Excerpt from An Essay on Warburton's Divine Legation: A Fellowship Probationary Exercise

The connection between the moral and the physical world, the constitution of the universe within us, our reason, passions, and affections, and that of the material system without us and around us, their identity of design, and the marks they bear of the same divine origin, is a most fertile and interesting subject of inquiry. Here it will be enough to touch slightly on one only of the many points of resemblance observable in their bearing on our own minds and feelings, the only relation which is valuable to the practical student of either. Truth of all kinds, physical and moral, is liable to the same impediments, the same passions to oppose, the same prejudices to thwart it the same inveterate principle of slothfulness, the strongest per haps in our whole nature, to prevent its practical usefulness, even when its evidence is too strong for the passive under standing-to resist. The only difference between the two cases is, that the obstacles in the way of moral truth act with a ten fold energy. On the one hand our mind only and (if we may so say) our intellectual passions are in arms, on the other the whole powers of our nature On the one hand arefaculties that end in theory, or which, if they end not there, have few occasions for action, on the other are those moral sentiments which, good orvbad, are the absolute disposers of our lives, and the great and efficient actors in that stage Whereon every man must play his part. The prominent facts indeed in both cases seem too obvious to escape the, most careless and indifferent observer, and too full of meaning to deceive the most superficial reasoner. Yet even these are rather forced upon us than collected by us, and drift loosely and carelessly down the current of the mind, along with that heterogeneous and chaotic mass of feeling, passion, and opinion which Consti tutes the substance of that intellectual nature which, though forced by its framer to think in some way or other, enjoys an unlimited charter to distinguish, infer, and systematize as its own judgment or caprice may direct. If such be the state with the facts of the case, the first simple elements of our knowledge and belief, much more must the same difficulties extend themselves to all attempts towards attaining that form of theory and philosophy which can alone consolidate and harmonize the whole. To pass over the history of those laws of the material world which (revealed at length by the inspi ration'of stupendous genius) have been disbelieoed by one half of the generations of men from the same prejudice through which they will be believed by the' other, to pass over the annals of natural religion, let us at once proceed to the Chris, tian' dispensation. In that awful repository of divine truth are opened to us the mysteries of our wonderful nature - the end of our being - the hopes and fears' of our immortal mind - the sphere originally traced out for it - the causes that have driven it from its orbit, and the means devised by Infinite Wisdom to controul its eccentricities, and to reconcile, its 'wayward and jarring motions to himself, the centre and end of all things. Executed in time, yet conceived in the past and extended iiito the coming eternity, it claims an integral part in the transac tions of the universe, from the moment that prophecy first unclosed her lips to fallen man to its consummation, in blood, on Calvary, from the infant Church of Palestine to that which.

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