l beauty; and, through the wide gloom,
Make all its obscure mystic symbols glow
With pleasing light,--that we may see and know
The glorious world, and all its wondrous scheme;
Not as distorted in the mind below,
Nor in philosopher's, nor poet's dream,
But as it was, and is, high in the Mind Supreme.--ANON.

Chapter I.

Summary Of The First Part Of The Foregoing System.

The commonly received systems of theology are, it is confessed by their
advocates, attended with manifold inconveniences and difficulties. The
habit of mind by which, notwithstanding such difficulties, it clings to
the great truths of those systems, is worthy of all admiration, and forms
one of the best guarantees of the stability and progress of human
knowledge. For in every department of science the great truths which dawn
upon the mind are usually attended with a cloud of difficulties, and, but
for the habit in question, they would soon be permitted to fade away, and
be lost in their original obscurity. Copernicus has, therefore, been
justly applauded,(219) not only for conceiving, but for firmly grasping
the heliocentric theory of the world, notwithstanding the many formidable
objections which it had to encounter in his own mind. Even the sublime law
of the material universe, before it finally established itself in the mind
of Newton, more than once fell, in its struggles for acceptance, beneath
the apparently insuperable objections by which it was attended; and, after
all, the overpowering evidence which caused it to be embraced, still left
it surrounded by an immense penumbra of difficulties. These, together with
the sublime truth, he bequeathed to his successors. They have retained the
truth, and removed the difficulties. In like manner, admirable though the
habit of clinging to every sufficiently accredited truth may be, yet,
whether in the physical or in the moral sciences, the effort to
disencumber the truth of the difficulties by which its progress is
embarrassed should never be remitted. The scientific impulse, by which a
great truth is grasped, and established upon its own appropriate evidence,
should ever be followed by the subordinate movement, which strives to
remove every obstacle out of the way, and cause it to secure a wider and a
brighter dominion in the human mind. And in proportion as any scheme,
whether in relation to natural or to divine things, shall, wit