THE ANIMATED CREATION. 285 



not permit a single law to swerve in any case from its 

 appointed course of operation. Thus we may still feel that 

 He is the immediate breather of our life and ruler of our 

 spirits, that we may, by rightly directed thought, come into 

 communion with him, and feel that, even when his penal 

 ordinances are enforced upon us, his hand and arm are closely 

 about us. Nor is this all. It may be that, while we are com- 

 mitted to take our chance in a natural system of undeviating 

 operation, and are left, with apparent ruthlessness, to endure 

 the consequences of every collision into, which we knowingly 

 or unknowingly come with each of its regulations, there is a 

 system of mercy and grace behind the screen of nature, towards 

 which we stand in a peculiar class of relations, which is capable 

 of compensating for all casualties endured here, and whose very 

 largeness is what makes these casualties a matter of indifference 

 to God. For the existence of such a system, the actual con- 

 stitution of nature is indeed a powerful argument. The 

 reasoning may proceed thus : the system of nature assures us 

 that benevolence is a leading principle in the Divine Mind. 

 But that system is at the same time deficient in a means of 

 making this benevolence of invariable operation. To reconcile 

 this to the character of the Deity, it is necessary to suppose 

 that the present system is but a part of the whole, a stage in a 

 Great Progress, and that the Redress is in reserve. Another 

 argument here occurs the economy of nature, beautifully 

 arranged, and vast in extent as it is, does not satisfy even 

 man's idea of what might be ; he feels that, if this multiplicity 

 of theatres for the exemplification of such phenomena as we 

 see on earth were to go on for ever unchanged, it would not be 

 worthy of the Being capable of creating it. An endless mono- 

 tony of human generations, with their humble thinkings and 

 doings, even though liable to a certain improvement, seems an 

 object beneath that august Being. But the mundane economy 

 might be very well as a portion of some greater phenomenon, 

 the rest of which was yet to be evolved. Our system, there- 

 fore, though it may at first appear at issue with other doctrines 

 in esteem amongst mankind, tends to come into harmony with 

 them, and even to give them support. I would say, in con- 

 clusion, that, even where the two above arguments may fail of 

 effect, there may yet be a faith derived from this view of nature 

 sufficient to sustain us under all sense of the imperfect happi- 

 ness, the calamities, the woes, and pains of this sphere of being. 

 For let us but fully and truly consider what a system is here 



