fixed his camp, with equal calmness may Christianity imitate her example of magnanimity.  She may feel assured that, as in so many past instances of premature triumph on the part of her enemies, the ground they occupy will one day be its own; that the very discoveries, apparently hostile, of science and philosophy, will be a great extent with the discoveries in chronology and history; and thus will it be, we are confident, (and to a certain extent has been already), with those in geology.  That science has done much, not only to render the old theories of Atheism untenable and to familiarise the minds of men to the idea of miracles, by that of successive creations, but to confirm the Scriptural statement of the comparatively recent origin of our Race.  Only the men of science and the men of theology must alike Guard against the besetting fallacy of their kind,—­that of too hastily taking for granted that they already know the whole of their respective sciences, and of forgetting the declaration of the Apostle, equally true of all man’s attainments, whether in one department of science or another,—­’We know but in part, and we prophesy in part.’

Though Socrates perhaps expressed himself too absolutely when he said that ‘he only knew nothing,’ yet a tinge of the same spirit,—­a deep conviction of the profound ignorance of the human mind, even at its best—­has ever been a characteristic of the most comprehensive genius.  It has been a topic on which it has been fond of mournfully dilating.  It is thus with Socrates, with Plato, with Bacon (even amidst all his magnificent aspirations and bold predictions), with Newton, with Pascal, and especially with Butler, in whom, if in any, the sentiment is carried to excess.  We need not say that it is seldom found in the writings of those modern speculators who rush, in the hardihood of their adventurous logic, on a solution of the problems of the Absolute and the Infinite, and resolve in delightfully brief demonstrations the mightiest problems of the universe—­those great enigmas, from which true philosophy shrinks, not because it has never ventured to think of them, but because it has thought of them enough to know that it is in vain to attempt their solution.  To know the limits of human philosophy is the ’better part’ of all philosophy; and though the conviction of our ignorance is humiliating, it is, like every true conviction, salutary.  Amidst this night of the soul, bright stars—­far distant fountains of illumination—­are wont to steal out, which shine not while the imagined Sun of reason is above the horizon! and it is in that night, as in the darkness of outward nature, that we gain our only true ideas of the illimitable dimensions of the universe, and of our true position in it.

Meanwhile we conclude that God has created ’two great lights,’—­the greater light to rule man’s busy day—­and that is Reason, and the lesser to rule his contemplative night—­and that is Faith.