A miracle is therefore the exerted will and agency of that Deity, who is an unexcludable part of all nature, as well as his works who is ever superintending them: and who acts by his natural laws in the usual course of things, and by the special operation of a miracle whenever he deems it proper to 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, become 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 knowledge. Authentic 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.

LETTER III.

Creation of Vegetation-Necessity of Light and Air to it-On the Divine Agency in Nature-On the Distinction between Light and the Solar Ray.

MY DEAR SON,

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 neces sary to keep them in it, as it was to compel them at first te assume it. The Divine agency is therefore as much a principle or law of subsisting nature, as any of its see ondary 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 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 unoriginating 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 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 knowledge of the science so essentially incorporated with nature, and so discernible in it, could not have 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 manly.

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,

So.

and it cannot be put into any form of phrase without being 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. In no part of our terrestrial abode is a creating mind more visible than in its VEGETABLE kingdom; for, here, we see everywhere specific combinations producing specific effects, and no other, and with undeviating constancy and with the exactest certainty, each phenomenon arising from a peculiar and adapted organization distinct from every other, which invariably produces its suited result, and only that; yet each but the union, in different arrangements and quantities, of the same common particles. No fancied tendency will explain this. The same particles could not tend to be a thousand dissimilar things. No assumed tendency can explain diversity: a tendency to diversity is an impossibility, because that would be a tendency to be and yet not to be, which may be justly deemed an absurdity. If the particles of vegetable nature tended to form a rose, the same particles could have no tendency in themselves to compose a lily. All tendency, if such a thing existed, must be specific and uniform; it could not be variable. A tendency to form, is a tendency to do so, but cannot be also a tendency not to do so. A tendency to form a rose could never form a lily, because that would be a tendency to form and not form a rose, which would be both a self-contradiction and an impossibility. No presumed tendency can therefore explain the numerous diversities of vegetable organization. All plants are formed of similar component particles, varying only in arrangement and amount; and no particles that tended to form one composition could tend to form any other. But instead of vegetable nature being only one composition, there are from 40,000 to 80,000 diversified species.* The theory of

"The botanist is conversant with from 80,000 to 100,000 species of plants."-Hersch. Disc. 136. This is a much larger number than former

tendencies is a mere fallacy of words. Not a single tendency has been proved to exist. All nature is, in each of its departments, an assemblance of varied compounds of similar elementary particles. A tendency of these to form any one would form only that one, and no other. But instead of all things being only multiples of a single composition, the universal character of nature is, in all its classes, that of multiform multiplicity; of compound diversity so inexhaustible, that of the inexpressible millions of millions of substances which are around us, scarcely any one is the exact counterpart of another.

You will therefore only smile when you find that some men can gravely say, and others gravely repeat, that one particle tended to unite with another, and these with others, but only in a straight line, and then, that they tended to bend that line into a ring, and then to enlarge that into a vessel, and then to branch out into other vessels, and then to make bone, and then to make blood, and then to form nerves and flesh, and then to extend into limbs, and then to make a heart, and then a pair of lungs, and then all the other functions of the human body, one after another: giving thus a thousand different and inconsistent tendencies to the same elementary particles, none of which can be proved, or is likely, to have had any tendency at all.

The true deduction of an enlightened reason therefore is, that all visible nature has originated from an intelligent Creator-that such a Creator will continue to superintend what he has made, to preserve it in existence as long as he means it to subsist-and that he who has made, and thus superintends, will be also the moral governor of his intellectual creation, and will exercise such a moral providence over them as his purposes and their welfare shall require; and will therefore make to them such communications of his sovereignty, of his mind, and of his will, as He may from time to time deem expedient.

In expressing to you these thoughts, I am only stating the process and progress of my younger mind, when it was forming its settled principles on these great subjects. I could not live contented with ignorance, nor with error. I

estimations. The laborious and active-minded Loudon mentions only 44,000, of which 38,000 had been described.--Encyc, Gard. 250.