ile it transmigrates freely from race to
race, and clime to clime, its chief home; too, is still in the bosom of
enterprise, wealth, science, and civilisation; and it is at this moment
most powerful amongst the nations that have most of these. If not true,
it has such an appearance of truth as to have satisfied many of the
acutest and most powerful intellects of the species;--a Bacon, a Pascal,
a Leibnitz, a Locke, a Newton, a Butler;--such an appearance of truth as
to have enlisted in its support an immense army of genius and learning:
genius and learning, not only in some sense professional, and often
wrongfully represented as therefore interested, but much of both,
strictly extra-professional; animated to its defence by nothing but
a conviction of the force of the arguments by which its truth is
sustained, and that 'hope full of immortality' which its promises have
inspired. Under such circumstances it must appear equally rash and
gratuitous to suppose, even if it be a delusion, that an institute,
which has thus enlisted the sympathies of so many of the greatest minds
of all races and of all ages--which is alone stable and progressive
amidst instability and fluctuation,--will soon come to an end. Still
more absurdly premature is it to raise a paean over its fall, upon every
new attack upon it, when it has already survived so many. This, in fact,
is a tone which, though every age renews it, should long since have been
rebuked by the constant falsification of similar prophecies, from
the time of Julian to the time of Bolingbroke, and from the time of
Bolingbroke to the time of Strauss. As Addison, we think, humorously
tells the Atheist, that he is hasty in his logic when he infers that if
there be no God, immortality must be a delusion, since, if chance
has actually found him a place in this bad world, it may, perchance,
hereafter find him another place in a worse,---so we say, that if
Christianity be a delusion, since it is a delusion which has been proof
against so much of bitter opposition, and has imposed upon such hosts
of mighty intellects, these is nothing to show that it will not do so
still, in spite of the efforts either of Proudhon or a Strauss. Such
a tone was, perhaps, never so triumphant as during the heat of the
Deistical controversy in our own country, and to which Butler alludes
with so much characteristic but deeply satirical simplicity, in the
preface to his great work:--'It is come,' says he, 'I know