that which is taught by Christian
doctrine. According to him, God is not even proclaimed to be the Creator
of the Universe. But even were He proclaimed such, what would be the
result of this philosophical condescension, unless it be that God is
distinct from the world? Would God possess then all those attributes
which reason, independently of all philosophy, points to in the
Divinity? Would power, goodness, infinite perfection be God's? Certainly
not: as we are unable to know Him except through a world of
imperfections, where good and evil, order and confusion, are mixed
together, and not by the conception of the infinite, which alone can
give us a true and perfect idea of God, it follows that God would be
much superior to the world, but would not be absolute perfection.

After this depreciation of the Omnipotent, what says this philosophy of
our soul? It does away altogether with one of the essential proofs of
its spiritual nature, and thereby compromises the soul itself, declaring
as it does, that "it is not unlikely that matter is capable of thought."
But then of what necessity would the soul be, if the body can think? How
hope for immortality, if that which thinks is subject to dissolution and
to death?

As for our liberty, it would be annihilated as a consequence of such
doctrines; for it is not supposed to derive its essence from the
interior activity of the soul, but would seem to be limited to our power
of moving. Yet we are hourly experiencing what our weakness is in
comparison with the power of the laws of nature, which rule us in every
sense and way. In making, therefore, all things derivable from
sensations, Locke fell from one error into another, and nearly arrived
at that point when duty and all principles of justice and morality might
be altogether denied. Being himself, however, both good, honest,
liberal, and Christian-minded, he could only save himself from the
social wreck to which he exposed others, by stopping on the brink of the
abyss which he had himself created, and by becoming in practice
inconsistent with his speculative notions. His successors, such as
Condillac and Cabanis, fell by following his system and by carrying it
too far.

A doctrine which denies the right of discovering, or of explaining the
religious truths which are the grounds of all moral teaching, and which
allows tradition the privilege only of bestowing faith; a system of
metaphysics, which can not avoid the dangers in whic