ience,
the cosmogony, physiology, ethnology, and chronology, contained therein,
creates a further body of difficulties,(908) less fundamental but more
painful, because founded on the apparent want of harmony of scripture with
the progressive discoveries of natural science.

While these are the species of temptations to unbelief which appertain to
one source of opinions, viz. that which relies upon sensation as the
ultimate test of truth; doubts similar in character, though different in
cause, manifest themselves in that portion of our literature which appeals
for its proof to the faculty of insight, and which believes in mental
sources of information which are independent of sensation. If the one
tends towards atheism, or to a deism in which the world is viewed as a
machine; the other tends towards pantheism or to naturalism, wherein no
opportunity for interposition by miraculous revelation is retained, but
the inner consciousness of man is regarded as able to create a religion.
The former class of views belongs to minds accustomed to experimental
science; this to those which are conversant with spiritual or aesthetic
subjects: the former expresses itself in the region of science, and tempts
men of thought; the latter expresses itself rather in the region of
literature, and tempts men of sentiment.

One writer, a prince in the region of letters,(909) may be adduced, many
of whose works imply, directly or indirectly, a mode of viewing the world
and society contrary to that which is taught in Christianity. He is the
highest type of the antagonist position which literature now assumes in
reference to the Christian faith, and which finds some parallel in the
contest which occurred in Julian's time, and at the Renaissance.

Though possessing too much originality to borrow consciously from the
literature of Germany, yet it is easy to discover that the fire of his
imagination has been kindled in contact with the marvellous insight of
Goethe, the pathos of Jean Paul, and the faith in eternal truth which
marked Jacobi. Their rival rather than disciple, he hails the philosophy
of his own country as a first approximation to truth; but regards the
German mind as having seen more deeply than any other of modern times into
the mysteries of existence. Though not formal enough to throw his
philosophy into a system, he has left an impress on the English literature
of this century. In every branch of literature which he has surveyed, he