to act in this unseen efficacy, rather than in the perpetual display of manifest new creations. The invisible 
miracle is left to be inferred by the human sagacity, from the wonderful phenomena that are continually 
occurring to our eyesight, which no human or known natural agency can account for. It is thus that He 
makes His eternal Power and Godhead the deduction of our reason and the sentiment of our intellectual 
sensibility, as well as a communicated truth from His personal revelation. The appeal has been felt by all 
nations in all ages, although few have acted properly or consistently with the sublime impression. 
All Vegetables, in every region, and of all sorts, from the most minute to the most towering; and they 
are of every degree and variety of size, from that pettiness which escapes our natural sight, to that mag- 
nitude which we feel to be gigantic and would deem sublime, but that greater things are about us ; have 
these properties in common with all animals and with the human race — organization : an interior power of 
progressive growth ; a principle of life, with many phenomena that resemble irritability, excitability and 
susceptibility ; and a self-reproductive and multiplying faculty. In all these qualities, they are distinguished 
from inorganic and earthly matter, and from all fluids and gases ; and by these are raised high in the scale 
of being above them. In these they resemble all animated nature, and our prouder selves. We may dis- 
like such a relationship; but to this extent our bodily frame and functions establish a natural kinship be- 
tween us. They are very humble cousins, but we cannot destroy the organical and living affinity, nor es- 
cape the closing assimilation. We decline and die, as they do; and they sicken, fade, die and decay, like 
every human being. There is also another analogy. Their substance nourishes us, and ours not unfre- 
quently becomes a part of theirs. They can feed on us, as we more continually and universally do on 
them. All living nature is- linked together by actual connexion, if not by perceivable sympathies. 
An organized being is a peculiar conception and fabrication of the Divine mind. And Vegetables have 
been caused to be organized beings of definite figures, diversified from each other into distinct classes and 
species; but each species constantly retaining and perpetuating its own peculiar configurations and the 
qualities thence resulting — and all with a living principle within them. Life and organization are insepa- 
rable companions. 
To form a correct idea of what an organized being is, you may observe, that in human mechanism we 
have an imitation and an analogy of vegetable and animal organization, which enable us more fully to under- 
stand it, and to perceive how it has originated. Neither watches, cotton-mills, nor steam-engines grow : 
they must be made by human hands, under the direction of a designing thought and will ; and this mode of 
their fabrication discovers to us how all similar things whose forming agents we have not seen at work and 
therefore how all natural organizations whose principles of construction are the same, and of which they are 
in perfect similitude, must have been made. 
All mechanisms, from the pair of tongs or the snuffers, to the windmill, the ship, and the manufacturing 
machines, consist of pieces or particles of matter taken out of their natural and proceeding state, and put 
into a peculiar arrangement in due relation to each other, so that, from this specific combination, the action 
of the completed thing may produce the effect intended by its planning, adjusting and commanding maker. 
Such are the mechanisms of man, and such are the organizations or mechanisms of his Creator. The plant 
and the animal, and the human beings are, in their bodily structure, material machines. They are so many 
mechanized substances, consisting of parts that have been put together from some other state into designed 
and adapted arrangements; and by their artificial and special construction, they each possess and exert 
powers which thence arise, and produce the phenomena which it was intended to effect. Nothing but 
human workmanship and skill will account for human mechanism. No metal in the mines could by any 
chance move itself into the wheels and springs and parts and adjustments which constitute a watch or an 
organ ; and begin marking time or playing a melody. So nothing but Divine agency and intelligence will 
explain the manner in which the inert particles of things became combined originally into vegetable or ani- 
mal organizations; because all other known agencies are known to be utterly incompetent to such effects. 
In neither human or Divine mechanisms do the parts of which they consist tend in themselves to be what 
they are, or do what they do. Iron has no tendency to be a hammer or a chain ; nor brass to be in a clock 
or cannon, or in a telescope, or in a piano-forte. So none of the particles that constitute plants have any 
natural tendency to be a carnation, an apple or an acorn, nor to form animal flesh, or to be wings, feathers, 
feet or fins. 
In all cases of mechanism and organization, the forming parts and particles have been taken out of 
their natural and preceding state, and have been put into those mechanized positions and combinations by 
some thinking, willing and competent agent, for the express purpose of their being thereby made to be the 
artificial figures and individual things which we see them respectively to be, and of doing the precise and 
determinate actions and effects which each of them separately and peculiary performs. Such are organi- 
zations in general : and Plants are that peculiar species of their construction, which display to us the Divine 
ideas in this class of natural being ; and which form the largest compartment in the immense panorama of 
the surface of our terrestrial fabric.* 
Turner’s Sacred History. 
