Divina, the human mind, when liberated from its gross and earthly mansion, and which, as being endowed with the faculty of acquiring knowledge by abstract reason alone, must, in its essence, be considered as on a level with the first orders of created beings, and not only, from its origin, incapable of extinction in se, but, as a direct result of its moral responsibility, endowed with an ever-during distinct and personal consciousness, as the medium of punishment or reward, of suffering or enjoyment.

To confound what was formed for the investment of spirit for the purposes of visible individuation, with the intellect that called it into being; to devolve the properties of the agent on the instrument; to make the tool beget the workman, or, in other words, to affirm that the creation of the brain generates mind, and that of the eye vision, is the gross error of the physiological materialists of the present day, and leads, as we have before observed, to the absurd result of a polytheism of mere matter.

Descending, however, from these speculations, in their nature certainly highly curious and interesting, let me declare, in the words of

Sir Thomas Browne, and in relation to that great First Cause, whose attributes and administration we have been venturing to contemplate, that "I know he is wise in all, wonderful in what we conceive, but far more in what we comprehend not; for we behold him but upon reflex or shadow;" adding, in the eloquent language of the same writer, and as an apology for the introduction of disquisition on topics thus lofty and mysterious, that "the world was made to be studied and contemplated by man: it is the debt of our reason we owe unto God, and the homage we pay for not being beasts; without this the world is still as though it had not been, or as it was before the sixth day, when as yet there was not a creature that could conceive, or say there was a world. The wisdom of God receives small honour from those vulgar heads that rudely stare about, and with a gross rusticity admire his works: those highly magnify him whose judicious enquiry into his acts, and deliberate research into his creatures, return the duty of a devout and learned admiration. And this is almost all wherein an hum

ble creature may endeavour to requite, and some

way to retribute unto his Creator; for if not he that sayeth, Lord, Lord, but he that doeth the will of his Father, shall be saved; certainly our wills must be our performances, and our intents make out our actions; otherwise our pious labours shall find anxiety in their graves, and our best endeavours, not hope, but fear a resurrection."

From the noble and sublime confession of his faith, which our philosophic physician has given us, in relation to the attributes of God, and the nature of man, let us now turn to what he has left recorded of his creed on the equally momentous subject of revealed religion. After a mature consideration, then, of the various religions of the earth, having in his riper years, and confirmed judgment, seen and examined all, he finds himself obliged, he tells us, by the principles of grace, and the law of his own reason, to embrace no other faith than that of Christianity. But as this had been, through the folly and iniquity of mankind, grossly corrupted from its original purity, he thinks it necessary to state that he is of the Reformed Religion: "Of the same belief our Saviour taught, the

Apostles disseminated, the Fathers authorized, and the Martyrs confirmed; but by the sinister ends of Princes, the ambition and avarice of Prelates, and the fatal corruption of the times, so decayed, impaired, and fallen from its native beauty, that it required the careful and charitable hands of these times to restore it to its primitive integrity." And yet, as there were not only many reformers, but likewise many species of reformation, "every country proceeding in a particular way and method, according as their national interest, together with their constitution and clime, inclined them, some angrily, and with extremity, others calmly, and with mediocrity," he feels it incumbent upon him to be still more explicit, and to say, "there is no church whose every part so squares unto my conscience, whose articles, constitutions, and customs, seem so consonant unto reason, and, as it were, framed to my particular devotion, as this whereof I hold my belief, the Church of England, to whose faith I am a sworn subject; and, therefore, in a double obligation, subscribe unto her articles, and endeavour to observe her constitutions. Whatso

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ever is beyond, as points indifferent, I observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and fashion of my devotion, neither believing this, because Luther affirmed it, or disproving that, because Calvin hath disavouched it. I condemn not all things in the council of Trent, nor approve all in the synod of Dort. In brief, where the scripture is silent, the church is my text; where that speaks, it is but my comment; where there is a joint silence of both, I borrow not the rules of my religion from Rome or Geneva, but the dictates of my

How would the author of the Religio Medici have been delighted, could he have seen what the Bishop of St. David's has lately so decisively proved; namely, that the church of Britain was founded by St. Paul; that it was established anterior to the Church of Rome; that it was perfectly independent of any other church, as long as Christianity maintained its primitive simplicity, and that when, as late as the seventh century, error and innovation had sullied the purity of the Romish Church, the British was "a truly Protestant Church, protesting against

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