We cannot see a law of nature, but we infer it. It is not written, like a proclamation, on visible paper, and hung up in the universe, to be translated or read. The phenomena which it occasions are all that our senses can know; but these indicate it to our discerning and reasoning mind; and we think and conjecture, connect and compare what we observe, until we find out the general law or principle on which the facts occur. It is in the same way we learn the agency of the Deity, and the derivation of all the laws of nature from him. It is in the same way we must study and strictly explore his intentions and purposes in them, and in all which they accomplish. We can only know the events and results; but by duly contemplating these, and by rightly reasoning upon them, we shall in time form those probable inferences as to his ends and meaning, which the more judicious minds will feel to be most satisfactory, and will be always trying to confirm or to enlarge and improve.* Our perceptions as to these will become more just and more successful in proportion as our knowledge and exercise of mind upon them increase. The human thought will improve in these meditations, as it has done in all others, by patient attention, by continued deliberation, by comparison of events, by a constant endeavour to ascertain the exact truth, and by a desire to avoid all misleading prepossessions, all hasty theories, and all egotistical presumptions.†

The admirable words of Handel's beautiful and impressive air should be always in our recollection:

"What though I trace each herb and flower

That drinks the morning dew?
Unless I own JEHOVAH's power,

How vain were all I knew!"

Hand. Sol.

+ Dr. Kidd's concluding paragraph deserves our frequent recollection, --"If, with Newton, we have delighted to deduce from the contemplation of the mechanism of the heavenly bodies the power of HIM Who made them, and who alone sustains and directs their motions, we may, and with faculties infinitely expanded, cultivate with him the same pure pleasures which, even on earth, attracted his desires from earthly wants. "Enraptured with the harmonious movement of these endless systems, which neither our present organs can see, nor our present faculties apprehend, we may continue to be constantly acquiring new knowledge; constantly absorbed in new wonder and adoration of THAT POWER, from whom, both in this world and in that which is to come, all knowledge, and every other good and perfect gift, are alone derived."-Dr. Kidd, p. 344.

How superior in views like these of our collegiate professor, and of myriads of others who think and feel like him, does the modern mind of

The importance of our adhering to the great principle of the divine creation of the world, is strikingly shown in the wild conjectures by which they who reject it and all sacred authorities, attempt still to account for the origin of all things. The two latest systems of this sort now afloat, indicate what we should soon sink to if we abandoned the idea of an intelligent Creator.*

LETTER IV.

Causes of the Idea of a Creation having been absent from the Ancient Mind-Importance of the Inferences which result from it-Ancient suppositions of Necessity and Fate, instead of a Creation and Providence-No general Providence without an individual one-These Ideas the Foundation of all Sacred History.

MY DEAR BOY,

Ir may surprise you at the first glance to find that the ancient world were generally unable to cherish in their minds that idea of a creating God which the Hebrew Scriptures inculcate, and which the enlightened population of our own happier day so universally entertain; especially as the communication of the fact accompanied the first existence of our race. The hostility of some among us to this great verity of nature, evinces that it may be opposed by individuals without being unknown or forgotten: but that in every country of antiquity it should have been so much abandoned and disliked, and so human nature appear to that of the greatest and most celebrated men who adorned the ancient nations of the world!

* Mr. Cuvier thus states them: "Some writers have reproduced and greatly extended the ideas of De Maillet. They say that, at first, every thing was in a state of liquefaction; that the liquid engendered animals of the simplest kind, such as monads, and others of the infusory and microscopic species; and that, in progress of time, these animals complicated and diversified their species into those now existing."

Other writers, like Kepler, assign vital powers to the globe; each of its component parts has life. Not only the very elementary atoms have instinct and will, but every sort of mineral can convert immense masses into its own proper nature. Mountains are the organs of the respiration of the globe, and the schists, the secreting organs!-Cuvier's Fossil Bones, v. i. p. 41.

In what do these notions substantially differ from those above quoted from Seneca, which have been so long consigned to derision and oblivion?

The

But

many wild and unwarranted conjectures adopted instead, is a circumstance which it is difficult to explain. The real cause I believe to be, that all great truths require a certain progression of the human mind, both morally and intellectually, in order to be adequately valued, felt, or understood. true idea of God is too much connected with the true philosophy of nature, with the right feelings of the human heart, and with the proper ethical dispositions of the character, to be either liked or fostered where these are absent. these are notoriously deficient wherever paganism prevails; and without unjustly defaming other ages and nations, we may say, that the strange puerilities which they preferred to worship the fantastic baby dreams which they patronised and sang, with the lavish effusions of their admiring genius; and the positive falsehoods which, on divine subjects, they either ignorantly adopted or designedly taught, imply that the human intellect had not then reached that extended correctness of judgment which these require, nor attained that proportion of knowledge, without which this invaluable faculty of our spirit will not on any subject be efficaciously exerted.*

*Plutarch's representations of the ideas of some of the most celebrated men of antiquity upon the Deity, show us his impressions of what these were; Christians may misconceive them, but he, with a more congenial education, must have sufficiently understood them.

"Some of the philosophers, as Diagoras the Milesian, Theodorus of Cyrene, and Euhemeros of Tegea, said that there were no gods at all. "Anaxagoras declared that material things existed stationary from the beginning; but that the mind of God put them in order, and made generations of them all.

"Plato thought that material things were subsisting, but without any arrangement, and were moving confusedly about, and that the Deity, knowing that order was better than disorder, put them into regularity.

Anaximander affirmed the stars to be the eternal gods; Democritus, that Deity was a fiery form, the soul of the world.

"Pythagoras taught, that of the principles of things the Monad was God, and good, which was the nature of one and the understanding itself; but the Duad was indefinite, and a demon and evil, about which is the multitude of matter and the visible world."

All these systems gave coeternity or anterior eternity to matter. "Aristotle supposed that the Supreme God (avwrurw Oɛov) was a separate form stationed on the sphere of the universe, with an ethereal body, which he called the fifth. This being divided according to the spheres, cohering to them by its nature, but distinct in reason, he thought that each of the spheres was a living being, consisting of body and soul; of which the body is ethereal, always moving circularly; but the soul is immoveable, and, by its energy, the cause of motion.

For it is universally true that nature must be properly known as to its constitution, laws, and substances, before it can be felt to have been essentially and originally an intelligent creation and until this is sufficiently perceived from direct revelation reverentially believed, or from a distinct knowledge of the composition, science, and adaptations which it contains, an intelligent Creator making and adjusting both its matter and its form will not be attached to it, nor can be convincingly inferred from it.

He is always what he is; but we cannot discern him, till our minds have been duly trained to trace him in his works; just as no one can know astronomy or geography without a similar process.

It is as impossible for a Bramin or Buddist, with their vernacular books of their sciences, to be a rational geographer, as with their Vedas, Puranas, and Ramayunas and accredited idolatry, to have a rational idea of God. A palace cannot be built of mud, nor can the Toorkmun or Caffre architects of their cabins construct a cathedral. Both the mind and the material must be improved before the efficiency can occur; and for this result to take place, sufficient time and the suited progress must intermediately precede.*

"The Stoics thought the Deity to be more common in every thing; a workman fire (TUP TεXVIкоV) proceeding in a way to the generation of the world, comprehending all things with spermatic reasons, by which all things are made according to fated destiny; a spirit pervading the whole universe, but changing its denominations as it passes through all nature. So that God is the world, the stars, and the earth, and the mind supreme above all in the sky.

"Epicurus declared, that all the gods have human forms (avopwTOεides); but all these can be seen by the reason only, from the subt ilty of the nature of their images. They were also incorruptible, atomical, empty, unbounded and alike."-Plut. Plac. Phil. I. i. c. 7.

*I am quite satisfied, and I write with the largest recollection of all that I have read upon the subject which I can comprehend, that no individual in any country, from the time of Thales to our Saviour, except in the Jewish nation, either believed, or would have admitted, both the first article in our decalogue and the first sentence in our creed, with which the poorest person who attends his Sunday devotion is now familiar:

"I am the Lord thy God. Thou shalt have no other God but ine." "I believe in God; the Father Almighty; the Maker of heaven and earth, and all things visible and invisible."

The creation of matter, and the non-existence of any other gods of any sex, than the One Almighty whom we worship, were nowhere parts of the ancient mind out of Judea.

It is the perceived and understood skill of any human mechanism which occasions us to estimate justly the contriving talents of its maker.

As long as a savage believes that a watch grows of itself, he will never suppose that there has been a watchmaker nor would those who thought a ship to be a living animal, imagine that any naval architect constructed it.* So, as long as the classical nations would dream of marriages between the different parts of nature, and literally thought and believed all things to be parental productions; and would consider night, and the sky, the ocean, rivers, fire, and the other elements, to be personal beings forming connubial unions with each other, and having men and gods as their children, or at least constantly talking of them as such, it was impossible, that with such opinions they could think of a designing and forming Creator. It was more suitable to these ideas that they should have fancied that men crawled out of the earth like worms, or were self-hatched from floating eggs; and when they added to these systems, or rather superseded them, by their Olympian divinities, they only enlarged their own distance from the truth.

Socrates, Plato, Pythagoras, the stoic school, and even Cicero, believed in the existence of secondary and inferior divinities, in addition to the Supreme whom they spoke of. All paid worship to some of them, and all taught and practised conformity to the popular superstitions of their country. Nor do I think that any but the Persians were hostile to the representation of their deities by material images of some form or other. Most writers who mention these, applaud and justify the practice. The second commandment was therefore as much beyond them as the first.

Plato disliked Homer's pictures of the intrigues and vices of his gods, but expressly admits the existence of such beings, though with a different costume. Plotinus, Porphyry, and Julian, took similar distinctions, and upheld paganism stoutly with their own modifications.

Nothing but Christianity would have overthrown it, nor will now do so in any country where it is prevailing.

* Captain Beechy mentions, that the natives of Bear Island, in the Pacific, "supposed the first vessel which they saw to be the spirit of one of their relations lately deceased."-Voyage, vol. i. p. 244.

† We must not mistake the disapproval of some of the tales attached to these gods, as indicating a disbelief in the Polytheism. Pindar complains of fables being repeated about them (Olym. i. v. 43), but he was one of their zealous votaries, and revered them as such.

Aristotle, who seems to have preferred the notion that mankind have had no beginning, in one of the works ascribed to him, remarks,-" If men and animals have sprung from the earth, that must have been in one of two ways: either they crawled out as worms, or came out of eggs."-De Gen. An. 1. iii. cap. ult.