CONCLUSION.

I here finish my review of Edwards’s System, and his arguments against the opposite system. I hope I have not thought or written in vain. The review I have aimed to conduct fairly and honourably, and in supreme reverence of truth. As to style, I have laboured only for perspicuity, and where a homely expression has best answered this end, I have not hesitated to adopt it. The nice graces of rhetoric, as popularly understood, cannot be attended to in severe reasoning. To amble on a flowery surface with fancy, when we are mining in the depths of reason, is manifestly impossible.

The great man with whose work I have been engaged, I honour and admire for his intellectual might, and love and venerate for a purity and elevation of spirit, which places him among the most sainted names of the Christian church. But have I done wrong not to be seduced by his genius, nor won and commanded by his piety to the belief of his philosophy? I have not done wrong if that be a false philosophy. When he leads me to the cross, and speaks to me of salvation, I hear in mute attention—and one of the old preachers of the martyr age seems to have re-appeared. But when we take a walk in the academian grove, I view him in a different character, and here his voice does not sound to me so sweet as Plato’s.

The first part of my undertaking is accomplished. When I again trouble the public with my lucubrations, I shall appear not as a reviewer, but in an original work, which in its turn must become the subject of philosophical criticism.

THE END.