As mystery and miracle took charge of the past and the present, prophecy took charge of the future, and rounded the tenses of faith.  The original meaning of the words “prophet” and “prophesying” has been changed, the Old Testament prophets were simply poets and musicians.  It is owing to this change in the meaning of the words that the flights and metaphors of the Jewish poets, and phrases and expressions now rendered obscure by our not being acquainted with the local circumstances to which they applied at the time they were used, have been erected into prophecies, and made to bend explanations at the will and whimsical conceits of sectaries, expounders, and commentators.  Everything unintelligible was prophetical.

V.—­DEISM

Fom the time I was capable of conceiving an idea, and acting upon it by reflection, I either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair.  It seems as if parents of the Christian profession were ashamed to tell their children anything about the principles of their religion.  They sometimes instruct them in morals, and talk to them of the goodness of what they call Providence.  But the Christian story of what they call God the Father putting his son to death, or employing people to do it—­for that is the plain language of the story—­cannot be told by a parent to a child; and to tell him it was done to make mankind happier and better is making the story still worse; and to tell him that all this is a mystery is only making an excuse for the incredibility of it.

How different is this from the pure and simple profession of deism!  The true deist has but one Deity, and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavouring to imitate him in everything moral, scientific, and mechanical.

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers; but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system.  Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit, that if the taste of the Quaker could have been consulted at the creation what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been!  Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties, not a bird been permitted to sing.

Quitting these reflections, I proceed to other matters.  Our ideas, not only of the almightiness of the Creator, but of His wisdom and His beneficence, become enlarged as we contemplate the extent and structure of the universe.  The solitary idea of a solitary world rolling or at rest in the immense ocean of space gives place to the cheerful idea of a society of worlds, so happily contrived as to administer, even by their motion, instruction to man.  We see our own earth filled with abundance, but we forget to consider how much of that abundance is owing to the scientific knowledge the vast machinery of the universe has unfolded.