all sentient beings known or
unknown to us, and also to his own sovereign pleasure as the supreme
object, we may not be in a position either to understand or profit by
all its parts, and hence may expect to find many mysteries, and many
things that we can not at present reconcile with God's wisdom and
goodness. We know but "parts of his ways," the "fullness of his power
who can understand." "His judgments are unsearchable," "his ways are
past finding out."

4. The law of type or pattern in nature is distinctly indicated in the
Bible. This is a principle only recently understood by naturalists,
but it has more or less dimly dawned on the minds of many great
thinkers in all ages. Nor is this wonderful, for the idea of type is
scarcely ever absent from our own conceptions of any work that we may
undertake. In any such work we anticipate recurring daily toil, like
the returning cycles of nature. We look for progress, like that of the
growth of the universe. We study adaptation both of the several parts
to subordinate uses, and of the whole to some general design. But we
also keep in view some pattern, style, or order, according to which
the whole is arranged, and the mutual relations of the parts are
adjusted. The architect must adhere to some order of architecture, and
to some style within that order. The potter, the calico-printer, and
the silversmith must equally study uniformity of pattern in their
several manufactures. The Almighty Worker has exhibited the same idea
in his works. In the animal kingdom, for instance, we have four or
more leading types of structure. Taking any one of these--the
vertebrate, for example--we have a uniform general plan, embracing the
vertebral column constructed of the same elements; the members,
whether the arm of man, the limb of the quadruped, or the wing of the
bat or the bird, or the swimming-paddle of the whale, built of the
same bones. In like manner all the parts of the vertebral column
itself in the same animal, whether in the skull, the neck, or the
trunk, are composed of the same elementary structures. These types are
farther found to be sketched out--first in their more general, and
then in their special features--in proceeding from the lower species
of the same type to the higher, in proceeding from the earlier to the
later stages of embryonic development, and in proceeding from the more
ancient to the more recent creatures that have succeeded each other in
geological time. M