This passage exhibits, we conceive, that combination of feelings which ought to mark the character of the religious natural philosopher; an earnest piety ready to draw nutriment from the contemplation of established physical truths; joined with a philosophical caution, which is not seduced by the anticipation of such contemplations, to pervert the strict course of physical enquiry.

It is precisely through this philosophical care and scrupulousness that our views of final causes acquire their force and value as aids to religion. The object of such views is not to lead us to physical truth, but to connect such truth, obtained by its proper processes and methods, with our views of God, the master of the universe, through those laws and relations which are thus placed beyond dispute.

Bacon's comparison of final causes to the vestal virgins is one of those poignant sayings, so frequent in his writings, which it is not easy to forget. "Like them," he says, "they are dedicated to God, and are barren." But to any one who reads his work it will appear in what spirit this was meant. "Not because those final causes are not true and worthy to be inquired, being kept within their own province." (Of the Advancement of Learning, b. ii. p. 142.) If he had had occasion to develope his simile, full of latent meaning as his similes so often are,

he would probably have said, that to these final causes barrenness was no reproach, seeing they ought to be, not the mothers but the daughters of our natural sciences; and that they were barren, not by imperfection of their nature, but in order that they might be kept pure and undefiled, and so fit ministers in the temple of God.

CHAPTER VIII.

On the Physical Agency of the Deity.

1. We are not to expect that physical investigation can enable us to conceive the manner in which God acts upon the members of the universe. The question, "Canst thou by searching find out God?" must silence the boastings of science as well as the repinings of adversity. Indeed, science shows us, far more clearly than the conceptions of every day reason, at what an immeasurable distance we are from any faculty of conceiving how the universe, material and moral, is the work of the Deity. But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this; we can perceive that events are brought about, not by insulated interpositions of divine power exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws. This, which is the view of the universe proper to science,

whose office it is to search out these laws, is also the view which, throughout this work, we have endeavoured to keep present to the mind of the reader. We have attempted to show that it combines itself most readily and harmoniously with the doctrines of Natural Theology; that the arguments for those doctrines are strengthened, the difficulties which affect them removed, by keeping it steadily before us. We conceive, therefore, that the religious philosopher will do well to bear this conception in his mind. God is the author and governor of the universe through the laws which he has given to its parts, the properties which he has impressed upon its constituent elements: these laws and properties are, as we have already said, the instruments with which he works: the institution of such laws, the selection of the quantities which they involve their combination and application, are the modes in which he exerts and manifests his power, his wisdom, his goodness: through these attributes, thus exercised, the Creator of all, shapes, moves, sustains and guides the visible creation.

This has been the view of the relation of the Deity to the universe entertained by the most sagacious and comprehensive minds ever since the true object of natural philosophy has been clearly and steadily apprehended. The great writer who was the first to give philosophers a distinct and commanding view of this object,

thus expresses himself in his "Confession of Faith" "I believe-that notwithstanding God hath rested and ceased from creating since the first Sabbath, yet, nevertheless, he doth accomplish and fulfil his divine will in all things, great and small, singular and general, as fully and exactly by providence, as he could by miracle and new creation, though his working be not immediate and direct, but by compass; not violating Nature, which is his own law upon the creature."

And one of our own time, whom we can no longer hesitate to place among the worthiest disciples of the school of Bacon, conveys the same thought in the following passage: "The Divine Author of the universe cannot be supposed to have laid down particular laws, enumerating all individual contingencies, which his materials have understood and obey-this would be to attribute to him the imperfections of human legislation;—but rather, by creating them endued with certain fixed qualities and powers, he has impressed them in their origin with the spirit, not the letter of his law, and made all their subsequent combinations and relations inevitable consequences of this first impression."*

2. This, which thus appears to be the mode of the Deity's operation in the material world,

* Herschel on the Study of Nat. Phil. Art. 27.

requires some attention on our part in order to understand it with proper clearness. One reason of this is, that it is a mode of operation altogether different from that in which we are able to make matter fulfil our designs. Man can construct exquisite machines, can call in vast powers, can form extensive combinations, in order to bring about results which he has in view. But in all this he is only taking advantage of laws of nature which already exist; he is applying to his use qualities which matter already possesses. Nor can he by any effort do more. He can establish no new law of nature which is not a result of the existing ones. He can invest matter with no new properties which are not modifications of its present attributes. His greatest advances in skill and power are made when he calls to his aid forces which before existed unemployed, or when he discovers so much of the habits of some of the elements as to be able to bend them to his purpose. He navigates the ocean by the assistance of the winds which he cannot raise or still: and even if we suppose him able to control the course of these, his yet unsubjugated ministers, this could only be done by studying their characters, by learning more thoroughly the laws of air and heat and moisture. He cannot give the minutest portion of the atmosphere new relations, a new course of expansion, new laws of motion. But the Divine opera