II. LETTER do so. He alone is the judge of the necessity or expediency of such an interference; but whatever He chooses to do for the benefit of His creatures, there is nothing to prevent Him from accomplishing. He has no controller nor superior; nor does He take counsel from us, as to the time, the manner, or the fitness of His interposition. Miracles are therefore at no time impossible; but, on the contrary, from the constant presence of the efficient cause, are always probable. The usual course of things is manifestly left to the operation of the mechanized and subordinated laws, as far as their visible causes appear. The supernatural interposition is not necessary, while the common events of nature only are to take place and can occur. But when the manifestation of the Superior Power, or the production of effects to which the common laws of things are inadequate, becomes expedient, then, what is specially needed, specially ensues. The Divine Agency immediately acts and produces visible effects beyond the power of natural causes to occasion; and thus evidences its own operation. That it would not thus interfere without an adequate reason, is the deduction of our judgment, which Horace has so forcibly expressed;" but that it will always thus interfere whenever a sufficient occasion makes its agency expedient, our same judgment will as correctly infer; because intelligence will always act like itself, and therefore intelligently, and therefore at every period do what it is proper and right that it should do. How it has acted in this respect before our present day, history only can inform us from human sources of knowlege. Authentic 7 Nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus Hor. Art. Poet, v. 191. history declares that it has thus interposed, but on rare, and always on great occasions, and from sufficient reasons; and thus the special interference of Divine Agency in the occurrence of miracles on great occasions and from sufficient reasons, is the suggestion of our past experience, and is the true philosophical probability. I throw out these ideas for your consideration, because Sacred History, being the History of the Divine Agency in human affairs, cannot but comprise the appearance, and be expected to exhibit the occurrence of such miracles as were necessary to effectuate its objects. II. G LETTER III. CREATION OF VEGETATION-NECESSITY OF LIGHT AND AIR TO IT ON THE DIVINE AGENCY IN NATURE-ON THE MY DEAR SON, LETTER I CLOSED my last Letter with observations on that Divine superintendence and agency which accompany the continued subsistence of our natural world, because no other supposition will explain those grand phenomena, which no discernible laws of nature can account for; and, because wherever these act, they only operate as they do, by the energy and qualities derived from the Creating Sovereign, and by the arrangement and co-operating and counteracting positions in which He has placed-and having placed, continues to maintain them. The permanent existence of things as they are, is as great a miracle as their original formation. It is their artificial, and not their natural state; and a continued Divine agency is as strictly necessary to keep them in it, as it was to compel them at first to assume it. The Divine agency is therefore as much a principle or law of subsisting nature, as any of its secondary or material ones. It is ever actively operating, for the welfare of what it has caused to exist and perseveres to uphold-and therefore for the benefit of us, who are no inconsiderable portion of the great whole. Being thus the manifested rule and guide of our terrestrial fabric and of its celestial companions, our reason will conduct us to the inference, that it will not be less mindful of the intelligent creatures which it has made—but that a moral providence as to them, and LETTER a moral government over them, and moral instruction to them, will be also laws and principles of its operations upon subsisting nature, as surely as those of the projectile and gravitating forces on our consolidated mass. It is upon this foundation that all Sacred History is built; and it is obviously the principal object of the first chapter of Genesis to establish in the human mind, as a primitive and essential truth, which must never be separated from it, that all existent things are the creation of the common GOD of all, the only and the universal Deity. This has been done as if with the foresight, that two great errors would be raised in the world, and would be set into opposition against it—the casual origin of things, on the one hand-or their un-originating eternity, on the other. We learn from literary history, and we see around us in life, that these notions have occurred and are struggling for prevalence; and as you will not be able to read, or to live, without meeting with them, I again press upon your recollection, in addition to the express testimony of the Mosaic revelation in this its important and commencing section, the reasoned truths, with which these mental hallucinations will be found to be incompatible. No words can more emphatically more emphatically subvert the groundless conception of the casual origin of things, than the declaration of LA PLACE, who had no motive or disposition to favour any better theory, than the force and impression on his mind of the visible truth, that it is INFINITY TO UNITY against such a supposition. Less than this, a mind with his knowlege of the science so essentially incorporated with nature, and so discernible in it, could not have III. LETTER rationally said; and it is to the credit, both of his understanding and of his candour, that what he felt so strongly he has avowed so manlily. We have only to regret that he did not at once connect the Science he admired, with the Divine Mind which produced it. What he has left imperfect and deficient, it is for us to supply. Intelligence must lose the power of discerning intelligence, or the scientific mind will feel that all Lucretian theories, of the particles of things moving themselves casually into the system we admire and are part of, are inconsistent with its visible nature and laws, and totally incompetent to account for them. But our enlightened reason, which makes this deduction, will as clearly feel, as to the other hypothesis, that the complicated structure of the World we inhabit, and of its Planetary system, cannot have been eternal; because no compound, no complexity, no combination of independent and separate particles, can have been eternally in this state. An eternal compound is a natural impossibility. It is a contradiction in its terms, and it cannot be put into any form of phrase without being so. All compounds must be unions of what were once not together; and therefore it is an absurdity to predicate eternity of them. The composing particles may, or may not, have been eternal; that is a question of fact; but never the composition. The separate letters of the alphabet may, or may not, have eternally subsisted, but never one single word, never any sentence; never, à fortiori, either Homer's Iliad or Newton's Principia. Never, therefore, our Earth and its finely gravitating and geometrized system.' 'We must do Lucretius the justice to say, that he felt and avowed his feeling, from surveying its ancient history, that the world had. not |