teacher, is--to assault capitally the scheme of God's discipline and
training for man. To improve by _heavenly_ means, if but in one
solitary science--to lighten, if but in one solitary section, the
condition of difficulty which had been designed for the strengthening
and training of human faculties, is _pro tanto_ to disturb--to
cancel--to contradict a previous purpose of God, made known by silent
indications from the beginning of the world. Wherefore did God give to
man the powers for contending with scientific difficulties? Wherefore
did he lay a secret train of continual occasions, that should rise, by
intervals, through thousands of generations, for provoking and
developing those activities in man's intellect, if, after all, he is to
send a messenger of his own, more than human, to intercept and strangle
all these great purposes? When, therefore, the persecutors of Galileo,
alleged that Jupiter, for instance, could not move in the way alleged,
because then the Bible would have proclaimed it,--as they thus threw
back upon God the burthen of discovery, which he had thrown upon
Galileo, why did they not, by following out their own logic, throw upon
the Bible the duty of discovering the telescope, or discovering the
satellites of Jupiter? And, as no such discoveries were there, why did
they not, by parity of logic, and for mere consistency, deny the
telescope as a fact, deny the Jovian planets as facts? But this it is
to mistake the very meaning and purposes of a revelation. A revelation
is not made for the purpose of showing to idle men that which they may
show to themselves, by faculties already given to them, if only they
will exert those faculties, but for the purpose of showing _that_
which the moral darkness of man will not, without supernatural light,
allow him to perceive. With disdain, therefore, must every considerate
person regard the notion,--that God could wilfully interfere with his
own plans, by accrediting ambassadors to reveal astronomy, or any other
science, which he has commanded men to cultivate _without_