that the diligences from Mexico and Puebla were not robbed in the very environs of those cities. Officers cause robberies to be committed by their troops, in order to divide with them the spoils of travellers.

With these military robbers we are at war. The power which enabled them to seize office and rob the people, has enabled them thus far to resist the United States; but their means are apparently exhausted. They can no longer raise means of defence, or rouse the enthusiasm of the people they have oppressed; and the church, using its whole influence to avoid peace, refuses a dollar to prosecute the war, while the journals in its interest complain of the apathy of the people. There is evidently no responsible or influential body in Mexico but the church, and its policy seems to be to prolong the war until the military is entirely broken up and destroyed. We have already, in anticipation of the occupation of the capital, and the negotiation of a treaty with the powers that be, a protest from the influen tial states, dissolving that constitution which has so often been set aside, and resolving the Union into its elements of independent states, irresponsible for the acts of the central government in case peace should be negotiated. Hence, there can be no peace. The hierarchy sees its salvation only in an absolute monarchy connected with itself; and it would seem that a restoration of peace can come only from the influence of the democracy of the church or the rural priests, who, with the people, must be guarantied against Spanish domination for the future, through the continued presence of the United States troops.

The annexation of the country to the United States would be a calamity. 5,000,000 ignorant and indolent half-civilized Indians, with 1,500,000 free negroes and mulattoes, the remnants of the British slave trade, would scarcely be a desirable incumbrance, even with the great natural wealth of Mexico. To conclude a peace with any party in power, would be in effect to accept the proposals of the Mexican congress, viz: to withdraw our forces from Mexican territory as a preliminary to peace.

With governments that do not emanate from the people, and have no stability or hold upon the country, it is impossible to negotiate. The political state of Mexico is so far dissolved, that it has no head which can represent or bind it. Although nominally a republic, the people have never had but one government-that of Victoria; and, as we have seen, there has never been an executive strong enough to enforce the laws of congress against the will of the church. There can, therefore, be none of sufficient weight to sustain a treaty to which that power is opposed. To enter into treaty with any party in power, and act upon it by withdrawing troops, would only be to commence the war anew on the occurrence of the next revolution; or the alternative, of accepting peace and leaving a force to support the authority of the government that made it, until a commercial interest of suf-. ficient strength shall have grown up to give stability to the government,

THE EXISTENCE OF THE DEITY.

THE Construction of the following argument, in my own mind, originated in the necessity of my nature. Some years ago, I had the misfortune to meet with the fallacies of Hume, on the subject of causation. His specious sophistries shook the faith of my reason as to the being of a God, but could not overcome the fixed repugnance of my heart to a negation so monstrous; and consequently, left that infinite, restless craving for some point of fixed repose which atheism not only cannot give, but absolutely and madly disaffirms.

Through the gloom of utter scepticism, I turned for relief to the Treatise of Paley, and other reasoners, on the mere mechanical hypothesis, but there found, as I deemed, an impassable hiatus in the logic of the argument itself. I was forced to admit that every machine must have had at first a machine-maker; but I saw clearly, that the fact of its being a machine, must, first of all, be proven, before the reasoning could hold at all; and thus the argument was worthless. For as it is based on the assumed postulate of an actual creation, and as such a postulate is anything but self-evident, it needs to be demonstrated. And no logician of the whole mechanical school has ever attempted to furnish such a demonstration. Indeed, were creation once proven, there would be no necessity for more argument on the subject, since a Creator would on that supposition be proven also.

But I saw a still more fatal defect in the reasoning of Paley. I said to myself, suppose that we admit the world to be a machine; still we have no evidence that the machine builder exists now. The watch-maker of Paley's example may have ceased to be, countless centuries ago, and still the watch remains as perfect as ever. And thus the mechanical conception of the universe could afford me no ray of light.

And yet I sought with eager solicitude for some solution of this vast world-enigma. I resembled a child who, in the crowd, had lost its parent. I went about wildly, asking of every one, "Where is he? have ye seen him?" But there was no answer. I teased philosophy, science and literature with endless questionings, but all in vain. I plunged in fierce excitements, but no solace was there. The infinite void in my want-nature would not thus be filled. I was as an Arab, washing himself with sand instead of water. Neither the heat of the heart, nor the impurity of even the surface, diminished by any such lavation. I will not attempt to paint the intense gloom of my situation. Death seemed to ride on the present hour as a race-steed of destruction. The past was a grim waste, strewn with the ruins of worlds, animals, men and things. The future was a chill mist hovering o'er incalculable sepulchres. Every voice in creation seemed to me a wild wail of agony. The godless sun and cold stars glared in my face, turned often to, the pitiless sky, which no longer wore the poetic hue of my credulous boyhood.

One beautiful evening in May I was reading by the light of the setting sun in my favorite Plato. I was seated on the grass, interwoven with golden blooms, immediately on the bank of the crystal Colorado of Texas. Dim in the distant west arose, with smoky outlines, massy and irregular, the blue cones of an off-shoot of the Rocky Mountains.

I was perusing one of the Academician's most starry dreams. It had laid fast hold of my fancy without exciting my faith. I wept to think that it could not be true. At length I came to that startling sentence, "God geometrizes." "Vain revery," I exclaimed, as I cast the volume on the ground at my feet. It fell close by a beautiful little flower that looked fresh and bright, as if it had just fallen from the bosom of a rainbow. I broke it from its silvery stem, and began to examine its structure. Its stamens were five in number; its green calyx had five parts; its delicate corol was five, parted with rays, expanding like those of the Texan star. This combination of fives three times in the same blossom, appeared to me very singular. I had never thought on such a subject before. The last sentence I had just read in the page of the pupil of Socrates was ringing in my ears"God geometrizes." There was the text written long centuries ago; and here this little flower, in the remote wilderness of the west, furnished the commentary. There suddenly passed, as it were, before my eyes, a faint flash of light. I felt my heart leap in my bosom. The enigma of the universe was open. Swilt as a thought I calculated the chances against the production of those three equations of five in only one flower, by any principle devoid of the reason to perceive number. I found that there were one hundred and twenty-five chances against such a supposition. I extended the calculation to two flowers, by squaring the sum last mentioned. The chances amounted to the large sum of fifteen thousand six hundred and twenty-five. I cast my eyes around in the forest; the old woods were literally alive with those golden blooms, where countless bees were humming, and butterflies sipping honey-dew.

I will not attempt to describe my feelings. My soul became a tumult of radiant thoughts I took up my beloved Plato from the grass where I had tossed him in a fit of despair. Again and again I pressed him to my bosom, with a clasp tender as a mother's around the neck of her sleeping child. I kissed alternately the book and the blossom, bedewing them both with tears of joy. In my wild enthusiasm, I called ont to the little birds on the green boughs, trilling their cheery farewells to departing day-" Sing on, sunny birds; sing on sweet minstrels; Lo! ye and I have still a God!"

Thus perished the last doubt of the sceptic. Having found the infinite Father, I found also myself and my beloved ones-all, once more. By degrees I put together the following argument: I tried it by every rule of logic; I conjured up every conceivable objection against all its several parts, and grew thoroughly satisfied that it contained an absolute demonstration. But I rested not here. I resolved to have it tested to the uttermost. For this purpose I journeyed all the way to Boston last winter. I presented it to the most eminent pantheists, atheists and sceptics of that literary city. Not one of them attempted to point out a single flaw in its logic.

Thus I became convinced, that the demonstration is utterly unassailable; and I therefore offer it without hesitation to the criticism of the world.

The aggregate argument is my own; though many of the particular elements have been freely borrowed from others, one of which, the a priori demonstration of the inertia of matter, was mainly suggested by that of Dr. Samuel Clarke.

The principal consideration, however, is not as to the authorship, but validity. And this may readily be determined. Let the objector designate its fallacy, and I will be among the first to renounce it altogether. Until this is done, I hold myself pledged to maintain it in fair controversy against all adversaries; though I will not debate the question with any person unacquainted with algebra, geometry, and the rules of strict logic.

"God geometrizes."-Plato.

The following argument assumes a bold tentative. It undertakes to demonstrate, in an absolute manner, not only the being, but the ever-present agency of the Deity in all the phenomena of the material universe. It professes to solve the old problem that has puzzled philosophy in every age, ever uttered by human curiosity, but perhaps never, as yet, answered by pure reason "What is the true nature of causation ?"

Beyond all controversy, this must be regarded as the fundamental problem of all real science; for we know nothing, we never can know anything, but causes and effects. All time and eternity form but one vast flowing stream, where these come and go like waves of the sea. All space is but the expanse, where these rise and fall in oscillations, as of some ethereal fluid of infinite extent, vibrated by a viewless force. Well has a distinguished pantheist of the modern German school worded this profound idea: "The soul will not have us read any other cipher but that of cause and effect." All scientific treatises, however pompous their nomenclature, contain but generalizations of these, expressed in mathematical formulas, with greater or less accuracy. I am stating a simple fact, admitted on all hands. Cause and effect are thus correlatives in language and thought. The former is first both in logic and chronology. It is, therefore, the necessary exponent of the latter. Unless its true nature be comprehended, nothing else can possibly be understood. If we err at this great starting point, every subsequent step must prove a blunder in every process of philosophical inquiry. And accordingly, universal history shows that the false solution of this radical problem has been the fruitful source of all pestilential heresies, both in philosophy and religion.

To this mighty question, "What is causation?" four different answers, and no more, can be given-the sceptical, the material, the pantheistic, and the rational, or Christian.

To assert that man is utterly ignorant of the true nature of causation, is total scepticism.

To predicate the doctrine of invariable sequence, as did Hume and Brown, presents the formula of materialism. Idealism is but another phase of the same false view; for both idealism and materialism are at a certain depth identical, as they both take for granted, that all nature is but a dream-show, a mere conjurer's trick of fleeting appearances, where phenomena have only the tie of antecedent and consequent to bind them together in a union that touches nowhere, and produces nothing.,

If we answer, that emanation is the only causation, we are landed in pure pantheism. All individual existence vanishes away, and with it all proper ideas of right and wrong, of truth and falsehood; and, in fine, all logical predicates of every name and nature; for if nothing remains but indivisible unity, every proposition is impossible, since it would be absurd to assert unity of itself.

The only remaining, conceivable answer, I deem the rational, the Christian, the true one-that causation alone resides in mind; that matter never can be a cause; and, therefore, every phenomenon in the universe is, and ever must be, but the effect of intellectual force exerted by pure volition.

This view we now proceed to demonstrate, after the rigorous method of the geometricians, and discarding as much as practicable, all loose and rhetorical digressions.

The argument has two divisions, general and special.

GENERAL DIVISION.-PROPOSITION I.

Matter both in molecules and masses, is absolutely inert.

This property of matter, under the name of vis inertie, is now admitted by all scientific writers on general physics. As many of the atheistical school, however, still affect to deny it, we have concluded to demonstrate its truth by a train of argument, as we deem wholly unanswerable. Those who wish to trace the process of reasoning, a posteriori, which establishes the doctrine on an impregnable basis, will do well to consult Arnott's Elements, one of the most scientific treatises ever written, where its definite rationale is unfolded in a most beautiful manner.

We confine ourselves, in the present essay, to an argument, a priori, exhibited in a mathematical form, and equally satisfactory with the other, to all who will give it a sufficiently patient attention.

The argument here is two-fold.

I. The force which moves any body multiplied into its quantity of matter, gives the exact numerical measure of its amount of motion. Thus, the power moving, and the mass moved, may be considered as the two factors, of which the resultant momentum is the compound product. This proposition is universally recognised as a general law of physics. No sceptic will be found hardy enough to call it in question. Thus, if we consider a given impulse, A. as equal to 10, and a given quantity of matter, B. as equal to 15, the motion produced will be equal to 45. Then if the impelling force be viewed as the multiplier, and the mass impelled as the multiplicand let us suppose the force reduced to nothing, it follows, mathematically, that the motion will be nothing also.

But all this seems like laboring a perfect truism. For surely, not even a Boston pantheist will venture the insane affirmation, that any body can, under any circumstances, originate its own motion, or will ever move at all without the application of some extraneous impulse. Thus is the passivity of matter demonstrated as clearly as any theorem in Euclid.

But the second argument, tending to the same result, though no more conclusive, is perhaps still more beautiful to a lover of logical analysis.

It may be stated thus in the form of a destructive dilemma, each alternative bifurcating into two subsidiary branches of a like character.

If matter may be supposed to possess in itself any inherent tendency to move at all, such tendency must necessarily exist either in the molecules, or in the masses.

Let us first postulate that it is in the molecules.

Then if the molecules tend in themselves to motion, such motion must be either in one direction, north, south, or some other course, in free space, or in all directions at the same time.

If such tendency to move in the molecules be in one direction alone, they will move only in that direction; and as all free motion is ever in the straight line, and as parallel straight lines can never meet, how far soever either way they be produced, the separate molecules on such a hypothesis could never impinge, cross, or conceivably interfere with each other's action, and there could not possibly be any relative motion in any event; in fine, no perceptible or appreciable motion at all.

But if the tendency to move in the molecules be in all directions at the same time, such a tendency would self-evidently amount to a state of equilibrium; and here, again, there could be no motion. For it is plain to the capacity of even a child, that if equal forces be exerted against every point of the surface of a billiard ball, such forces would equiponderate with each other, and no effect could result from their conjunctive action.