reduce the phenomena of nature to general laws, and to
limit those occasions on which it is necessary to conceive of a direct and
separate interposition of divine power, as a fresh encroachment on the
prerogatives of the Deity, or a concealed attack upon his very existence.
And yet these very same men are daily appealing to such laws of the
creation as have already been established, for their great proofs of the
existence and the wisdom of God! Their imagination has remained utterly
untutored by the little knowledge which they have rather learned to repeat
than to apprehend. Whatever words they may utter, of subtle and
high-sounding import, concerning the purely spiritual nature of the Divine
Being, it is, in fact, a _Jupiter Tonans_ clad in human lineaments, and
invested with human passions, that their heart is yearning after. Such
objectors as these can only be beaten back, and chained down, by what some
one has called the brute force of public opinion.

Some little time ago men of this class deemed it irreligious to speak of
the _laws_ of the human mind; it savoured of necessity, of fatalism; they
now applaud a Dr Chalmers when he writes his Bridgewater Treatise, to
illustrate the attributes of God in the laws of the mental as well as the
physical world.

No, there is nothing atheistic, nothing irreligious, in the attempt to
conceive creation, as well as reproduction, carried on by universal laws.
For what is the difference between individual isolated acts, and acts
capable of being expressed in a general formula? This only, that in the
second case the same act is repeated in constant sequence with other acts,
and probably repeated in many places at the same time. The divine work is
only multiplied. If the creation of a world should be proved to be as
orderly and systematic as that of a plant, this may make worlds more
common to the imagination, but it cannot make the power that creates them
less marvellous.

But while we would reprove the narrowness of spirit that finds, in any of
the discoveries of science, a source of disquietude for the interests of
religion, we have here an observation to make of an opposite character,
which we think of some importance, and which we shall again, in reviewing
the theories of our author, have occasion to insist upon. It is
undoubtedly true that there rises in the minds of every person at all
tinctured with science, a presumption that every phenomenon we witness
might be, if our