When, now, we see how completely Mr. Spencer--to use a commonplace but very forcible phrase--has "ruled God out of the ring," how impertinent seems his rebuke, administered a few pages further on, in the passage beginning, "Volumes might be written upon the impiety of the pious," to those who believe that God means what he says, and that men may know him. These men at least stand on a far higher plane than he who teaches that an "incomprehensible omnipresent Power" is all there is for us to worship, and his words will sound to them like the crackling of thorns under a pot. There does not appear in this chapter any further topic that has not already been touched upon. With these remarks, then, the examination of this chapter, and of Mr. Spencer's First Principles, may be closed. CONCLUSION. If it has ever been the reader's lot to examine Paley's "Evidences of Christianity," or the "Sermons of President Dwight on the Existence of God"; and if he has risen from their perusal with a feeling of utter unsatisfaction, enduring the same craving for a sure truth harassing as before, he will have partly shared the experience which drove the author forward, until he arrived at the foundation principles of this treatise. Those works, and all of that class are, for the object they have in view, worthless; not because the various statements they make are untrue, not because elegant language and beauty of style are wanting; but because they are radically defective in that, their _method_ is irrelevant to the subject in hand; because in all the arguments that have been or can be brought forward there is nothing decisive and final; because the skeptic can thrust the sharp sword of his criticism through every one of them; because, in fine, the very root of the matter, their method itself is false, and men have attempted to establish by a series of arguments what must be ground for the possibility of an argument, and can only be established by the opposite, the _a priori_ method. Though the Limitist Philosophy has no positive value, it has this negative one, that it has established, by the most thorough-going criticism, the worthlessness of the _a posteriori_ processes of thought on the matter in hand. Yea, more, the existence of _any_ spiritual person cannot be proved in that way. You can prove that the boy's body climbs the tree; but never that he has a soul. This is always taken for granted. Lest the author should appear singular in this view, he would call the attention of the reader to a passage in Coleridge's writings in which he at once sets forth the beauty of the style and incompetency of the logic of Dr. Paley's book. "I have, I am aware, in this present work, furnished occasion for a charge of having expressed myself with slight and irreverence of celebrated names, especially of the late Dr. Paley. O, if I were fond and ambitious of literary honor, of public applause, how well content should I be to excite but one third of the admiration