nor mean to perform any of them, nor could of themselves co-operate with each other, nor produce any systematical arrangement, or regulated or orderly effects. It is their Master and Maker who organizes, governs, and guides them to those movements and operations which they perform, and from all others; so that by his directing will they are made to do what we see them effect, and that only, because he restrains and averts them from all else. He limits, withholds, and suspends, as well as urges and enables. It is his sacred gratification to do so. His creations are obviously his delight. Their multiplicity is evidence of the pleasure he has taken in making them, for he would not have framed them if their formation had been irksome to him. Their conservation is equally an evidence that he continues to be gratified by them; and we may believe that if there can be a difference, it must be more pleasurable to a being of his benevolence to preserve and superintend than even to create. We therefore need not have the paltry idea of the ancients, that he could not exert a providence over mankind, because then he would be toiling and working like a fatigued and complaining human labourer. Every active intellect among us knows and feels that it is a high enjoyment to exert its intelligent capacity. Nothing is so dreary as existence unemployed: nothing so self-wearying. It is the misery, not the blessing, of a thinking being, to have nothing to do.t We may therefore be satisfied, that his Divine Mind, possessing such energies of omnipotence, and having exerted them so multifariously, as the boundless universe with its hosts of being testify to us that he has done, can never be inactive. But

* Even Plutarch blames Plato and Anaxagoras for thinking that God encumbered himself with human affairs; "for, if he did so, what a wretched and evil being he would be (kakodatμwv), subjecting himself like a workman or a mechanic to heavy burdens and anxious cares in the composition and government of the world."-Piut. Plac. Ph. 1. i. c. vii. p. 162-3.

It is a just idea of Mr. Lytton Bulwer, that "activity is the national characteristic of Englishmen." An expressive instance of this, and of the necessity of some employment to an active mind, occurs in Mr. Alexander's remarks on the English in Don Pedro's army, as it lay beleaguering Santarem in 1834: "Many of the officers before Santarem were sorely at a loss what to do with themselves. An officer of the English regiment rode daily to Cartaxo from Atalia; distance a league: walked up and down a dull street, and then returned to his quarters. 'If I were not to kill time in this way,' said he, 'I must go to sleep under a tree, or else shoot myself." "-Un. Serv. Journ. 1834, p. 297.

as it cannot be at all times creating, it must be preserving, and actuating, and guiding, and governing all that it has formed. This view will make the moving forces of nature more interesting to us; for we shall then feel that all their motions and operations take place in obedience to his designs and direction, and are always acting under his cognizance, and only as he empowers them, and that they are perpetually displaying his mind and purposes to us.

Our admiration of nature in all its kingdoms will increase as we cultivate these sentiments. Once settled in the conviction that matter is and does nothing of itself, but is and acts only as he has framed and ordained it, we shall see the Divine Mind in all the figures, movements, positions, causes, and agencies of terrestrial things.

The lightning, the storm, the vernal breeze, the flowers, the fruits, the river, the earthquake, the attracting and gravitating powers, all are but his will, and thoughts, and designs, put into action and representing these to us.

They show his intentions and determinations as to our portion of the universe; and the rules and principles of these, which we can trace in the material phenomena, that from their vicinity to us we are able to examine, will be safe and useful guides in our study of his administration of human concerns, in which he has been at all times as operative, as in the world and system which we inhabit. *

These considerations lead us to some farther inferences. As nothing exists but what he has made, so whatever is subsisting, must be as he has chosen and determined that it should be. He was not driven by an overpowering necessity, as many ancients thought, to do the things which he

*Sir Humphrey Davy's sentiments are worth quoting on this subject. "Man, acquainted with his real situation in the universe, has learned likewise to appreciate more distinctly his objects and the end of his creation. A mere atom on a small point of space, by his intellectual powers he has elevated his mind from the minute base of the earth unto the heavens, and has measured, and even weighed, masses many millions of miles distant from him; and some of these invisible, except by instruments of his own invention. He has been able to account for those motions of the heavenly bodies, which at first appear disorderly, by constant laws.

"And as his science has become more perfect, he has seen more distinctly the order and the harmony of the system of things. He has found the WHOLE of created nature to exhibit ONE VST AND GRAND DESIGN of perfect intelligence; one single and yet complicated work of unceasing beneficence and infinite power."

has done or is doing. This must be made an essential priuciple in our divine philosophy as well as in the sacred history of the world. An eternal fate, or senseless destiny, or irresistible necessity, commanding the Eternal Deity, and all creation, and all intelligent beings, and all human life, is an idea which is incompatible with either intelligence or omnipotence. It takes away reason from our minds, virtue from our lives, science from nature, and religion from the heart. It places over all and in all an iron mechanism of invincible force, compelling us and all things to do whatever is done, without any moral feeling, or intellectual consideration, or actuating judgment; a state which our daily experience is continually contradicting yet some great names of antiquity are attached to the irrational supposition, as, indeed, they are to many things that the simplest among us would reject as absurdities. It is only to be lamented that any mind should now degrade itself with an idea so unmanning and self-depreciating. *

But its ancient and modern existence makes it more important to us to preserve our improved intellect from the contagion; and therefore never to forget that the Deity has no controller, but that all things exist solely according to his will and choice. All the powers, properties, and activities of nature and of man are those which, out of all others that were equally possible and practicable, he has selected to be attached to our system of things. Neither man nor animals have any qualities which have originated from any thing but

By what process of mind the strange doctrine of the avayan or necessity of a fate and superior force controlling and overruling the Almighty, came into the ancient world, I do not understand, but it has never since been obliterated. In some shape or other it is still perverting the human thought. Thales held that it governed the universe: Αναγκη κρατει το παντος. Pythagoras said that it encompassed the world. Parmenides and Democritus maintained that all things were according to it. Plato referred events partly to a providence, and partly to necessity. Empedocles made it an essence and an effective cause of all the principles and elements of things. Heraclitus taught, that all things were according to fate, and that this was the avaykη itself. Plato admitted it to be on human souls and lives, but that the cause was with ourselves. The Stoics, agreeing with Plato, deemed necessity to be an immoveable and violently operating cause, and that fate was a complication of arranged causes, in which concatenation we are so involved, that of what concerns us, some things are fated, and some not.--Plut. Plac. Phil. i. c. 25-27. A gloomy doctrine, always darkening and discomposing the mind that adopts it.

his will. Each has such, and such only, as he has devised and assigned to it. All are placed as he meant them to be circumstanced; the fish in the seas, the birds in the air, the beasts in their plains and forests, and the human kind, to walk on the surface of the earth and to till it, raise their food from it, and build their own dwellings on it for their use and comfort. The history of earthly nature, our sacred history, is thus a portion of the history of his own existence, and of his thinking mind.* Man, in his mode and order of being, is also the planned and appointed work of his Creator; all the laws of our frame, like those of the skies, and earth, and ocean, and all our qualities, powers, sensibilities, and activities, have been devised and established by the same wisdom and choice which have constituted the rest of the universe. Nothing has been left to chance; nothing has occurred unforeseen or unprovided for. An intelligent Purpose has directed hitherto the course of human affairs, and still guides and governs human nature. All is consistency

in the economy of Divine Providence. There is no anomaly of neglect in one compartment, and of assiduous care in another.

Every portion of the stupendous whole, every order of beings, and every division of their varied classes, are alike the subject of his all-comprehending administration, and of that particular application of it, without which it would not be any administration at all. All care and government, all direction and purpose, must be individual to all intelligent existences, or are but words without use or meaning. What is general, is but a verbal expression for what is done for the larger number of individuals, whom the mind that uses it intends to signify by it. It is specifically done to each, or it is not done at all; but being similarly done to these, the uniformity of the operation on them, separately, constitutes the generality of which we speak. It is general only inasmuch as it does individually operate to this extent. A general law is therefore that which acts on every individual thing

It was from impressions like these, that Plato, in one of his best effusions, said, "NATURE was but the art of God; his artificial machinery."-" Dei artem, vel artificiosum Dei organon."-Socrates said to Euthydemus, "Let it suffice you that you see these works: adore the gods for these, and think that it is by these that they show themselves to us; you cannot behold their form."-Xen. Aro. 1. 453.

that is comprised within its application; for it is no law to that on which it does not operate. A general providence is therefore an individual providence-a providence acting on the same principles towards every individual that is subject to its agency. Under such a providence, the unceasing superintendence, direction, system, control, and regulation of that sovereign who has chosen to be the creator and governor of his human race, every individual of that race has been always living, while he has lived, and the course of human affairs been carried on; and all for some designed ends worthy of him who has conceived them, worthy of him who has put them into execution, and who alone can accomplish, at his own appointed times, his magnificent conceptions. On these ideas our sacred history must be founded.

I press these observations on your attention, because, when I was young, I was led away from the true conception of the fact, by the terms "general laws," and "general providence." They are used when connected with the Deity, especially the latter, too much to take off our attention from their individual application, and by this means to make providence nothing but a verbal providence, and therefore no providence at all. But I now perceive that they have no meaning independently of their individuality. The term "general" can only mean the greater number of particulars, and therefore what is called a general law, is always acting specifically. It was made and meant to do so, and it never acts in any other way. If it cease to act specifically, it ceases to act at all, and is no longer a law, nor any acting force. The laws of magnetism are in constant action on every substance, and in every place where the magnetic power is, and on every atom which it affects in proportion to its amount. The great attractive law of nature is of the same character. Though it reach from the sun to the farthest planet, and controls all the vast masses which roll around, yet it is always operating on every particle of which they consist, as much as, indeed thereby, on their collective magnitudes. It is by always acting specifically, and on the greatest number of particulars, that any force or influence becomes a general law. Its generality subsists on this fact.

The general consists of a multitude of particulars. It is the number of its specific operations which constitutes its