PROOFS, ILLUSTRATIONS, AUTHORITIES, ETC. li 



of God from the law and order and harmony in the world, from the 

 proofs of adaptation, wisdom, and goodness, and from reflections on 

 our own internal consciousness. 



It here fully appears that the real objection of the learned professor 

 to the Vestiges is a bugbear formed in his own mind. It is nowhere 

 affirmed in that work, that " the successive parts of the organic 

 sequence are related to one another only in the way of material cause 

 and effect." Cause and effect of any such peculiar character are 

 never once alluded to there. The whole of the phenomena of the 

 external world are regarded as originating in and dependent upon 

 the will of God the moral as well as material phenomena, the 

 phenomena by which a globe was peopled, as well as those by which 

 the population of a globe is sustained. This is what we have seen 

 Mr. Sedgwick himself affirm. It is something over and above, a 

 delusion of his own brain, w ith which he fights. It takes the form 

 of a perfectlj r arbitrary distinction, which he asserts as between 

 material cause and effect and moral cause and effect. He seeks, in 

 many pages of by no means lucid writing, to establish this distinc- 

 tion, but can only show, what few would dispute, that a moral law 

 is not a material law. "I affirm," he says, "that the moral conduct 

 of man (whatever it may be in the eye of God) is not, like the move- 

 ments of the heavenly bodies, bound up in any conception of a constant 

 undeviating law." Let the reader observe that, a few pages back, 

 we had Professor Sedgwick admitting that " the mind and morals of 

 man are under the regulation of fixed laws." In the choice of his 

 affirmations, we of course adopt the latter, finding in it enough to 

 overthrow the whole effect of the long dissertation on the distinction 

 between moral and material laws. It is enough for us that our 

 vivacious opponent agrees with us in saying, that mind as well as 

 matter is under law. As he has elsewhere deduced from the fact ot 

 the organic world being under law, that it must have also originated 

 under law, he cannot save himself from another and similar logical 

 conclusion, though he forces us to draw it for him, that the moral 

 nature of man, being under law, also originated in the manner of 

 law. He will be a little surprised, and so will some of his readers ; 

 but such is actually the sell-contradictory position into which he has 

 brought himself. As to the denial of a personal and intelligent God, 

 or a belief " that dead inanimate matter may, without external aid, 

 and by its own inherent powers, work itself into what is vital, sensi- 

 tive, and intellectual," they are hallucinations of his brain as to us, 

 whatever they may be as to others. We believe in a personal and 

 intelligent God, and cannot conceive of dead matter receiving life 

 otherwise than from Him, though of course in the manner of order 

 or law. To attempt to fasten any doctrines upon us different from 

 those we have ourselves avowed, is a mere trick of controversy, 

 doomed, we trust, to bring its own punishment. 



After all, we ought perhaps to have simply taken up the professor's 

 argument on material cause and effect as an unusually clear and 

 bright example of his manner of controverting a proposition. We 



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