m SIMPLE MINERALS. 431 



all this beautiful and exact machinery, if we accept not that 

 which would refer its origin to the antecedent Will and 

 Power of a Supreme Creator; a Being, whose nature is 

 confessedly incomprehensible to our finite faculties, but, 

 vviiom the " things which do appear " proclaim to be su- 

 premely Wise, and Great, and Good. 



To attribute all this harmony and order to any fortuitous 

 causes that would exclude Design, would be to reject con- 

 clusions founded on that kind of evidence, on which the 

 human mind reposes with undoubting confidence in all the 

 ordinary business of life, as well as in physical and meta- 

 physical investigations. " Si mundum efficere potest con- 

 cursus atomorum, cur porticum, cur templem, cur domum, 

 cur urbem non potest? quse sunt minus operosa et multo 

 quidem faciliora."* 



Such was the interrogatory of the Roman Moralist, 

 arising from his contemplation of the obvious phenomena of 

 the natural world; and the conclusion of Bentley from a 

 wider view of more recondite phenomena, in an age re- 

 markable for the advancement of some of the hiirhest 

 branches of Physical Science, has been most abundantly 

 confirmed by the manifold discoveries of a succeeding cen- 

 tury. We therefore of the present age have a thousand 

 additional reasons to affirm with him, that " though univer- 

 sal matter should have endured from everlasting, divided 

 into infinite particles in the Epicurean way, and though mo- 

 tion should have been coeval and coeternal with it ; yet those 

 particles or atoms could never of themselves, by omnifarious 

 kinds of motion, whether fortuitous or mechanical, have 

 fallen, or been disposed into this or a hke visible system. "f — 

 Bentley, Serm. vi. of Atheism, p. 192. 



* Cicero de Natura Deorum, lib. ii. 37. 



f Ur. Prout lias pursued this subject still farther in the third Chapter of 

 his Bridgewater Treatise, and shown that the molecular constitution of mat- 

 ter with its admirable adaptations to the economy of the natural world, can- 

 not have endured from eternity, and is by no means a necessary condition of 

 its existence; but has resulted from the Will of some intelligent and volun- 

 tary Agent, possessing power commensui-ate with his Will. 



