The British Review, and London Critical Journal Volume 5 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1813 edition. Excerpt: ... Akt. VI.--The Advantages of distributing the Holy Scriptures among the lower Orders of Society, chiefly by theirown Agency. London. 1812. Great instruments or discoveries are seldom perfected at once. They do not start full formed and armed for future achievements from the head of the inventor; but, struggling on perhaps through a feeble and laborious infancy, attain by slow degrees to manhood and vigour. Thus all those rare machines by which our manufacturers are enabled to outstrip the world, though their first principle and elementary construction may have been the work of a day, have not reached their present excellence but by tardy steps. Thus also in the discoveries of science: how vast the interval between the mere skeleton of the Newtonian system in a page of Bacon, to its full and perfect developement in the volumes of Newton How vast even the additions made by this great philosopher himself to his first conquests on the empyreal plains; from his first doubtful solution of a solitary problem to the latter sections of his Principia, where he takes his station as "high priest of nature"--as the mterpreter of its mysteries--and where by a sort of influence, like that force of gravity which he describes, he seems to command systems and control the great machine of the universe Other similar instances might be named: but perhaps few are more striking than that which is supplied in the pamphlet before us. The " British and Foreign Bible Society" may be considered as the discovery and application of an entirely new instrument in religion. It is not indeed the discovery of a new principle, but the novel application of an obvious principle to a religious object. It is the first example, upon a large scale at least, of the various sects...