III. themselves which is living and intelligent, and LETTER capable to think, adjust and direct; and this again must be concluded to be the Almighty cause of all things.10 Thus the laws of nature, properly considered, lead us in every view to Him. They are in all things His laws; His appointed, intended and governed agencies. In them we see His mind and will in action. They are the servants of His intelligence, and the ministers to execute His plans and to perform daily and continuously His orders and intentions, as much as our hands or our obeying assistants in our several families, are daily executing ours."1 In all cases they are, like His agency and superintendence, the inferences of our judgment, not the objects of our sight. We cannot see a law of nature, but we infer it. It is not written, like a proclamation, on visible paper, and hung up in the universe, to be translated or read. The phenomena which it occasions are all that our senses can know ; 10 His power, His wisdom, His goodness, appear in each of the provinces of Nature, which are thus brought before us: and in each, the more we study them, the more impressive, the more admirable do they appear. When we find these qualities manifested in each of so many successive ways, and each manifestation rising above the preceding by unknown degrees, and thro a progression of unknown extent, what other language can we use concerning such attributes, than that they are INFINITE?' Whewell's Astron. p. 372. Dr. Kidd very appositely asks,—' In calculating the unerring motions of the heavenly bodies, have we been content to characterize the certainty and regularity of their motions as the result of necessity, or of the laws of an undefined agent, called Nature? And in thus failing to acknowlege explicitly the Author of these laws, tho not indeed formally denying His existence, have we, like the nations of old, worshipped the creature, rather than the Creator.' Dr. Kidd's Bridg. Treat. on the Adaptation of external Nature, p. 343. III. LETTER but these indicate it to our discerning and reasoning mind; and we think and conjecture, connect and compare what we observe, until we find out the general law or principle on which the facts occur. It is in the same way we learn the agency of the Deity, and the derivation of all the Laws of Nature from Him. It is in the same way we must study and strictly explore His intentions and purposes in them and in all which they accomplish. We can only know the events and results; but by duly contemplating these, and by rightly reasoning upon them, we shall in time form those probable inferences as to His ends and meaning, which the more judicious minds will feel to be most satisfactory, and will be always trying to confirm or to enlarge and improve."2 Our perceptions as to these will become more just and more successful in proportion as our knowlege and exercise of mind upon them increases. The human thought will improve in these meditations, as it has done in all others, by patient attention, by continued deliberation, by comparison of events, by a constant endeavour to ascertain the exact truth, and by a desire to avoid all misleading prepossessions, all hasty theories, and all egotistical presumptions. 13 12 The admirable words of Handel's beautiful and impressive air should be always in our recollection : What tho I trace each herb and flower That drinks the morning dew? Unless I own JEHOVAH'S power, How vain were all I knew! Hand. Sol. 13 Dr. Kidd's concluding paragraph deserves our frequent recollection,- If, with Newton, we have delighted to deduce from the contemplation of the mechanism of the heavenly bodies the power of HIM who made them, and who alone sustains and directs their motions, III. The importance of our adhering to the great prin- LETTER ciple of the Divine Creation of the World, is strikingly shewn in the wild conjectures, by which they who reject it and all sacred authorities, attempt still to account for the origin of all things. The two latest systems of this sort now afloat, indicate what we should soon sink to, if we abandoned the idea of an intelligent Creator.14 motions, we may, and with faculties infinitely expanded, cultivate with him the same pure pleasures, which even on earth attracted his desires from earthly wants. 6 • Enraptured with the harmonious movement of these endless systems, which neither our present organs can see, nor our present faculties apprehend, we may continue to be constantly acquiring new knowlege; constantly absorbed in new wonder and adoration of THAT POWER, from whom, both in this world and in that which is to come, all knowlege, and every other good and perfect gift are alone derived.' Dr. Kidd, p. 344. How superior in views like these of our collegiate professor, and of myriads of others who think and feel like him, does the modern mind of human nature appear to that of the greatest and most celebrated men who adorned the ancient nations of the world! 14 Mr. Cuvier thus states them: Some writers have reproduced and greatly extended the ideas of De Maillet. They say that, at first, every thing was in a state of liquefaction; that the liquid engendered animals of the simplest kind, such as monads, and others of the infusory and microscopic species; and that, in progress of time, these animals complicated and diversified their species into those now existing.' Other writers, like Kepler, assign vital powers to the globe; each of its component parts has life. Not only the very elementary atoms have instinct and will, but every sort of mineral can convert immense masses into its own proper nature. Mountains are the organs of the respiration of the globe, and the schists, the secreting organs! Cuvier's Fossil Bones, v. i. p. 41. In what do these notions substantially differ from those above quoted from Seneca, which have been so long consigned to derision and oblivion? LETTER IV. LETTER IV. CAUSES OF THE IDEA OF A CREATION HAVING BEEN ABSENT SACRED HISTORY. MY DEAR BOY, Ir may surprise you at the first glance to find, that the ancient world were generally unable to cherish in their minds, that idea of a creating God which the Hebrew scriptures inculcate, and which the enlightened population of our own happier day so universally entertain; especially as the communication of the fact accompanied the first existence of our race. The hostility of some among us to this great verity of Nature, evinces that it may be opposed by individuals without being unknown or forgotten : but that in every country of antiquity it should have been so much abandoned and disliked, and so many wild and unwarranted conjectures adopted instead, is a circumstance which it is difficult to explain. The real cause I believe to be, that all great truths require a certain progression of the human mind, both morally and intellectually, in order to be adequately valued, felt or understood. The true idea of God is too much connected with the true philosophy of Nature, with the right feelings of the human heart, and with the proper ethical dispositions of the character, to be either liked or fostered where IV. these are absent. But these are notoriously de- LETTER ficient wherever Paganism prevails; and without unjustly defaming other ages and nations, we may say, that the strange puerilities which they preferred to worship; the fantastic baby dreams which they patronised and sang, with the lavish effusions of their admiring genius; and the positive falsehoods which on divine subjects they either ignorantly adopted or designedly taught, imply that the human intellect had not then reached that extended correctness of judgment, which these require, nor attained that proportion of knowlege, without which, this invaluable faculty of our spirit will not on any subject be efficaciously exerted.' 'Plutarch's representations of the ideas of some of the most celebrated men of antiquity upon the Deity, show us his impressions of what these were; Christians may misconceive them, but he, with a more congenial education, must have sufficiently understood them. "Some of the philosophers, as Diagoras the Milesian, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Euhemeros of Tegea, said that there were no gods at all. 'Anaxagoras declared that material things existed stationary from the beginning; but that the mind of God put them in order, and made generations of them all. 'Plato thought that material things were subsisting, but without any arrangement, and were moving confusedly about, and that the Deity, knowing that order was better than disorder, put them into regularity. "Anaximander affirmed the stars to be the eternal Gods; Democritus, that Deity was a fiery form, the soul of the world. 'Pythagoras taught, that of the principles of things the Monad was God, and good, which was the nature of One and the understanding itself; but the Duad was indefinite, and a dæmon and evil, about which is the multitude of matter and the visible world.' All these systems gave co-eternity or anterior eternity to Matter. 'Aristotle supposed that the Supreme God (avwrarw ɛov) was a separate form stationed on the sphere of the universe, with an ethereal body, which he called the Fifth. This being divided according to the spheres, cohering to them by its nature, but distinct in reason, he thought that each of the spheres was a living being, consisting of body and soul; of which the body is ethereal, always moving circu larly: |