most
eager desire to act up to his own ideal. If the divine notions of
goodness in its several varieties be not identical with the human, it
can only be because they are superior; and so, too, of the divine love
of, and zeal for, goodness. It cannot be that the Creator is inferior to
the creature in virtues which the creature derives from Him alone.
Demonstrably, therefore, God is good and just in the very highest degree
in which those qualities can be conceived by man. Demonstrably, too,
since the universe is the work of His hands, He must be possessed of
power which, if not necessarily unbounded, is at least as boundless as
the universe. Thus, rigidly arguing from effects to causes, and
scrupulously proportioning the one to the other, man sees imaged on the
face of creation a creator, both realising his highest conception of
goodness, and wielding measureless might. Is not such a being worthy to
be looked up to, and confided in, and adored and loved as a
superintending providence? Is not faith in such a providence not simply
not irrational, but the direct result of a strictly inductive process?
And would it be an irrational stretch of faith sanguinely to hope, if
not implicitly to believe, that an union of infinite justice with
measureless might may, in some future stage of existence, afford
compensation for the apparently inequitable distribution of good and
evil which, according to all experience, has hitherto taken place among
human beings?

Were it desirable to amplify the apology with which this paper
commenced, some additional justification of the freedom of the
foregoing criticisms might be found in hints thrown out by Hume in
various parts of the treatise which we have been examining, and
particularly in its concluding chapter, that in many of his most
startling doctrines he was but half in earnest. Hume's temperament, too
cool for fanaticism, had yet in it enough of a certain tepid geniality
to save him from becoming a scoffer. The character which he claims for
himself, and somewhat ostentatiously parades, is that of a sceptic or
general doubter--a character in which, when rightly understood, there is
nothing to be ashamed of. To take nothing on trust, to believe nothing
without proof, to show no greater respect for authority than may consist
in attentive and candid examination of its statements, to accept only
verified facts as bases for reasoning on matters of fact and
existence--these are golden rules of