First, and foremost,--the want of that logical [Greek: propaidéia dokimastikàe], that critique of the human intellect, which, previously to the weighing and measuring of this or that, begins by assaying the weights, measures, and scales themselves; that fulfilment of the heaven-descended 'nosce teipsum', in respect to the intellective part of man, which was commenced in a sort of tentative broadcast way by Lord Bacon in his 'Novum Organum', and brought to a systematic completion by Immanuel Kant in his 'Kritik der reinen Vernunft, der Urtheilskrajt, und der metaphysiche Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft'. From the want of this searching logic, there is a perpetual confusion of the subjective with the objective in the arguments of our divines, together with a childish or anile overrating of human testimony, and an ignorance in the art of sifting it, which necessarily engendered credulity. Second,--the ignorance of natural science, their physiography scant in fact, and stuffed out with fables; their physiology imbrangled with an inapplicable logic and a misgrowth of 'entia rationalia', that is, substantiated abstractions; and their physiogony a blank or dreams of tradition, and such "intentional colours" as occupy space but cannot fill it. Yet if Christianity is to be the religion of the world, if Christ be that Logos or Word that 'was in the beginning', by whom all things 'became'; if it was the same Christ who said, 'Let there be light'; who in and by the creation commenced that great redemptive process, the history of life which begins in its detachment from nature, and is to end in its union with God;--if this be true, so true must it be that the book of nature and the book of revelation, with the whole history of man as the intermediate link, must be the integral and coherent parts of one great work: and the conclusion is, that a scheme of the Christian faith which does not arise out of, and shoot its beams downward into, the scheme of nature, but stands aloof as an insulated afterthought, must be false or distorted in all its particulars. In confirmation of this position, I may challenge any opponent to adduce a single instance in which the now exploded falsities of physical science, through all its revolutions from the second to the seventeenth century of the Christian æra, did not produce some corresponding warps in the theological systems and dogmas of the several periods.