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MISCELLANEOUS WRITINGS

must be used in your application of his words and inference from his acts, to guide your own state of combat with error. There remaineth, it is true, a Sabbath rest for the people of God; but we most first have done our work, and entered into our rest, as the Scriptures give example.


Scientific Theism

In the May number of our Journal, there appeared a review of, and some extracts from, “Scientific Theism,” by Phare Pleigh.

Now, Phare Pleigh evidently means more than “hands off.” A live lexicographer, given to the Anglo-Saxon tongue, might add to the above definition the “laying on of hands,” as well. Whatever his nom de plume means, an acquaintance with the author justifies one in the conclusion that he is a power in criticism, a big protest against injustice; but, the best may be mistaken.

One of these extracts is the story of the Cheshire Cat, which “vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.” Was this a witty or a happy hit at idealism, to illustrate the author's following point? —

“When philosophy becomes fairy-land, in which neither laws of nature nor the laws of reason hold good, the attempt of phenomenism to conceive the universe as a phenomenon without a noumenon may succeed, but not before; for it is an attempt to conceive a grin without a cat.”