EV. Fear not this, fair Ida. Rather believe with Bouget, that philosophy and _natural_ theology mutually _confirm_ each other. The latter teaches us that which it is our duty to believe; the former to believe more firmly. And Lord Bacon himself, in his “Cogitata et Visa,” deems natural philosophy “the surest antidote of superstition, and the food of religious faith.”
The belief in existence of a preadamite world, presumes not to controvert the Mosaic record of the development of the globe, the creation of Adam, or the fall of man. Modern geology has peopled this preadamite world with _saurians_, or lizards, a race of beings _not concerned in the punishment of that delinquency_. Of the existence of these creatures there is no doubt; the discovery of their fossil remains, without a vestige of the human skeleton, marks the period of their destruction, and that the crust of the globe enveloping these relics, might have been reduced to that chaos when “the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep;” and from which our beautiful world was fashioned by a fiat.
The truth of holy Scripture is too clear even to be disturbed by a sophist. You may recollect that Julian, the apostate, contemplated the reconstruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, in order to confute the prophecies; but Julian failed, and misfortune was the lot of all who were leagued in the impiety.
As to natural laws, think me not so profane as to cite such as the superstitious alchemyst, Paracelsus, in proof of their use in the working of a miracle; who says that “devils and witches raise storms by throwing up alum and saltpetre into the air, which comes down as rain-drops!”
And it were reversing this solemn argument were I to confess the doctrines of the Illuminaten, who, taught by Jacob Boehmen, and the mysticisms of his “Theosophia Revelata,” explained all nature’s laws by warping texts of Scripture to their purpose. Yet it is clear that even the miracles of the prophets may have been sometimes influenced by established laws. Elisha raised the Shunamite’s son by placing mouth to mouth, as if by inhalation.
Believe not then, fair Ida, that philosophy is set in array against religion, when the student of nature endeavours to explain her phenomena by physical laws, _for those laws the great Creator himself hath made_.