refuses to recognize, and of which it counts the knowledge impossible, have occurred and do occur continually, and to these transgressions the words do apply, “there is no gradation of the breach of God's law that is not followed by an equivalent gradation of punishment." A great Scriptural truth is borrowed by a godless and immoral philosophy in which it has no real place, and then, is so disguised as hardly to be recognizable. "The wages of sin is death." "In the way of righteousness is life, in the pathway thereof there is no death.” "The righteous shall be recompensed in the earth, much more the wicked and the sinner." "The commandment of God is life everlasting."

CHAPTER VIII.

NATURE WITHOUT MAN OR GOD.

THE indictment of immorality which Mr Mill has brought against Nature, that idol of modern physicists, suggests a deep inquiry, which may throw light on the whole question of anti-supernaturalism. There are four classes of action of which we can conceive. (1) The direct action of God Himself, the supreme intelligence and perfect goodness, doing as He will among the inhabitants of heaven and the dwellers upon earth: The exclusion of all such direct action of God Himself, as unreasonable if not impossible, is the main dogma of anti-supernaturalism. (2) The second class of activity consists of the conscious voluntary actions of good or bad men, who are subject to a law of moral duty, and the similar action of good or bad spirits, or rational beings in other parts of the universe, supposing us to have access to them, and means of ascertaining their reality, and of discriminating them from all lower activities. (3) Thirdly, the actings of the animal creation, or of vegetable life. None of these can have a strictly moral or anti-moral character. It is not surprising that in brute nature no traces of moral action should be found, though there are near approaches to it, and close resemblances in the nobler animals, when humanized by association with man. (4) Fourthly, there are the

actings of all material creatures, things devoid either of animal or vegetable life, which yet are most intimately connected with the welfare or continued existence of living things. Many indeed hold that lifeless matter has no active power whatever; that action is the distinctive character of conscious mind; so that what we popularly call the actings of material objects, are really the direct actings of the Creator Himself. This view, I think, is erroneous, and that activity of some kind is essential to a real existence. That which cannot act in some way or other cannot be acted upon, and that very passivity and sluggishness which is imputed to lifeless matter, still requires us to admit in it activity of some kind. The wind acts when it blows upon us, fire when it burns us, a stone when it bruises us, the earth itself when it pinions us to its surface by its attraction. The difference is that in the actings of lifeless things, or material objects of all kinds, there is no spontaneity or element of choice, but the action is determined by distance and position alone. The immense disproportion, in amount, of unorganized matter in the universe as known to us, compensates in a certain sense for the inferior and more passive form of its activity. Its actings, because they are lower in kind than even those of the brutes themselves, cannot possibly reveal moral features of choice or discrimination, with reference to moral ends or purposes. There seem to be three laws at least to which all matter is subject. (1) The first is that of universal appetency, each atom of matter tending to approach every other, with a force or intensity determined by the distance alone. (2) The second is a law of special appetency, determined by the union and interaction of matter and self-repulsive ether. On this second law, probably, all cohesion, electric affinity, and chemical structure depend. (3) The third is a law of ethereal repulsion,

on which all the phenomena of light, electricity, magnetism, heat, and the more subtle agencies of nature depend.

If then we deny all direct action of God, the Supreme Intelligence, and shut out the Creator from His own universe, and then speak of nature in contrast to man, of the natural in contrast to the artificial, it is idle to look for moral qualities in the actings of brute creatures, or the limited activities which alone belong to unorganized creatures, or material objects in all their diversities. At the same time, these lowest creatures must have had their limited powers defined by the Creator in the moment of their creation, and out of infinite possibilities, the same Creator must have decided all those conditions of place, number, mass, concentration, or diffusion, on which, by the very law of their being, all their later activities and operations one upon another, and upon the living things with which they co-exist, will really depend. So far then as any semblances of choice, moral purpose, or moral preference seem detected in the changes of mere matter, it can be due to no present purpose or choice in the things themselves, but only be a remote consequence of the wisdom of the Creator, in His wise arrangement of the material universe in the hour of its creation. Thus, brute or unorganized lifeless nature cannot possibly reveal moral preferences in its separate actings. Those actings are linked with each other by a law that extends through distant ages, and which is determined by distance and position alone; but the actings of brute or inanimate nature are modified continually by the voluntary actions of all mankind, into which the elements of spontaneity, choice, love, and hate, or moral preference and aversion do continually enter. The same is true of the actings of all moral and spiritual intelligences, in whatever part

of the universe they may exist, and the laws which link together the whole material universe would make it impossible for such actings of spiritual being, in however remote a region, not to extend their influence to the earth and terrestrial changes.

That changes on the earth should be determined solely by physical laws would require two great conditions; that the Living God should, by a self-denying ordinance, bind Himself never to stretch forth His Almighty hand, whether for judgment or for mercy, to interfere with the mechanical working of the laws of brute and inanimate nature, and that He should equally shut up in eternal inaction all rational and spiritual creatures, in every part of the created universe. It is not surprising then that Mr Mill should find Nature, as defined by himself, nature, that is, exclusive both of Man and God, guilty of strange enormities and moral crimes, when he tries each separate event in which material agents are concerned, by the same test as if they were the separate and independent actions of a moral agent. He exacts, in short, from nature the unnatural; from things not endowed with the power of choice, the proper results of choice and spontaneity; from creatures that cannot choose, the virtue of choosing well. It is not surprising, when God Himself and all moral and spiritual creatures, have been excluded from the definition of nature, that the residuum should be found devoid of moral excellences and perfections. Two questions alone remain. First, whether the general laws appointed for the lower creatures, and for the whole material universe devoid of life and moral preference, disclose any proofs of wisdom and goodness, in Him by whom they were first appointed. Now it is the wisdom and excellency of these laws which tempt atheistic speculators to embrace the strange hypothesis,