from
everlasting to everlasting, mutually conditioning themselves and betraying
no need for or dependence upon anything outside of themselves. Everything,
even the smallest movement, is here determined strictly by the dependence
of each upon all and of all upon each. There is no variation, no change of
position for which an entirely satisfactory cause cannot be found in the
system as a whole, which works like an immense machine. Nothing indicates
dependence upon anything external. And as it is to-day so it was
yesterday, and a million years ago, and innumerable millions of years ago.
It seems quite gratuitous to suppose that something which does not occur
to-day was necessary at an earlier period, and that everything has not
been from all eternity just as it is now.

We saw that naturalism is attempting to extend this character of
independence and self-sufficiency from the astronomical world to the world
as a whole. Shall we attempt, then, to oppose it in this ambition, but
surrender the realm of the heavenly bodies as already conquered? By no
means. For religion cannot exclude the solar system from the dependence of
all being upon God. And this very example is the most conspicuous one, the
one in regard to which the whole problem can be most definitely
formulated.

Astronomy teaches us that all cosmic processes are governed by a
marvellous far-reaching uniformity of law, which unites in strictest
harmony the nearest and the most remote. Has this fact any bearing upon
the problem of the dependence of the world? No. It surely cannot be that a
world without order could be brought under the religious point of view
more readily than one governed by law! Let us suppose for a moment that we
had to do with a world without strict nexus and definite order of
sequence, without law and without order, full of capricious phenomena,
unregulated associations, an inconstant play of causes. Such a world would
be to us unintelligible, strange, absurd. But it would not necessarily be
more "dependent," more "conditioned" than any other. Had I no other
reasons for looking beyond the world, and for regarding it as dependent on
something outside of itself, the absence of law and order would assuredly
furnish me with none. For, assuming that it is possible at all to conceive
of a world and its contents as independent, and as containing its own
sufficient cause within itself, it would be quite as easily thought of as
a confused lawless play o