And secret stores, and heaped-up offerings,
    Art’s noblest wealth with Nature’s fruit and flower. 
      Paintings and Sculpture, Summer’s best, and Spring’s,
    Its plenitude of pride and praise betoken;
    An ever-burning lamp shines in its soul;
      Deep music all around enchantment flings;
    And God’s great Presence consecrates the whole!”

Probabilities.

In this our day, Agnosticism, if not avowed Atheism, seems to be making great way, and destroying the happiness of thousands.  It may be a truth, though partly an unpleasant one, that “he has no faith who never had a doubt,” even as “he has no hope who never had a fear.”  Well, in my short day and in my own small way I seem to have been through everything, and there was a time when I was much worried with uninvited difficulties and involuntary unbeliefs.  Such troublesome thoughts seemed to come to me without my wish or will,—­and stayed too long with me for my peace:  however, I searched them out and fought them down, and cleared my brain of such poisonous cobwebs by writing my “Probabilities, an Aid to Faith;” a small treatise on the antecedent likelihood of everything that has happened, which did me great good while composing it, and has (to my happy knowledge from many grateful letters) enlightened and comforted hundreds of unwilling misbelievers.  The book, after four editions, has now long been out of print; however, certainly I still wish it was in the hands of modern sceptics for their good.  The scheme of the treatise is briefly this:  I begin by showing the antecedent probability of the being of a God, then of His attributes, and by inference from His probable benevolence, of His becoming a Creator:  then that the created being inferior to His perfection might fall, in which event His benevolence would find a remedy.  But what remedy?  That Himself should pay the penalty, and effect a full redemption.  How?  By becoming a creature, and so lifting up the race to Himself through so generous a condescension.  I show that it was antecedently probable that the Divinity should come in humble form, not to paralyse our reason by outward glories,—­that He might even die as a seeming malefactor; this was the guess of Socrates:  and that for the trial of our faith there are likely to be permitted all manner of difficulties and mysteries for us to gain personal strength by combating and living them down.  Many other topics are touched in this suggestive little treatise, whereanent a few critiques are available; as thus, “The author has done good service to religion by this publication:  it will shake the doubts of the sceptical, strengthen the trust of the wavering, and delight the faith of the confirmed.  As its character becomes known, it will deservedly fill a high place in the estimation of the Christian world.”—­Britannia. And similarly of other English journals, while the Americans were equally favourable.  Take this characteristic instance, one of many:  the Brooklyn Eagle maintains that “the author is one of the rare men of the age; he turns up thoughts as with a plough on the sward of monotonous usage.”  And Hunt’s Magazine, New York, commends “this reasoning with the sceptical, showing that if they consider probabilities simply, then all the great doctrines of our faith might reasonably be expected.”