For

inherent property of matter, is simply to insult our common sense, and overturn the foundation of all reason. we have no knowledge of matter, and can have none, more certain than we have of the constitution of our own minds, which requires us to trace up every change among material objects to the energy and will of a person capable of planning and effecting the change. To refer us to the law of gravity is not to give us a cause for the motions of the heavenly bodies, but only a name; for law is only a rule of action. We demand a lawgiver-an agent-a force, capable of producing effects. When the law of projectiles makes a cannon-ball, and projects it, we will believe that the law of gravity made the worlds, and moves them.

"Descending within the mind's interior chambers, I find no conviction so sure of the existence of an external world, as is my belief in the reality of power-of something that sustains succession, and causes order. Again, then, whence this idea, and what is it? What this attribute with which I endow material laws, and raise them into forces? Now, in my apprehension, the strictest scrutiny can not obtain for these inquiries any reply save one; we primarily connect the idea of power with no change or movement, except an act or determination of the FREE WILL; but from such acts, that idea is inseparable. If, therefore, in order to explain the progress of material things, we require the agency of efficient causes, is not this a direct and solemn recognition -through all form and transiency-of the necessity of an ever-present creative power; a power requisite and necessary to uphold-to renew the universe every moment-or, rather, to prolong creation by the persistence of the creative act? And, in very truth, startling though it be, such is the only and ultimate scientific idea of the divine omnipresence. Law is not even the Almighty's minister; the order of the material world, however close and firm, is not merely the Almighty's ordinance. The forces, if so we name them,

which express that order, are not powers which he has evolved from the silences, and to whose guardianship he has committed all things, so that he himself might repose. No! above, below, around, there is God; there his universal presence, speaking to finite creatures, in finite forms, a language which only the living heart can understand. In the rain and sunshine; in the soft zephyrs; in the cloud, the torrent, and the thunder; in the bursting blossom, and the fading branch; in the revolving season, and the rolling star; there is the infinite essence, and the mystic development of HIS WILL."*

2. Scientific astronomy inexorably demolishes the Atheistic scheme for the arrangement of the solar system by accident, commonly known as Buffon's cosmogony.

"Buffon supposed that the force of a comet falling obliquely on the sun has projected to a distance a torrent of the matter of which it is composed, as a stone thrown into a basin causes the water which it contains to splash out. This torrent of matter, in a state of fusion, has broken into several parts, which have been arrested at different distances from the sun, according to their density, or the impetus they received. They then united in spheres, by the effect of the motion of rotation, and condensing by cold, have become opaque and solid planets and satellites."†

This formation of worlds by accident, it is true, gave no reason for the form of their orbits, for their rotation on their axes, in one direction, and that, too, the direction of their motion, nor for several other matters, of which Infidels make little account, but about which plain men like to ask, namely: Where did the sun come from? What melted it down into a fluid state, fit to be splashed about? Where did the comet come from? And who threw it with so cor.

*Nichol's Architecture of the Heavens, 9th edition, 272. † Pontecoulant in System of the World, p. 79.

rect an aim through infinite space as exactly to hit the sun in an oblique direction. Creation, it seems, was nearly missed, after all. This chaotic theory never gained much respect from men of science, though its simplicity speedily opened its way among the vulgar, and it has ever been a a favorite with the most ignorant class of Infidels, numbering thousands of warm advocates, even at the present day.

It was thought to be very much corroborated by the discovery of the asteroids, and their supposed formation by the explosion of a larger body. There is a certain proportion observed in the distances of the orbits of the planets from each other-a breadth or gauge, as it were, on the celestial railroad. But there was the breadth of a track between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter on which no train ran, and this vacancy excited the curiosity of astronomers. In the first seven years of this century, three very small planets were discovered, running near this track; and Dr. Olbers, the discoverer of Pallas, finding that they were nearly in the same track, and sometimes crossed each other, and that they were diminutively small-bearing about the same proportion to a regular planet which a hand-car does to a freight train-imagined that they were formed by the explosion of a large planet; that the boiler of the large locomotive had burst, the fragments had all lighted upon the track again, in the shape of hand-cars, and the handcars had magnanimously resolved to keep running, and do the business of the line; and that, as there must have been material enough in the original planet to make some thousands of them, more would be discovered by watching two depots, at the crossings of the tracks, in the constellations Virgo and the Whale, where they must all pass. In fact, he did himself find another, very near one of these nodes; more recently many others have been found; and astronomers now expect to hear of one or two more every year. At first sight his theory seemed strengthened by every new

discovery. It is true, reflecting men could not help wondering at such a marvelously regular explosion as would. produce beautiful little orderly planets, going so regularly too, and all by accident. They never heard of the blowing up of a palace producing cottages, or the explosion of a steamboat throwing off the hurricane deck in the shape of whaleboats, or the bursting of a locomotive producing model engines, or even hand-cars. However, as the theory removed God out of sight, it was generally accepted and freely used by Infidels, to show that the world had no need of a Creator.

But astronomers saw, that as each new asteroid had a track of its own, and ran to a different terminus, and the roads in which they ran were of different gauges and grades -one little asteroid, Pallas, running up and down a track inclined thirty-five degrees, just as speedily as the others-every new discovery increased the difficulty of accounting for their origin by explosion. But the discovery of the planet Hygeia, at a vast distance from the others, utterly overturned the explosion theory. Loomis says:

"The difficulties in the way of our regarding these small planets, as fragments of a single body, were well nigh-insuperable before the discovery of Hygeia. This last discovery has probably given the death-blow to the theory of Olbers. The orbit of Hygeia completely incloses the orbits. of several of the asteroids, its perihelion distance—that is, its least distance from the sun-exceeding the aphelion-or greatest distance-of Flora by twenty-five millions of miles. No change of position of the orbits could, therefore, bring these orbits to a coincidence."*

The matter has been finally settled by the greatest of modern mathematicians, Leverrier, who has subjected the eccentricities, distances, and inclinations of the orbits of

*Progress of Astronomy, 70.

the asteroids to a mathematical investigation, the result of which is as follows:

"In the present state of things, these eccentricities and these inclinations are totally incompatible with Olbers' hypothesis, which supposed that the small planets-some of which were discovered even in his day—were produced from the wreck of a larger star, which had exploded. The forces necessary to launch the fragments of a given body in such different routes (whose existence we should be obliged to suppose) would be of such an improbable intensity, that the most limited mathematical knowledge could not but see its absurdity." He concludes the memoir by advancing four propositions, "which forever annihilate Olbers' hypothesis."*

3. The progress of astronomical discovery has utterly refuted the notion of creation by natural law, known as the Development Theory, or the Nebular Hypothesis.

Scientific Infidels knew that there was too much order and regularity in the motions of the planets to allow any rational mind to ascribe these motions to accident, according to Buffon's notion. They saw that these movements must be regulated by law. La Place, an eminent mathematician, saw that there are at least five great regularities pervading the system, for which Buffon's theory gave no

reason:

1. The planets all move in elliptical orbits, nearly circular. They might, on the contrary, have been as elongated as those of comets.

2. They revolve in orbits nearly in the plane of the sun's equator. They might have revolved in orbits inclined to it at any angle, or even in the plane of his poles.

3. They revolve around the sun all in the same direction, which is the direction of his rotation on his axis.

* Memoirs of the French Academy, by M. Leverrier; from The Annual of Scientific Discovery, for 1855, p. 376.