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The Formative Power in Nature . 
[May, 
speak in a scientific article of what “ Christians worship and 
adore.” All men, willingly or unwillingly, entertain the idea 
of God, and all thinking men attempt to define him, because 
all such men desire to understand that which is the objedt 
of their faith. So far as I can understand or learn (my 
studies have been somewhat extensive) no man has yet 
accomplished that objedt. Dean Stanley says, “To Spinoza 
was vouchsafed the clearest glimpse into the nature of 
Deity.” After a contemplation of this nost momentous 
conception, man falls back on the comparative nothingness 
of himself, and finds how miserably small is the faculty he 
possesses when he endeavours to grasp this stupendous idea. 
No man by his reason can define what God is, nor where 
God is ; no human reason can teach of his being or of his 
existence. We go to Nature, and there find order amid 
diversity, and homogeneity in seeming heterogeneity. We 
know that accumulated accidents do not constitute order : 
where order is there is always intelligent direction and super- 
intendence ; hence we infer that Nature had an ordinator, 
and that all we perceive must have been the result of that 
ordinator’s will, combined with a maintaining power which 
may well be termed a providence. We see the machine, and 
infer that there is a machinist or creator. We see intelligent 
direction, and therefore infer that there is intelligence in the 
machinist. We see the exemplification of power, and we 
therefore infer that the machinist is powerful. We see an 
orderly maintenance and direction, and therefore infer the 
continual presence of the machinist. The corollary of this 
exposition is that the machinist is all intelligent, because all 
his works which we are able to examine are perfectly 
adapted to their particular placements, and of each to the 
other ; that he is ultra-powerful, because the great and little 
— the floating mote which reflects the magnetic adtion of 
the sun, comprehended as light, and worlds and systems of 
worlds — are in his grasp ; that he is ever superintending, 
because the universe is orderly administered, — i.e., the uni- 
verse is order. Thus we arrive at a Machinist or Creator 
who is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent ; further 
than this no reasoning will lead us. 
In the Vedic poems of Chaos, or the beginning, we read : 
— “Nothing that is was then, even what is not did not 
exist then ; what was it that hid or covered the existing ? 
What was the refuge of what ? Was water the deep abyss, 
the Chaos which swallowed up everything ? There was no 
death, nothing immortal. There was no space, no life, and, 
lastly, no time, no solar torch by which morning might be 
