406 ON THE GENERAL FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



The power of all things cease ; e'en sacred oaths 

 At times be broke, and the dtteniiiiied mind 

 Forego its steady purpose. 



Material causes, on the contrary, are regular in their operations, and unin- 

 terrupted in their effects. Nobody doubts that the sim will rise to-morrow ; 

 that a cannon-ball will sink in water; or that, if the lamps over our heads 

 were to be extinguished, we should be in darkness. The power of Buona- 

 parte, when in the zenith of his success, was absolute and almost unbounded, 

 but did even this ensure steadiness of conduct ? Quite the reverse. We be- 

 hold the decrees of to-day overthrown by those of to-morrow, and, in the 

 blind and overwhelming career of his ambition, his hosts of bloodhounds 

 that have just plundered his enemies next sent against his friends; we be- 

 hold every thing in nature, that is within his reach, tottering and out of joint ; 

 while every thing that is beyond and above him continues steadfast and un- 

 changeable ; the air is as vital as ever, the seasons as regular in their courses, 

 and, to adopt the beautiful language of our poet-laureate — 



The moon, 

 Regardless of the stir nf this low world, 

 / Holds Oil her heavenly way. 



But we are farther told, that unless there be the same fixed and dependent 

 chain established in the moral creation which unquestionably exists in the 

 physical, the Deity himself could have no prescience or foreknowledge of 

 human conduct. And so forcible has this argument appeared to some men, 

 and men, too, of acknowledged worth and piety, that in the dilemma into 

 which they have felt themselves thrown, like the Brahmins of the East, they 

 have utterly abandoned the doctrine of divine prescience in favour of that of 

 moral liberty. 



Shallow and impotent conclusion ! Absurd admission of an hostility that 

 has no existence I As though he who sees through infinite space is incapable 

 of seeing through the brief duration of time ; or as though, lil^e Theseus in 

 the Cretan labyrinth, the great Author of nature stands in need of a thread 

 to guide him through the maze of his own creation, and depends upon every 

 preceding event as a direction-post to that which follows. There are con- 

 tingencies in the natural as well as in the moral world, though they are far 

 less frequent because far less necessary. Miracles are of this description ; 

 they are direct and palpable deviations from the common laws of nature, the 

 common routine of causes and effects ; and he who denies that the Deity can 

 know any thing of contingencies, in the one case, ought also to deny that he 

 can know any thing of them in the other ; for the necessary and consecutive 

 chain of causation, upon, which alone such philosophers found the attribute 

 of prescience, is equally broken in both instances. But such philosophers 

 have to deny still more than this, or they must abandon their principle alto- 

 gether. They have equally to deny that the Deity can see or know any thing 

 of such anomalies, even when present ; for if he can only know events as 

 successive and necessary links of preceding events, the tie being broken, on 

 their appearance, and the anomalous events detached, he can have no more 

 knowledge of them when gone by or present than when future. It may, per- 

 haps, be thought, that when present and operating they pass before him ! Pass 

 before him ! O puerile and miserable conception of Divinity ! All nature is 

 equally before him, in every point of space, and every moment of eternity, and 

 he who denies God to be every wkere, must deny him to be anywhere ; unless 

 he sees and knows every thing, he must see and know nothing. Miracles and 

 moral contingencies, then, are as much provided for, and must be so, as the 

 most common train of natural events. It is true, we know nothing of the arrange- 

 ment by which they subsist ; but they are and must be provided for, neverthe- 

 less. It is here, and here only, we ought to tast — in an equal acknowledgment 

 of human ignorance and divine perfection ; — for it is, assuredly, not quite 

 consistent either with the modesty of genuine philosophy, or the reverence 

 of religious faith, to controvert a truth because we cannot account for it ; or 



