upon the human mind. The same Author, whose wisdom and love reared the structure of Christianity, reared also the structures of the visible worlds, and sealed upon them the impresses of this wisdom and love-created the human powers and faculties with wants to be answered by Christianity alone, and instituted a providential government whose unfolding plans and policy perpetually recognize the Christian faith. Every where there are clasps and fixtures which bind the visible to the invisible. It is the high office of science, as she wakes up the heathen mind to thought, to present these analogies which are confirmatory of revealed religion, and those facts which attest the truth of the historic statements of the in

spired record. And a true philosophy may so propose all the objects of knowledge as to show that the mind cannot apprehend them, in their deepest import, without abandoning paganism and unbelief-that in order to understand and interpret the universe, it must first admit the faith of Christianity; and still further, that it cannot interpret itself except by a philosophy based upon that faith. Our holy religion shall thus gather to herself all the analogies of nature, and the confirmation of universal science, and shall inweave them with the web of her own divine texture, and form for the human soul a vestment of truth, woven without seam, throughout. The true philosopher will rejoice that science is assuming the form which will best adapt her to the purposes of Christianity in her aggressions upon the false science and religion of paganism, and that schools of learning, are springing up in the Moslem's capital, in the dominions of the Pacha of Egypt, in the Presidencies of India, in the borders of China, along the coasts of Africa, and amid the islands of the ocean. May they become orbs of light, whose effulgence shall be the glory of all lands.

Let it not be thought that philosophy is intended to be exalted above revealed truths. She would then go forth to bewildered man only to dazzle and blind. Such a usurpation has always been destructive to religious and intellectual

growth and freedom. It once arrested the triumphs of our divine faith over the idolatrous world. For, when Christianity first began to subvert the systems of heathen philosophy, and, in the struggle between them, to enlist on each side the powers of the noblest minds, instead of planting herself firmly on her own basis of truth, she subjected her dogmas to the Platonic and mystic systems, and thus quenched her light in the darkness of the middle ages. There is hardly an errour of those times which cannot be traced to this usurpation of philosophy over revealed truth. Should it be allowed again, it must be attended with a similar disastrous influence upon the purity, and power, and progress of Christianity, and the advancement of science, in pagan lands.

Christianity was designed to be the mistress, not the handmaid, of philosophy and the sciences. Her verities belong to a higher realm of truth, up to which she would attract the human spirit. They are adapted to the deeper and nobler wants of our nature, and should command the assent of the mind like the axioms of mathematical science. We receive them on the authority of the Omniscient mind, and build our faith upon them with a reverence as much deeper than that we render to mathematical truth as the intuitive insight of Deity is clearer than human knowledge.

It is a false theory that science and philosophy must precede Christianity in heathen lands, and that the pagan mind must first be civilized in order to be Christianized. Christianity must begin, though science in a humbler sphere may aid it. Revealed truths, in ennobling the mind, and in preparing it for a high temporal, no less than an eternal destiny, may claim the precedence of every other influence. For they alone place the mind in the true attitude for the attainment of all truth. In the history of philosophy, nothing has been more variously demonstrated than that the disposition of the mind with respect to the objects of knowledge determines the success of its efforts.

The mind filled with the prejudices of scepticism, or with the gloom and superstition of idolatry, or guided by an arrogant, sensual philosophy, can effect nothing noble. It has none of that prophetic insight by which the bounds of knowledge have been enlarged, and wider regions of truth laid open to philosophy and science. It has no harmony nor sympathy with the laws which pervade the moral and ma