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processes in nature to the direct agency of God. In some of 
these objections he is evidently more influenced by heathen 
than by Christian conceptions of God and His relation to the 
world. He seems inclined, like the ancients, to look upon the 
Supreme Being as having only an extra-mundane existence, and 
the divine omnipresence appears to be for him relatively an ino- 
perative truth, of little practical value. There would seem also 
to be a forgetting of the words of Him, who said, “ My Father 
worketh hitherto, and I work/' and who affirmed that God, our 
“ Father,” cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the 
field, and even descends to numbering the hairs of our heads ; 
and also an insufficient appreciation of the literal truth of PauFs 
declaration, that it is in God that “ we live, and move, and have 
our being.” Cudworth cites approvingly the judgment of a pagan 
writer, to the effect that “it is not decorous in respect of God, 
that He should set His own hand, as it were, to every work, and 
immediately do all the meanest and triflingest things Himself 
drudgingly, without making use of any inferior and subordinate 
instruments.” Moreover, he continues, it seems not so agree- 
able to reason, that nature should be quite superseded, “ God 
Himself doing all things immediately and miraculously; from 
whence it would follow also, that they are all done either forci- 
bly and violently, or else artificially only, and none of them by 
any inward principle of their own.” (Here Cudworth plays 
directly into the hands of his materialistic opponents, in admit- 
ting that whatever God, the supreme source of universal law, 
literally and immediately does, is done “ miraculously,” “ vio- 
lently,” “artificially.” Furthermore, -whatever an “inward 
principle ” in nature might do, would, in the eyes of a strict 
materialist, be just as strictly miraculous, violent, and artificial. 
What the materialist professes to see, and all he admits, is matter 
and blind force acting “mechanically.” Any ideal principle 
assumed as directing the actions of matter and its “forces,” 
whether from within or from without, is in his view miraculous 
and impossible.) And lastly, Cudworth argues, that the “ slow 
and gradual process ” of things in nature, “ which would seem 
to be but vain and idle pomp, or a trifling formality, if the agent 
were omnipotent,” and also “ those errors and bungles which 
are committed, when the matter is inert and contumacious,” are 
evidences that the agent is not omnipotent; such an agent “could 
despatch its work in a moment” (an evident absurdity ; the very 
conception of nature is that of a process in time, and this obvi- 
ously could not be despatched “ in a moment,” i. e. practically 
in no time), and “ would always do it infallibly and irresistibly.” 
(Here again our author shows himself under bondage to the false 
VOL. XI. T 
