SPECIAL ENDS IN CREATION. 



" standing behiud, as it were, and in reserve of the principle of 

 special adaptation;" it does commend itself to our minds as a thing 

 not unworthy (but the reverse) of the Divine Architect, to limit 

 himself, in those creatures of his hand which were designed to come 

 under our notice, to a few well-defined patterns ; out of condescen- 

 sion to the weakness of our faculties, and from a desire that we might 

 not be utterly bewildered in our efforts to make ourselves acquainted 

 with his works. 



Another view of the subject, however, has been taken. It has been 

 supposed that there are certain typical forms which, in themselves, 

 and altogether irrespectively of their adaptedness to the minds of 

 men or of other finite intelligent beings, are agreeable to the Creator ; 

 that there are arrangements with which the Divine mind is pleased, 

 in virtue of their essential harmony — models which it delights to con- 

 template, for their intrinsic grace or beauty. The poet or painter 

 who has completed a composition to which the highest efforts 

 of his genius have been devoted, will dwell upon the glorious 

 creation of his own mind with emotions of admiration and ecstacy, 

 arising solely from his view- of what the poem or picture is in itself, 

 and having no reference to the light in which others are likely to re- 

 gard it. Even so (it is conceived) the Divine Being may " rest in his 

 love" and "joy over" the Cosmos which he has produced; feeling 

 that in itself, and quite apart from its relation to th- minds of finite 

 intelligences, it is "very good."* Not, by any means, that the rela- 



* We cannot forbear quoting here one of those line passages which give such a charm to 

 the scientific works of Dr. Hugh Miller. After referring to the boundless variety of beauty 

 by which the ichthyolites of the Old Red Sandstone are distinguished, he adds : " Nor does 

 it lessen the wonder, that their nicer ornaments should yield their beauty only to the micro- 

 scope. There is unity of character in every scale, plate and fin— unity such as all men of 

 taste have learned to admire in those three Grecian orders from which the ingenuity of Rome 

 was content to borrow, when it professed to invent— in the masculine Doric, the chaste and 

 graceful Ionic, the exquisitely elegant Corinthian ; and yet the unassisted eye fails to dis- 

 cover the finer evidences of this unity: it would seem as if the adorable Architect had 

 wrought it out in secret with reference to the Divine idea alone. The artist who sculptured 

 the cherry-stone consigned it to a cabinet, and filaced a microscope beside it ; the microsco- 

 pic beauty of these ancient fish was consigned to the twilight depths of a primeval ocean. 

 There is a feeling which at times grows upon the painter and the statuary, as if the percep- 

 tion and love of the beautiful had been sublimed into a kind of moral sense. Art comes to 

 be pursued for its own sake; the exquisite conception in the mind, or the elegant and elabo- 

 rate model, becomes all in all to the worker, and the dread of criticism or the appetite of 

 praise almost nothing. And thus, through the influence of a power somewhat akin to con- 

 science, but whose province is not the just and the good, but the fair, the refined, the exqui- 

 site, have works, prosecuted in solitude, andnever intended for the world, been fraught with 

 loveliness. Sir Thomas Lawrence, who finished with the most consummate care, a picture 

 intended for a semi-barbarous foreign court, was asked why he took so much pains with a 

 piece destined, perhaps, never to come under the eye of a connoisseur. " I cannot help it," he 

 replied, " I do the best I can, unable, through a tyrant feeling, that will not brook offence, 

 to do any thing less." It would be perhaps over bold to attribute any such over mastering 

 feeling to the Creator ; yet certain it is, that among his creatures well nigh all approxima- 

 tions towards perfection, in the province in which it expatiates, owo their origin to it, and 

 that Deity in all his works is his own rule."— Old Red Sandstone, Ch. V. 



