to the one point of
the relation subsisting between "the Constitution of Man and External
Objects,"--that is a perfectly legitimate, and might be a highly
instructive field of investigation; but we do object to his utter
forgetfulness of that limitation in the progress of his work, and to his
attempt to introduce a variety of other topics which are manifestly
alien from his professed design. If he meant to discuss merely the
relation between the constitution of man and external objects, he had
nothing whatever to do with the far higher and more comprehensive
doctrine respecting the relation between the constitution of man and the
government of God, and, least of all, with the _revealed_ doctrines of a
special Providence, of a fall into a state of sin, of death as its
wages, and of "spiritual influences" by which the ruin occasioned by the
fall may be redressed; and yet these topics, foreign as they are to the
professed design of his work, are all introduced, and treated, too, in a
way that is fitted, if not designed, to shake the confidence of his
readers in what have hitherto been regarded as important articles of the
Christian faith. It has received this significant testimony, "'Combe's
Constitution of Man' would be worth a hundred New Testaments on the
banks of the Ganges."[196]

There are _two points_, especially, on which he comes more directly into
collision with our present argument:

1. He speaks as if God governed the universe _only_ by "natural laws,"
so as to exclude any other dispensation of Providence.

2. He speaks as if the "physical and organic" laws of Nature possessed
the same authority and imposed the same obligation as the "moral" laws
of Conscience and Revelation; and as if the breach or neglect of the
former were _punishable_ in the same sense, and for the same reason, as
the transgression of the latter.

Next to the omission of all reference to a future state, and the total
exclusion of the connection which subsists between the temporal and the
eternal under the Divine government, we hold these _two_ to be the
capital defects of his treatise; and it may be useful, in the present
state of public opinion, to offer a few remarks upon each of them.

In regard to the _first_, we need not repeat what we have already
explicitly declared, that God does govern the world _in part_ by means
of "natural laws" and "second causes;" but, not content with this
concession, Mr. Combe speaks as if He governed t