234 Natural Theology. 



Nature has already made. She prepared the 

 work so that the mirid of man should be fully satis- 

 fied when it was comprehended. She prepared it 

 in such a way that the best powers of the mind should 

 be called out in discovering and comprehending it. 

 Nature never arranges. She does, indeed, put her 

 symbolic language on every stone in her temple. 

 But though the building is perfect to the eye of the 

 Great Architect, it is a perfection of relation and 

 not of position. Its blocks are like those so pre- 

 pared in the mountain, that no sound of hammer or 

 any tool of iron was heard when they were joined 

 together. It seems chaos to man until that relation 

 is perceived as it existed in the Divine Mind and is 

 manifested in his works. The blocks are scattered 

 where they were fashioned by the Creator, on every 

 continent, the islands of the sea, and beneath the 

 waters. Their true place is written in their struc- 

 ture ; it is repeated in every change, from the un- 

 folding of the germ to the perfect being. But it is 

 the gathering up of these scattered fragments, 

 so that their relation shall be seen by man, as they 

 formed a perfect whole to the omnipresent eye in 

 the first creation it is this entering into the thought 

 of God by the army of naturalists, that is the great 

 triumph of intellect. This shows both the divine type 

 of the human mind, and also the perfect provision 

 that has been made for it in the organic world, that 

 the whole plan of structure, and the manifold rela- 

 tions, should all be perfectly within the grasp of that 

 mind, and be adapted to its nature ; adapted to it in 



