others) a 'society for the promotion of analysis, and for asserting the principles of pure D-ism in opposition to the Dot-age of the 'University' (referring to the contest between the old notation of fluxions and that of the Differential Calculus), he left the University curriculum, and gave himself up to French mathematics. His account of his University life is interesting. He went a great deal into society; was chairman of clubs of all kinds. One set (whom he gratefully styles his Tom fools,') he makes row him down to Whittlesea Mere when he feels dyspeptic.

But we must not linger any more over the secular part of the book, for our business is now chiefly with its religious element. In this respect there is something to praise, and a good deal to blame. We dislike very much the irreverent tone which he habitually adopts about sacred things. All through the book there is a good deal of reference to such matters. The author's intense egotism leads him to record his feelings when a lad about the eternity of punishment and the existence of Satan. He relates how he tried to evoke the Evil One according to the approved recipe of saying the Lord's Prayer backwards, &c. and how he tested the truth of revelation by saying to himself, * If a 'certain door is open at such an hour on such day, I will believe; 'if not, I will hold the Bible to be false.' Pretty well that for a boy scarcely in his teens. By-and-by, at a private tutor's, the pupils are required to give in notes on the Sunday's sermon, but the practice is discontinued because young Babbage writes such a startling composition on the text, Alexander the coppersmith did me much mischief,' &c. Of reverence there does not seem the least trace in our author's mind. Inspiration' he would, of course, scout as untenable. Eternity of punishment he dismisses at once, with just a passing repetition of the old sophism, 'It is not just to award an infinite punishment to a finite offence.' His way of dealing with the Athanasian Creed is an instance of his arrant self-sufficiency. He feels 'the utmost disgust,' not at the damnatory clauses, but at the direct contradiction in terms which its words implied.' He is a mathematician, and so feels warranted in throwing metaphysics overboard, and in saying that he thinks the Creed was written by an Atheist, who tried to crowd in as many absurdities as he could together in order to make the whole matter ridiculous.

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The most important theological subject touched on in the volume is the question of miracles, in regard to which Mr. Babbage (as we remarked above) rather sneeringly boasts that nearly all the chief orthodox theologians of all parties have come over to his views, as broached some nineteen years ago in a work which he called the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise,' and in which he held up to ridicule the ordinary view of Special Pro

vidences. We do not say that there is not a sense in which this view is unsound: in one aspect of the case it is identical with the belief of all enlightened Christians; what we dislike about it is the harsh way in which it is expressed and enforced. His view is simply this-a miracle is not a breach of law; it is the expression of a higher law, of whose workings we have not sufficient experience to enable us to determine its periodicity. The Calculating Engine forms squares several thousand times; it then forms one cube, and reverts to squares for the same number of operations as before. Then comes one cube again, and so on. This cube, therefore, is not abnormal. The true and complete formula representing the working of the machine would involve its recurrence. So the complete formula (so to speak) of universal Providence must provide for the occurrence of miracles -they are not afterthoughts, interferences to help out imperfect plans. Even the bare suggestion is profane. The greatest miracle of all-the Incarnation-is no miracle in the common vulgar sense, in which crowds in Popish countries cry' A miracle' over what they look on as an interference made necessary by some previously unforeseen' act of man or Satan. It is part of the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God. As the poet says, 'Nothing is that errs from law,' but then what he says is true, just for this reason, that the very hairs of our head are all numbered. This fore-ordaining of all things, of miracles as well as of ordinary events, requires to be looked at first in its bearing on man's conduct, next as to the way in which it affects our view of the Almighty. How to reconcile free-will and necessity has always been the great problem with thinking men. As Coleridge said, it needs a sixth sense to see how the two can work harmoniously, to trace the law within the law.' Yet it has never been a difficulty in practice. Every one decides for himself how it shall regulate his course of action. The Turk settles it after his fashion, and becomes a sluggish fatalist. But amongst Western nations the most energetic have always been those who have realized most fully this cardinal truth of God's fore-ordering. The reason is, they have been more self-reliant, less tempted to be shiftless waiters upon Providence,' than those who think that a special interference may at any moment break in upon the settled order of God's world. Nor does this Christian, not fatalist, view of Providence make prayer unavailing. The question is too wide to be entered on now. It has lately been discussed in the Pall Mall, and also, in a different spirit, in the Record and the Guardian; but we may merely remark, that the instrumental value of prayer may stand on the same footing as that of food. Prayer is the food of faith. As to God, we are sure that all miracles, as well as

all that made the miracles needful, are part of His great plan. But we must abstain from a kind of language about Him which is very open to mistake. We often apply to Heaven the laws of the Medes and Persians, forgetting that He is a personal God, 'who doeth what He will in the armies of heaven, and who can 'stay His hand?' We continually forget what has been so well said,'' Laws of God exist only for us; it is a will of God 'for Himself: and we must not think that there is more of 'the will of God in a miracle than in any other work of His.' A miracle, in the ordinary sense of the word, is not a greater manifestation of God's power than those ordinary and everrepeated processes which S. Augustine calls daily miracles. God is always working in His world, not more when He displays what we call miracles-not more, but in a different way. Hence there are three views; the true Christian view of a Father' working hitherto,' 'upholding all things by the word of His power,' manifesting His will in the miracle, but manifesting it also in the ordinary course of nature. And the thaumaturgic view (if we may so express it) which sees God working immediately when a miracle is wrought, but in ordinary events leaving the laws which He has established to work themselves out-a view this which is the most godless of any, which is at the bottom of all the Paleyism and indifferentism of the last century, when 'miracles,' .e. a direct interposition, as of a clock maker who should come in to set his own mechanism right, were made the basis of everything, while vital religion was looked on as something quite distinct from 'evidence.' And then there is the third view, that of Mr. Babbage, that miracles, as well as the ordinary course of nature, are included in the original law stamped by the Creator upon the creatures of His hand, and since left to work itself out. Surely this is not the Christian view. It sets God at an infinite distance from His creatures; it renders Him practically a nullity under pretence of knowing Him; it makes prayer a farce (how strange it seems at first sight that our Lord should ground the duty of prayer on the fact that things are preordained—' the very hairs of your head are all numbered). The other, viz. the thaumaturgic view, debases our idea of God, by making him interfere at every turn, as if He could not trust His own work to go on from year to year. Mr. Babbage's view does away with God altogether. He is not necessary, any more than an attendant would be on a perfectly-constructed calculating engine. Orthodox as our author claims to be, we do not think any Christian heart will warm towards his theory. We prefer

1 Abp. Trench on the Miracles. See his second chapter throughout.

God's will, which indeed, being a will of highest wisdom and love, excludes all wilfulness, and can be reckoned on, but which is a will still—to any law which, having been set going at the first, goes on presenting periodical discontinuities which we term miracles.

His engine has supplied him with one illustration, his mathematics furnish him with another: miracles are like the singular points in curves which (as every analyst knows) occur when certain values are given to the unknown quantities in the curve's equation. These points are bona fide part of the curves to which they belong: they are as much a product of its equation' as is the most regular portion of its arc. And so

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miracles may be regarded as the singular points in the world's equation. This view is drawn out at length, with illustrative diagrams, in the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise.' We said there was a sense in which all this might be true. Miracles could not happen if they were not part of God's pre-ordained plan: but, though all is ordered and sure, we will not give up a personal God moving in the midst of His creation, guiding the workings of His Providence, and working with His intelligent creatures. As S. Augustine well puts it: Neque enim, sicut 'â structura ædium, quam fabricaverit quis abscedit, atque illo 'cessante et absenti stat opus ejus; ita mundus vel ictu oculi stare poterit, si ei Deus regimen suum subtraxerit.' the point at issue: Mr. Babbage is all very well so long as he is only talking about the miracle being (to quote Dr. Trench again) due to the mightier law stepping in,' or even to the periodical variation of ordinary laws: but we join issue with him at once when he hints that the laws of nature, ordinary and extraordinary, having been criginally set going, are left to work themselves out for ever. That is certainly not religion, nor do we hold it to be sound philosophy.

There is

And now for a few words about the other book named at the head of our paper. The Ninth Bridgewater Treatise' contains a great variety of matter: among the rest a number of letters from Sir J. Herschel, dated Feldhausen, Cape of Good Hope, 1836. From these we quote the following, simply as showing the wild way in which even the best of our scientific men suffer themselves to talk: 'The earth gets rapidly warmer towards the 'centre; but it may get again cooler further down—as it would 'do if we suppose it, originally cold, to have been kept for a few billions of years in a firmament full of burning suns, and then 'launched into our cooler milky way. If while it was roasting at this sun-fire the great jack of the universe had stood still, ' and allowed one side of our terraqueous joint to scorch, the 'inferior temperature of the American continent is explained.' It is very likely that the distinguished writer threw this out

merely as a speculation, and in a sense almost playful; but if it is to be taken seriously, it looks like a sample of the strange expedients to which men are reduced when they enslave themselves to that theory of ' immeasureable periods of time,' which finds so much praise with those who forget that the same kind of forces indefinitely intensified may work their results infinitely quicker than anything of which we have experience.

But our business is not with Mr. Babbage's geology, but with his application of mathematics to miracles, and his argument in favour of design.

Hume had said that the falsehood of the testimony in favour of a miracle must always be more probable than the occurrence of the miracle itself. Mr. Babbage, taking up the word probable, enters into the subject mathematically, using La Place's 'Doctrine of Chances,' and shows that there is only 1 case in 10,000 in which two independent witnesses, who are habitually only deceived in 1 case out of 100, can agree in error, the probability of their future testimony being false being, therefore, 1 in 10,000. Thus, out of the first 100 cases, there are 99 cases in which A and B, both being right, agree, 1 in which one of them is wrong; so that, out of 10,000 cases, we have 99 × 99 in which both are right, 99 in which A is right and B wrong, 99 in which A is wrong and B right, 1 only in which both are wrong. Extending this to six witnesses, we have 1,000,000,000,000 to 1 against all of them being wrong together; so that we may easily get a number larger than any attainable from Hume's consideration, so many millions have died since the creation, and not risen again, therefore, there are so many million 'chances to one against this particular man having risen.' Now, however forcible this mode of proving the Resurrection may appear to some minds, to us it is insufferably painful. In the first place, it goes back to the old thaumaturgic unsatisfactory view. In the next place, it confuses the limits of moral and mathematical evidence. A man's testimony in favour of a miracle is not to be reasoned upon in the same way as the chance of taking a black or a white ball out of a bag; man is a spiritual being; his emotions come into play and affect his evidence. Mr. Babbage's method proves too much; it is as applicable to the lying wonders of old Eastern creeds, and the sham miracles of the Middle Ages, as those of the Gospels. How do you know your witness is independent, and that he was always right in '99 cases out of 100?' That will be the question of the sceptic, who will be quite justified in throwing the onus probandi on the believer. At times we have almost thought that the whole subject has been brought forward in this way by Mr. Babbage, in order to throw discredit on the whole subject of

NO. CXXXI.-N.S.