74 T/z£ Course of Nature, [January, 
is not many centuries since the pestilence was believed to 
be specially sent by Heaven to punish mankind for their 
wickedness. Punishment and terror were here the ends 
which Providence was supposed to have in view. The 
regular daily breezes and showers were supposed to be the 
result of natural laws. But these laws were not supposed 
to be entirely adequate to the production of the tornado, 
which was again a special messenger, and they were sus- 
pended or their action was modified in times of extreme 
drought threatening mankind with famine. 
These special messengers of Heaven have, one by one, 
yoked themselves to the car of natural law, so that I think 
I can hardly be wrong in saying that the supremacy of 
mechanical law and its adequacy to account for the whole 
course of nature, as we see it going on before us, is now the 
almost universal opinion of educated men. This revolution 
in human thought is, perhaps, clearly brought out in the 
different view we now take of certain religious observances 
introduced by our ancestors, whose ideas would now be con- 
sidered as approaching the irreverent. Take, for example, 
the prayers for the right kind of weather, which we find in 
our prayer-hooks. When they were first composed and 
inserted, their objeCt was a purely pradtica.1 one. As the 
farmers now sometimes fire off cannon to make the black 
cloud break and discharge its contents upon the parched 
field, so the prayers were to be offered up in order that the 
aqueous vapour in the air might he made to condense and 
fall. That a much more exalted view of prayer than this is 
now taken by the more enlightened portion of the religious 
world, I think we have every reason to believe. 
Although we can hardly entertain a serious doubt that 
the mechanical theory of natural operations, or, as it is 
sometimes called, the dodtrine of the uniformity of nature, 
is generally acquiesced in by the mature thought of intelli- 
gent Christendom, yet objections are frequently made to it 
because it seems to run counter to some of our most 
cherished ideas. If it were not paradoxical to make the 
assertion, it might be said that we hold, or at least express, 
entirely inconsistent views on the subject. The fadt is that 
we are pupils of two opposing schools, which are, in a cer- 
tain degree, antagonistic, one of which we cannot, and the 
other of which we will not, give up. In one of these schools 
the chief teachers are observation and experience. All sen- 
timent and emotion are banished from its curriculum, which 
admits only the hard realities of the outer world. The older 
we grow the more we see and hear of this school, and the 
