Mr. Chairman: We have heard a great deal on the subject of Mr. Owen's experience, and the pains he has taken to test the soundness and practical utility of his principles. But, as he will not admit the legitimacy of any authority, we cannot admit the experience of Mr. Owen as authority. We must examine the question on its own merits. If Mr. Owen had traveled all over the world, fraught with the combined intelligence of the four quarters of the globe, this ought not to influence our minds in the least. We are here assembled, to examine truth coolly and deliberately on its own evidences. Mr. Owen thinks that I desire to lead him from his object into the mazes of metaphysics; but a single retrospective glance, at the course this discussion has taken, is sufficient to show us that the first metaphysical proposition was introduced by Mr. Owen himself. There cannot be a more metaphysical question than "whether volition has power over belief." I have no penchant for metaphysics in the discussion of questions of this sort; nor have I introduced metaphysics into this discussion any further than the nature of the argument itself requires. He has informed us, that the origin of natural evil is to be found in the elements of the human constitution. Now if this be true, every plan of amelioration [99] must be impracticable, unless it be a plan to make man over again. Perhaps Mr. Owen has discovered some new elements, or some way of affecting a new combination of elements, in the human constitution. Perhaps he means the four elements of the old school, and that it is the exact apportionment of these which makes a man good or evil. If this be the meaning of Mr. Owen, it is obviously impossible to ameliorate the condition of man, unless we can change the elements of his nature. Unless he can apportion the elements of fire, air, earth, and water, he cannot improve our race. If I have mistaken Mr. Owen, I shall be glad to be corrected. But I affirm that if natural evil is to be referred to the quantum of the four elements of the old, or the forty elements of the new school, or to the modification of these elements in the human system, all improvements are impracticable; unless, perhaps, a change of circumstances might have the effect of graduating these elements in other proportions, in the human constitution.

      We have been told of the mal-adaptation of Christianity to the happiness of man; but I hope to be able to show that religion is as admirably adapted to the constitution of human nature, as the eye is to light, or the ear to sound. And I will further attempt to prove that the Author of the Universe must also be the author of religion, because both are predicated of the same fundamental principles; or, in other words, that the Almighty predicated religion and the universe of the same principles. I presume that if Mr. Owen did understand the Christian religion, he would not have a solitary objection to it. He may have called popery Christianity, and identified the Christian religion with papal enormities.¹ But let the Christian religion be taught [100] in its purity, and cordially embraced, and it will exalt man higher, and render him incomparably more happy than Mr. Owen has ever conceived of.

      The gnothi seauton of Solon, or "Know thyself," is what I desire as cordially as Mr. Owen. I am desirous to analyze the mind and the senses, and thus to develop man. Has Mr. Owen exhibited in his plan anything like a design, or desire, to investigate the physical and intellectual man? Has he taken hold of my analysis of his powers, submitted with the hope of eliciting such investigation? I am willing, yea, desirous to take up the creature man, and analyze him corporeally and mentally; and thus obey the mandate of the philosopher and the apostle--"Know thyself."

      He asked you, my friends, of what he would rob you! His motives are doubtless pure. But of what would he rob you? Why, my friends, all the attacks that were ever made upon man's dearest rights, and most valued treasures, are mere petty larcenies, compared to the robbery he would commit! Of what would he rob us? Why of the hope of immortality!--of that alone.

      Now, are thrones, principalities, and powers--is the empire of the world and the fame of all ages--equivalent to the mere hope of living forever? The materialist takes us out of the earth, and thither he consigns us back again. But where is the man of unperverted, unsophisticated rationality, who would not give up all the world for the hope of an immortality in heaven?

      I have now adverted to all the matter offered by Mr. Owen, that, at this time appears to require my notice. I should now proceed as proposed this forenoon, but from some hints I find it expedient not yet to dismiss the mysteries of atheism, particularly with a reference to one [101] point on which skeptics of all schools declaim so much. They will make experience the standard, law, and measure of their belief. I will, in part, traverse the area of mysteries a second time.

      We have been discussing the mysteries of atheism. They are either natural or artificial. In the original term [mysterion] means nothing but a secret, and when divulged it loses the name of mystery. By natural mysteries we mean natural secrets. These mysteries are not of my creation; they have been collated from the speculations of the atheists, from their own confessions. The secrets atheists are ignorant of, are:--the origin of matter. This they declare to be inexplicable. The natural principle of mobility with which they acknowledge matter to be endowed; the specific origin of the earth; here they acknowledged themselves at fault. I have given you already three perhapses of Mirabaud. They say they "cannot comprehend the natural mysteries of any bodies." While they acknowledge the existence of the magnetic power, they confess ignorance of the nature of it. The principle of attraction, the most pervading law of matter, they say they know not. They know nothing of the great law of repulsion, nor of the law of cohesion, by which particles of matter adhere in defiance of the general law of attraction. They confess their ignorance of the nature of the law of elasticity, and so of the law of electricity. The destiny of the whole, or any part of the universe, is to them unknown. Atheists make all these concessions.

      When we take a view of these items, we discover that all the operations of nature are embraced by these physical principles, and atheists declare that they know nothing about it. Now to these Mr. Owen has added that our belief in no case depends upon our will--the consequence of which law is, that faith is as necessary as the law of attraction and must therefore be divine; faith must be with him a divine law of nature. Does not this truth follow out most legitimately? He affirms that faith is as necessary as the action of a mill-wheel; therefore it is a "divine principle," and on the same principle the evidences on which faith is founded, must be divine. But knowledge, belief, and opinion are all involuntary!

      Now is this desire of knowledge a natural principle, and has it no effect upon the will? And has our consent or volition to influence upon our knowledge? These are two artificial mysteries.

      Now what is the conclusion from these premises? Is it not that the materialist has to confess as much ignorance of his own system, and believe more mysteries than the Christian? He has also to contend for artificial mysteries, each of which is absurd--artificial mysteries [102] which are greater than any that ever have been taught in the most corrupt schools of Christianity.

      The materialist affirms that "it cannot really interest man to discover his specific origin." I have no doubt that this dogma was adopted to avoid a difficulty which they knew was invincible. It is conceded that if the materialist's system be true, it is impossible for us to account for our origin--that is a question beyond the utmost reach of human intellect. Therefore to suit the exigency of their speculative scheme, they have the temerity to assume that it cannot rationally interest mankind to know aught about their specific origin--that the stream of human vitality was not worth tracing to its source. Now we are often obliged to appeal to the experience of man; it is the grand argumentum ad hominem. I will, therefore, ask the whole world, every man, woman, and child in it, if the principle of curiosity be so intensely active upon any other point of human inquiry, or human investigation, as it is in tracing up this stream of vitality to its fountain, in order to ascertain the specific origin of the species? It is a point which elicits some of the earliest development of infantile curiosity, or love of knowledge. "Who made me?" "Whence came I?" are among the first questions put by the infant catechist to his seniors. This monstrous atheistical assumption opposes itself to the most ardent passions of the rational man. There is no animal appetite in man more operative than his moral eagerness in pursuit of knowledge. It makes man a keen hunter--it causes him to neglect his food, his sleep, his ease, and even to forget fatigue, in pursuit of his object. "Mens agitat modem--et toto se corpore miscet." If my opponent so ardently desires that we should know ourselves, let him come out from a school which declares that the unde derivatur of man, or the whence came I, is matter of no concernment to him. Let him set his face like a flint against a dictum like this, "In pursuit of self knowledge you must not begin at the beginning." Let Mr. Owen's principles be admitted, and there is a total blank in this first and most intensely interesting chapter of man's history. It is all obliterated as unworthy of a place in the volume. "It cannot really interest man to know anything concerning his primitive specific origin," is the first artificial mystery; and this is the way that the school to which Mr. Owen belongs eulogizes the oracular precept of "Gnothi seauton." This, I say, in the first artificial mystery, and this has been invented after the manner of mysteries of the church of Rome. The second artificial mystery is, that man has no just reason to believe himself a privileged being in the scale of creation over the bee, the bat, the beaver, the butterfly, or the elephant. Does this comport with your experience? Let the [103] word experience be received and interpreted according to its usual, most known, and legitimate acceptation; and I am not afraid to abide by its test. Well, then, I ask you, if it comports with your experience to admit that man has no reason to imagine himself a superior being to a butterfly? But why was this asserted by the atheists? Merely from the necessity of the case. The materialists would never have agitated these mysteries, but for the hard fate which attends their system. They discovered that unsophisticated reason would lead man to discover that he was at the head of creation; that here he stands pre-eminently chief; that he is lord paramount over all the irrational part of creation; that all was made for him, and subordinate to him. But of this noted dignity we must be divested to make room for a speculative phantom, which exterminates the germ of all feeling, save that of pity; if indeed it leaves that branch of human sympathy unscathed. For in the doctrine of materialism, where can pity find an object? Can I pity a tree when I see it growing crooked, or a stone for the angularities of its shape, or a house for its rude architecture?

      But there is a third artificial mystery of the materialists: In any attempt to account for man's origin he has to suppose that there were an infant male and female produced without parents, who consequently must have perished in infancy. Some materialists have actually supposed that the first pair grew up like two plants, as I have before stated. And when these were developed and began to expand, the leaves became arms, etc., etc., until at length some favorable zephyrs wafted them into each other's arms. They mutually embraced, and thus originated the human family. But in any attempt to account for the origin of man, the modern materialist has to suppose his first ancestors to have been an infant male and female; and if so, incapable of arriving at maturity!

[COD 99-104]