“Hic specus horrendum et sævi spiracula ditis.” Religion and science thus stood in direct antagonism to each other, divorced by general consent from an unnatural alliance; and men, in those days, in the Scottish metropolis, were grouped into coteries who eyed each other with a bitter jealousy. Some more liberal mind, indeed, a Blair and a Robertson, would pass occasionally into the hostile camp, but returned again to his own ranks, to be received with no very cordial embrace or flattering approval. But now, were one of the sages of scarcely half a century ago permitted to rise from the dust, and to take his place among the intellectuals of the present time, nothing would be more likely to excite his wonder than the controversies, and their subjects, which figure in their works. Theory there is scarcely any among those who now give law in Modern Athens in letters and science.—Whether in the regions of mental philosophy, the walks of physical science, or the sacred precincts of religion, men’s minds are nearly at one as to the objects and distinctive province of each. They do not fear or dread the pursuits in which they are respectively engaged, assured that skepticism, or any desire to maintain it, has now neither party nor standing; or come to what conclusion they may, the WISDOM FROM ABOVE will in its own pure and elevated region remain scathless against any or all the bolts with which it may be assailed. The everlasting hills are still there on their old foundations—the remarkable variety of structure, which, all around the city they so marvelously present, still speaks in impressive language of order and disruption, stability and change—and underneath, in the imperishable forms of buried generations, are the records of a history in which man has no part, and with which his destiny would seem in no wise concerned. But the language written thereon, and the leaves on which it is impressed, are divested of the awful sibylline mystery in which they were then involved. The saint is scared not away by the frightful characters and dark meanings which the sage pretends he can trace in them. Nor is the sage himself startled at the alchemy of his own art, and the singular forms he can summon to his presence from his subterranean domains.