"Theology from the Greek _theos, logos_, renders distinct the meaning of the subject it attempts to treat.--_Theos_, God, or Gods, unseen beings and unknown causes. _Logos_, word, talk--or, if we like to employ yet more familiar and expressive terms, prattle or chatter. _Talk, or prattle, about unseen beings or unknown causes_, The idleness of the subject, and inutility--nay, absolute insanity of the occupation, sufficiently appears in the strict etymological meaning of the word employed to typify them. The danger, the mischief, the cruelly immoral, and, if I may be permitted to coin a word for the occasion, the _unhumanizing_ tendencies both of the subject and the occupation, when and where these are (as they have for the most part ever been throughout the civilized world) absolutely protected by law and upheld by government, sufficiently appear also from the whole page of history. Religion, from the Latin _religio, religio_, renders with equal distinctness the things signified. _Religo_, to tie over again, to bind fast; _religio_, a binding together, a bond of union. The importance of the great reality, here so accurately shadowed out, appears sufficiently in the etymological signification of the word. Its utility will be evident if we read, with intelligence, the nature, the past history, the actual condition, and the future destiny of man. But now, taking these two things in the most strict etymological sense of the words which express them, it will readily be distinguished that the first is a necessary creation of the _human intellect_ in a certain stage of inquiry; the second, a necessary creation of the _human soul_ (by which I understand both our intellectual and moral faculties taken conjointly) in any and every state of human civilization. Theology argues, in its origin, the first awakening of human attention to the phenomena of nature, and the first crude efforts of human ingenuity to expound them. While man sees the sun and stars without observing either their diurnal or their annual revolutions; while he receives upon his frame the rain and the wind, and the varying elements, without observing either their effects upon himself or upon the field of nature around him, he is as the brute which suffers and enjoys without inquiring why it experiences light or darkness, pain or pleasure. When first he puts, in awkward language, to himself or to his fellow, the question _why does such an effect follow such a cause_? he commences his existence, if not as a reasonable being, (a state at which he has not yet arrived) at least _as a being capable of reason_. The answer to this first inquiry of awakening intelligence is, of course, such as his own circumscribed observation supplies.--It is, in fine, in accordance with the explanation of the old nurse to the child, who, asking, when startled by a rolling peal of thunder--'what makes that noise' was fully satisfied by the reply: 'my darling, it is God Almighty overhead moving his