owledge of all sorts, into the good service
of illustrating Gospel truths.

Another religious essay has been relinquished, although to a great
degree effected, from the apprehension that it may suggest matter
fanciful or false: also, in part, from the material being perhaps of too
slender a character to insist upon. Its name stood thus,

SCRIPTURAL PHYSICS;

being an attempt to vindicate the wisdom of Holy Writ in matters of
natural science; for example, cosmogony, geology, the probable centre of
the earth, the vitality and circulation of the blood, hints of magnetism
and electricity, a solar system, a plurality of worlds, the earth's
shape, inclined axis, situation in space, and connection with other
spheres, the separate existence of disembodied life, the laws of optics,
much of recondite natural history:--all these can be easily proved to be
alluded to in detached, or ingeniously compared, passages of the Hebrew
Scriptures. It is very likely, however, that Huntington has anticipated
some of this, although I have never met with his writings; and a great
deal more of it is mentioned in notes and sermons which many have read
or heard. Until, therefore, I become surer of neither invading the
provinces of others, nor of detracting from their wisdom, let those
ill-written fancies still lie dormant in my desk.

A fifth tractate on things theological, still in the egg state, was to
have been indued with the rather startling appellation of

AN APOLOGY FOR HEATHENISM;

especially as contrasted with practical atheism, which, truth to tell,
is the contradictory sort of religion most universally professed among
the moderns: working out the idea, that any-how it is better to have
many objects of veneration than none, and that, although idol-worship is
a dreadful sin, still it is not so utterly hopeless as actual
ungodliness. That, among the heathens, temporal judgment ever vindicated
the true Divinity; whereas the consummation of the more modern
unworshiping world will be an eternal one: so, by the difference in
punishments comparing that of their criminalities. Showing also that,
however corrupted afterwards by impure rites and fatuous iniquities,
heathenism was, in its most ancient form, little more than the
hieroglyphic dress of truth: this exemplified by Moses and the brazen
serpent, by interpretations of Grecian mythology, shown, after the
manner of perhaps too ingenious Lord Bacon, to be consistent with
philosophy