32 
power? Obviously not. This would be to expect the first 
link certainly to draw in the second, when there was no certain 
connexion between them. But, again, if efficient power in a 
second cause is not the expression of any final cause whatso- 
ever, in any intelligent agent, would the reason ever regard it 
as a certain connexion between the parts of the sequence ? 
Obviously not. For, the first lesson the reason has learned 
about the material bodies, which are the seats of the pheno- 
mena, is, that they are blind, inert, unintelligent. All the 
education the reason has received about these bodies is, that 
they are subject to variation. Our whole discussion is about 
“ effects.” But what is effect save change? The very 
problem of all science is, Nature’s changes. How did the 
reason learn from nature’s perpetual variations, then, to trust 
in the invariability of nature? And especially when this 
nature is material, and too blind to have consciousness either 
of her own changes or stability, of her observance or viola- 
tion of her supposed laws? ‘To explain this intuitive expecta- 
tion of the invariability of causal changes, as a healthy act of | 
the reason, there must be somewhere a sufficient cause of the 
law in nature. And the only sufficient cause is the final cause 
which is the expression of the intelligence which made and 
governs nature. We believe in the stability of a natural law, 
when we discover it, only because we believe in the function 
which a stable intelligence has designed in endowing that 
thing with that law. Why are we so certain that “like causes 
always produce like effects”? ? Because the same reason tells 
us that the power deposited in that (natural cause was put 
there by a supreme intelligence, and, therefore, for a final 
cause; and that the wisdom which planned will certainly 
regulate, on the same consistent plan, the machinery of causa- 
tion there established. The postulates of theism are necessary 
to ground the inferences of induction. The doctrine of divine 
purpose, and that of the stability of the law of true causes, 
are the answering parts of one system of thought. When 
this is asserted, it is not designed to retract the proposition 
so often asserted as fundamental, that our belief in the regu- 
larity of the law of cause is intuitive, or to represent that 
judgement now, as a deduction from the propositions of theism. 
What is meant is this: that the Creator, while He did fashion 
the human reason so as to be intuitively necessitated to believe 
in cause, also gave it, that He might be consistent in so fashion- 
ing it, the evidence of His own causation and intelligent design 
in all his works. The two judgments are complementary to 
each other; the suppression of the latter would leave the 
other inconsistent. God’s constancy to his own ends is the only 
