82 GENERAL CONSIDERATIONS ON THE 



niable of all the attributes of Omnipotence. It lowers him 

 towards the level of our own humble intellects. Much 

 more worthy of him it surely is, to suppose that all things 

 have been commissioned by him from the first, though 

 neither is he absent from a particle of the current of na- 

 tural affairs in one sense, seeing that the whole system is 

 continually supported by his providence. Even in human 

 affairs, if I may be allowed to adopt a familiar illustra- 

 tion, there is a constant progress from specific action for 

 particular occasions, to arrangements which, once estab 

 lished, shall continue to answer for a great multitude ot 

 occasions. Such plans the enlightened readily form for 

 themselves, and conceive as being adopted by all who 

 have to attend to a multitude of affairs, while the ignorant 

 suppose every act of the greatest public functionary to be 

 the result of some special consideration and care on his 

 part alone. Are we to suppose the Deity adopting plans 

 which harmonize only with the modes of procedure of the 

 less enlightened of our race ? Those who would object to 

 the hypothesis of a creation by the intervention of law, do 

 not perhaps consider how powerful an argument in favor 

 of the existence of God is lost by rejecting this doctrine. 

 When all is seen to be the result of law, the idea of an 

 Almighty Author becomes irresistible, for the creation of 

 a law for an endless series of phenomena — an act of intel- 

 ligence above all else that we can conceive — could have 

 no other imaginable source, and tells, moreover, as pow- 

 erfully for a sustaining as for an originating power. On 

 this point a remark of Dr. Buckland seems applicable : 

 " 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 farther to answer, under 

 many dispensations of the material world, such an abori- 

 ginal constitution, so far from superseding an intelligent 

 agent, would only exalt our conceptions of the consum- 

 mate skill and power that could comprehend such an in- 

 finity of future uses under future systems, in the original 

 groundwork of his creation." 



A late writer, in a work embracing a vast amount of 

 miscellaneous knowledge, but written in a dogmatic style, 

 argues at great length for the doctrine of more immediate 

 exertions on the part of the Deity in the works of his cre- 

 ation. One of the most striking of his illustrations is a« 



