ment. Mind acts in us as it appears to have acted in him; thinking in us resembles thinking in him; our manner of willing represents to us the nature of his volition; and by what we contrive and do in the use of our intellectual powers, we may conceive how his sublime spirit has designed, and how he executes his designs. We can, in the same manner, infer and perceive what is direction, guidance, and government in him, by our own acts of this description. Even the invisibilities of his interferences and administrations are made intelligible to us by our own. For the orders of our cabinets to their distant governors, as those of the imperial general to his marshals and officers, act by invisible impulses and motivities. Their ears hear the sound of words, or their eyes may trace the letters of the written despatch; but the effect of both, the influence, the power, the actuating cause which produces their immediate and exact obedience, is entirely intellectual and invisible.

It is the mind of the director, though hundreds or thousands of miles distant, which moves the mind of the directed and the obeying. Neither sees the other, nor the ruling impulse which the one transmits and the other receives and conforms to. The process is one of the invisible intellectualities which the human faculties can put in action, and be conscious of and governed by.

Of this kind were the plans of Napoleon and Wellington in their several campaigns; unseen by any, intangible by themselves. They were ideal realities, putting in action all the material substances of cannon and warlike munitions; all the projectile forces and moving powers of their instruments of battle, and all the living principles, both in animals and men, which they ordered to move and act, correspondently with their determined plans, to execute their determined purposes. The precisely-operating and unresisted power and motive influence by which the natural qualities and spontaneous wills of their armies and implements of warfare were put into action, and controlled and regulated into the specific actions which were intended, and which were made to achieve the devised and appointed ends of the commanders, were nothing like objects of sight and contact. It was as invisible and as intellectual as that Divine agency which guides and influences material nature and its moving powers; and which, in the

same unseen manner, conducts its economy of human life, and all its particular interferences.

Our legislation is another instance of invisible, moral, and intellectual agency upon us, of the strongest and most commanding effect, by which our actions are continually governed. We see not the legal or political force which we obey. We behold only the instruments which execute it, or the printed words which relate to it. But the agency, which, if we resist, will put the whole society into operation against us, is an ideal reality, existing in no particular place, confined to no station, yet pervading, superintending, and ruling the whole community in which we reside.

What thus occurs between man and man will serve to illustrate what is always taking place between us and God. His presence is everywhere in effect; his plans guide, his mind actuates, his will governs all things; his purposes limit and shape the course and results of all that he puts into movement; and yet all this agency, even in its most formidable impulses, as well as in its gentlest attraction, can be neither seen, nor touched, nor subjected to any examination of our material sense.

It is as invisible and as wholly intellectual as the effect, on our sensibility and rational spirit, of the departed poet, orator, or historian. We read words which of themselves are but marks or scrawls, blackening the paper they are upon. It is the unseen genius of the writers which affects our mind through these, its petty instruments. It is invisible mind addressing invisible mind. The process and the operation are ideal, and by our organized senses imperceptible. The recollection of these, and of all effects analogous to these, will enable us to form a rational and comprehensible notion of the nature, mode of operation, and continual efficiency of the Divine agency, which guides and governs us, and which is continually executing the plans and purposes that have been determined on as to the economy of our human life. But while we use these illustrations, it is for us to bear continually in mind, that however assimilating such things be in the point of view in which they are here represented, yet all that is Divine rises above what is human with that immeasurable superiority which infinitude, and perfection, and eternity unceasingly confer.

In considering the plans and purposes of the Deity, we must make this distinction between them, that although both

are what must be our inferences concerning them, yet the latter will be always less to us than the former. The plan is devised to execute the purpose, and is continually displaying itself in the process of the execution. But the purpose is rarely discernible until it has been accomplished; and is, even then, often a subject of difficult deduction; neither is written in the heavens, as none of the laws or agencies of nature are. Nothing but what is material is a subject of our senses; everything else is a perception or inference of our understanding, but it is not less certain. What, indeed, is sensation itself but an intellectual consciousness? It differs only

in its cause; we feel the effect, but from that alone do not know the cause. We use our understanding to perceive by what the interior emotion has been produced, and we ascribe it to one external object rather than to another by the decision of our judgment. We discern by this the real exterior thing which has affected us. This is an inference of our judgment, and thus our knowledge of natural and visible, as well as of intellectual and invisible things, always arises from the perceptions and inferences of our mental faculty. We are right in our opinions when our intellectual inferences are right; and not more so in our sensations than in our reflections and reasonings. It is the character of our knowledge in all things to be the inferences and judgment of our intellect. If you speak to me, it is this reasoning and judgment, trained by former experience, which lead me to conclude that the voice comes from you, and not from the chair or table; or when I hear the robin sing, that it issues from the bird instead of the tree he sits upon.

Our inferences as to plans and purposes are as much true knowledge and certainties as those we derive from our senses; in either case are they such, unless justly made. In both, we must learn to observe accurately, reason properly, and judge soundly. The conclusion, then, becomes a positive truth; as surely in what we can perceive only by the intellect as in what we behold and handle. We are frequently erring in our decisions on the experience of our senses, and still oftener differ from others in the information they convey. Sense is, therefore, not a more certain guide to truth than sound intellect, for it is this which is our real teacher and directer in everything we know.

On this reasoning, the invisibilities of our world and of the

universe, where they are in existence, and become descried and are rightly inferred and stated by our investigating mind, are as certain and as true to us as every material thing which we hear and look at. It is not the bodily organ, but the mind, which, in our sensorial impressions, perceives, feels, learns, compares, judges, and knows. The nervous organization is but an optical tube which it uses in sight; or an acoustic instrument, which collects for it the vibrations of the sonorous fluid when it hears; or the numerous implements into which it converts its fingers when it handles and operates by their agency. It is our intellectual principle which, in all the effects that we call sensations, is the acting, feeling, moving, perceiving, and knowing power. The invisible things of nature are thus as cognizable by us as the visible, though not so soon or readily. They require a cultivated mind, exercised on such subjects in proportion to their difficulty and remoteness; and this is necessary in all our recondite studies.

The more you observe the statements and arguments of those who exclude a Deity from nature and disbelieve a creation, the more useful you will find it to be to recollect and apply the ideas here suggested. These writers are strenuous to banish from the mind whatever their senses cannot examine, on the fallacious theory that nothing else is existing.

On the topics which we will proceed to consider, we will first collect from history and nature the main facts which mark the plan and system of our Creator with respect to the subjects of our inquiry, and trace such laws and principles concerning them as we may be able to discern; and then attempt to infer the purposes for which they have been established.

The POPULATION of our world will naturally be the first object of our attention, as it is the basis and material of all our other subjects. The circumstances which have actually taken place enable us to notice the outlines of the plan which comprehended them.

Intending at some period of his eternity to have a human race in his universe, the Deity chose to make our terrestrial globe for their present residence, and to place this, with the associated planets, under the influence of a central sun, in that compartment of unbounded space which our system occupies. In what portion of the wonderful whole we are situated, we know not, and have no means of ascertaining. In

numerable bodies effuse radiances of light above and about us, which induce us to consider them to be material suns, inhab ited by living beings. The analogy is persuasive and satisfactory; but our opinions about them can only be speculations, as we have nothing but the lucid similarity to reason from; and comets possess their degree of this quality, and yet are so unsubstantial, that the stars they cover can be seen through the centralized nucleus of several which have entered our planetary area. We know not whether we are gliding in the middle of a living universe or in a corner; or whether our population is or is not the chief, or the only intelligent beings which our solar system contains. It is most probable that we are not the exclusive vitalities which have a Divine intellect as their distinguishing property; but it is not certain. We have not the least information whither our departing spirit is removed to, or whether Venus, Mars, and the Moon, whose material masses seem most to resemble our own, receive it as their inhabitant, or have original populations of their own. In the absence of all solid grounds of judgment, conjecture would be misleading, and it is better to leave the question in its natural uncertainty. The safest fancy would be to suppose that each has a peculiar population suited to it, and therefore not so suited to any other. This must be as much the case with ourselves as with them; only, as the operation of death manifestly and universally takes us away, our living principles, which mere separation from the body cannot destroy, must go somewhere. The ancient Christian fathers disposed of our disimbodied souls by conveying them into the central regions of our earth; but as our present geologists make that a red hot, or molten mass of fiery matter, any other location of them, while that hypothesis lasts, will be a preferable supposition.

Our Creator began mankind by the pair whom he placed a while in Paradise; but on their determination to do what pleased themselves instead of obeying him, he transferred them to the general surface. On this their posterity multiplied, and continued the disobedience, until the increasing perversity disordered their social communities with universal corruption and violence. This state was so much at variance with his wishes, and with his purposes in their existence, as to make it necessary, in his consideration, and according to his plans for this order of his living beings, that they should VOL. III.-D