should have been the scene of God’s care and kindness, and still more, of His special interposition, communication, and personal dealings with its individual inhabitants, in the way which religion teaches, is, the objector is conceived to maintain, in the highest degree extravagant, incredible, and absurd.”[31] Such is, as we have seen, the assertion of Thomas Paine; and Dr Whewell proposes to discuss this vast _speculative_ question, “not as an objection urged by an opponent, but rather as a difficulty felt by a friend of religion;”—“to examine rather how we can quiet the troubled and perplexed believer, than how we can triumph over the dogmatical and self-satisfied infidel.”[32] But let _our_ reader note well, at starting, the above mighty “IF:” which he may regard as the comet’s nucleus, drawing after it an enormous and dismaying train of consequences, sweeping into annihilation man’s hopes equally with his fears. Dr Whewell gives a lucid and terse account of the scope of Dr Chalmers’s eloquent declamation, his ingenious suggestions, and his _astronomical_ or _philosophical_ arguments, which he deems “of great weight; and, upon the whole, such as we may both assent to, as scientifically true, and accept as rationally persuasive. I think, however, that there are other arguments, also drawn from scientific discoveries, which bear in a very important and striking manner upon the opinions in question, and which Chalmers has not referred to; and I conceive that there are philosophical views of another kind, which, for those who desire and will venture to regard the universe and its Creator in the wider and deeper relations which appear to be open to human speculation, may be a source of satisfaction.”[33]