f chances as a well-ordered Cosmos. Perhaps more
easily; for it goes without saying that such a conglomeration of
promiscuous chances could not possibly be thought of as a world of God.
Order and strict obedience to law, far from being excluded, are required
by faith in God, are indeed a direct and inevitable preliminary to
thinking of the world as dependent upon God. Thus we may state the
paradox, that only a Cosmos which, by its strict obedience to law, gives
us the impression of being sufficient unto itself, can be conceived of as
actually dependent upon God, as His creation. If any man desires to stop
short at the consideration of the apparent self-sufficiency of the Cosmos
and its obedience to law, and refuses to recognise any reasons outside of
the world for this, we should hardly be able, according to our own
proposition, to require him to go farther. For we maintained that God
could not be read out of nature, that the idea of God could never have
been gained in the first instance from a study of nature and the world.
The problem always before us is rather, whether, having gained the idea
from other sources, we can include the world within it. Our present
question is whether the world, as it is, and just because it is as it is,
can be conceived of as dependent upon God. And this question can only be
answered in the affirmative, and in the sense of Schiller's oft-quoted
lines:

The great Creator
We see not--He conceals himself within
His own eternal laws. The sceptic sees
Their operation, but beholds not Him,
"Wherefore a God!" he cries, "the world itself
Suffices for itself!" and Christian prayer
Ne'er praised him more, than does this blasphemy.

God's world could not possibly be a conglomeration of chances; it must be
orderly, and the fact that it is so proves its dependence.

But while we thus hold fast to our canon, we shall find that the assertion
of the world's dependence receives indirect corroboration even in regard
to the astronomical realm, from certain signs which it exhibits, from
certain suggestions which are implied in it. We must not wholly overlook
two facts which, to say the least, are difficult to fit in with the idea
of the independence and self-sufficiency of the world; these are, on the
one hand, the difficulties involved in the idea of an eternal machine, and
on the other the difficult fact of "entropy." We have already compared the
worl