ORIGIN OP THE ANIMATED TRIBES. 93 



It leaves the absolute fact of his authorship of and supremacy 

 over nature, precisely where it was ; and only tells us that, 

 instead of dealing with the natural world as a human being 

 traffics with his own affairs, adjusting each circumstance to a 

 relation with other circumstances as they emerge, he has 

 originally conceived, and since sustained arrangements fitted 

 to serve in a general sufficiency for all contingencies ; himself, 

 of course, necessarily living in all such arrangements, as the 

 only means by which they could be, even for a moment, 

 upheld. Were the question to be settled upon a consideration 

 of the respective moral merits of the two theories, I would 

 say that the latter is greatly the preferable, as it implies a far 

 grander view of the divine power and dignity than the other. 

 For one thing, it places the leading divine attribute of fore- 

 sight in a much more sublime position. " If," says Dr. 

 Buckland, contemplating the possible establishment of this 

 doctrine " if the properties adopted by the elements at the 

 moment of their creation adapted them beforehand to the 

 infinity of complicated useful purposes which they have 

 already answered, and may have still further to answer, under 

 many dispensations of the material world, such an aboriginal 

 constitution, so far from superseding an intelligent agent, 

 would only exalt our conceptions of the consummate skill and 

 power that could comprehend such an infinity of future uses 

 under future systems, in the original groundwork of his crea- 

 tion'' 



It is also to be observed, though almost needlessly, that any 

 objection of this kind would lie equally well against other 

 doctrines which the enlightened part of mankind have long 

 admitted. The whole purport of science is to ascertain law ; 

 it has, in the course of time, transferred one set of phenomena 

 after another out of the region of marvel into that of law, thus 

 showing a true divine regulation in them. Suppose, then, 

 that there be a balance of probability from actual evidence in 

 favour of an organic creation by law, we should only, in so 

 settling the matter, be concluding upon one department of 

 the great system of things, as we have been concluding upon 

 others throughout all the ages of philosophy. 



