A chief--if not the very first place--amongst the opponents of atheism and immorality, must be adjudged to Ralph Cudworth, whose learning and ability have reflected so much lustre on the Cambridge school. His _Intellectual System_ is left unfinished, and reminds us of costly preparations for palatial buildings which have never risen above a few layers of marble blocks. With such a comparison, however, a contrast is suggested; for whilst the substructions referred to, may be monuments of the folly, condemned in the Gospel, of him who begins to build and is not able to finish,--Cudworth’s treatise shows it was from no want of power that he left his work incomplete. Of the five chapters of the first and only book of the _Intellectual System_, the fourth and fifth are by very far the longest, and these are devoted to Theology. It comes not within my province to make an attempt at deciding upon the place of honour due to Cudworth in the temple of fame, to report his speculations, or to repeat his critical estimates of different philosophers; my duty is simply to call attention to the two chapters, in which he ventures to trace a resemblance between the Trinity of Plato and the Trinity of Scripture, and argues also against Atheism. Respecting the latter, Cudworth had stated in his second chapter, the various reasonings of the ancient fatalists, whose system he characterized as “a gigantical and titanical attempt to dethrone the Deity,”--“Atheism openly swaggering under the glorious appearance of wisdom and philosophy.” In the fourth chapter, where he speaks of the Trinity, he explains Platonic ideas, attempting to show, that notwithstanding the difference between them and the ideas in Scripture, the three hypostases of the Platonists were Homoousian, Coessential, and Consubstantial. He touches upon the opinions of the Fathers, and expounds the views of Athanasius, who supposes that the three Divine hypostases “make up one entire Divinity, after the same manner as the fountain and the stream make up one entire river; or the root, and the stock, and the branches, one entire tree.” Cudworth contends that the Christian Trinity, though a mystery, is more agreeable to reason than the Platonic; and that there is no absurdity at all in supposing “the pure soul and body of the Messiah to be made a living temple or Shechinah-image or statue of the Deity.”[478] The bent of the author’s mind, and the tendency of the school to which he belonged, is seen throughout this part of his design, which is not to place the doctrine of the Trinity on a scriptural basis, but to establish and illustrate its perfect reasonableness, and to point out coincidences between it and some of the best guesses, or most satisfactory conclusions, of thinkers who never enjoyed the advantages of revelation. In harmony with this, is the fact of his noting, in the midst of his speculations, the following errors:--“The first, of those who make Christianity