mere possession or enjoyment, is the great purpose of human life. The workings of instinct, if we look only at the importance and difficulty of the results obtained, often surpass the most strenuous efforts of the conscious mind. Man, as I have said, may go to school to the ant and the bee; in fact, there is hardly one of the inferior animals whose habits he may not study with a well founded hope of obtaining direction for his own labors. Why, then, is he not led, unconsciously and passively, as the brutes are, by the wisest and most effective means, selected without any effort of his own judgment and ingenuity, to the immediate accomplishment of far more brilliant results than he has ever yet worked out by the natural exercise of the faculties with which he is at present endowed? Why, for instance, after all his bitter experience in the matters of government and social institutions, and after the wisdom of thirty centuries has been exhausted in pondering upon the several problems of social philosophy, is he still unable to form a society which, in point of orderly arrangement, harmony, and effective coöperation for the general good, shall even approach the excellence of a community of bees? His faculties, his powers, both of body and mind, are unquestionably higher than theirs; the gregarious appetite or passion with him is as strong; and his happiness, if not his safety, is consequently as dependent as theirs on the perfection of the arrangements which may be made for living and working in company with his fellows. Why, then, has not the same Almighty Guide, who condescends to order and sustain the economy of a hive, placed man also, without any effort of his own, in a perfect social state, thus saving him from the disorder, contention, anarchy, and misrule, the long and painful recital and description of which now constitute the history of the human race? It were surely as easy to do this for man as for an insect; and why, then, is it not equally desirable in the two cases?

There can be but one answer to this question. It is, that an improved condition of society, bestowed at once by the free gift of the Creator, instead of being attained by human trai and effort, is not an end so desirable as that very unassisted trial and

- effort, however costly these may seem in respect to human happiness or mere enjoyment. He who complains of the necessity of this labor, and thinks it an impeachment of the goodness of God that the object cannot be acquired without it, really envies the condition of an insect, who is led blindfold, but in absolute security, to the fulfilment of the conditions of his existence. Will he consent to change places with it? I do not yet say that the lot of human beings, with all this necessity for toil, with all their liability to repeated mistakes and failures, and consequent sufferings, is still infinitely higher and happier than that of the lower orders of animal life, who walk darkling, but in safety; who have no liberty of choice, and so never mistake; who are God-guided, and therefore never fail of the end that is placed before them. The question of the comparative desirableness of the two situations, or the two schemes of life, as they may be termed, will depend on the result of our subsequent inquiry into the comparative value of discipline and enjoyment; of a character self-formed, and a nature endowed and wholly controlled, however happily, by another; of virtue united with freewill, and happiness enjoyed of necessity. But it is important here to understand the radical difference of the two situations, and the consequences which necessarily follow from the different endowments of man and the brute, and the dissimilar parts which they have to play upon the theatre of creation.

Why physical laws are permanent and uniform. The plan of Divine Providence in the government of the universe must be studied as a whole. We cannot understand the economy of one of the parts without contrasting it with that of the others, and seeing how, in the several cases, different ends are obtained by different means, and one end, again, made subservient to another and higher one, so that all work together for good. Man is not the only denizen of the earth, nor is his happiness the single purpose, or even the highest purpose, of creation. His improvement, the perfecting of his moral character by his own choice and effort, may be this purpose; but this is the point to be established by our present inquiry. We have seen that the course of merely physical events, or the succession of

what are called cause and effect in the material universe, is sustained and guided by the immediate agency of the Deity, and in every part it affords sufficient evidence of his wisdom and power. These events do not succeed each other at random, but according to what we term natural law; that is, in a fixed and orderly succession, similar antecedents being always fol lowed by similar consequents. There must be some reason for this order and harmony, some purpose to be accomplished by it; for as each event is caused immediately, or without the intervention of secondary causes, its character is in nowise necessarily determined by the event which preceded it, but its occurrence, if the Deity had so willed, might have been marked by wholly unprecedented circumstances. I say that there must be some reason or purpose for this preservation of natural law, because all physical arrangements and adaptations, all the organisms of nature, as we have seen, reveal design; and it is inconsistent with the Divine wisdom that is evinced by this fact, to suppose that any thing is, or takes place, in vain, or without a purpose.

Permanency of law not needed for the brutes. Now, this regularity of succession, or permanency of natural law, is not needed for any object connected with the animal kingdom, which is inferior to man. Brutes, as far as we can see, make no selection of means, and seem wholly ignorant, indeed, of the difference between means and ends. Every act performed by them appears to be done from immediate impulse, or desire relating to that act alone; they are literally slaves of the appetite of the present moment. Of the subserviency of the action to some result which is to take place hereafter, of its fitness to satisfy some future want, or to make provision for satisfying it, they have no knowledge. They profit not by experience, and indulge in no anticipations; or, at any rate, they never conform their conduct to anticipations of the future. The resemblance, then, of the present and future to the past, the fact that similar events may be expected under similar circumstances, is not needed for their guidance. Order and harmony are not for those who are incapable of comparing them with confusion

and discord, and who could not profit by their continuance. Limited in its desires and feelings to the present moment, looking neither before nor behind, and so incapable, as we may suppose, of any purely intellectual exercise, the animal creation, excluding man, is still susceptible of enjoyment, and its pleasures, as they are evidently not of its own procuring, afford the clearest evidence of the benevolence of the Deity. The exigencies of their situation, the wants of their nature, and especially the continuance of their species, are all provided for, without any tax on their own skill or energy, by the same power and wisdom which ordained their existence.

Moral purpose of physical law.

The predominance of law, then, in the course of nature is intended for the "guidance of man we can imagine no other purpose for it. It is a portion of the scheme of Providence for the government of a being endowed with freewill, furnished with motives or inducements to action, supplied with a capacity for knowledge and means of instruction, and then left by his own effort to form his character and shape his destiny. There must be some object in such a plan of government beyond the mere production of happiness; that end, as has been shown, is sufficiently answered in the case of the lower animals by simpler means, by a less complex constitution of mind, and fewer adaptations to it of external circumstances. There must be some higher and more desirable attainment than the mere sense of pleasure or enjoyment for the time; and therefore, the subordination of the lower end to the higher, the occasional sacrifice of human happiness for the promotion of a worthier object, is perfectly consistent with the infinite benevolence of the Creator. Man, as has been shown, has no instincts whatever; appetites, desires, and affections, relating to objects immediately before him, he has in common. with the brutes, and, like these, he is susceptible of pleasure from the gratification of them. But he has no means of foreseeing the exigencies of his situation, and, of course, no power of providing for his future wants, or of aspiring to any thing higher than this merely sensual pleasure, except from what his reason teaches him respecting the course of nature, and the

laws which govern the succession of events. Reason proceeds only by experience; and the lessons of experience would be of no worth, they would be mere reminiscences of past events, without any inferences deducible from them, unless the course of nature were uniform, and similar circumstances were always attended with similar results.

This doctrine, that the fixed laws even of material nature have a moral purpose, will appear to most persons, I am well aware, as a bold and fanciful speculation. The prevailing opinion, though it be not often openly avowed, is, that these laws have no object but to uphold the beauty and order, the stupendous mechanism, of the outward universe, one being subordinated to another, or included in it, and all working together in grand and complex harmony to keep up the perpetual cycle of events, and sustain the unity of the system of created things. This, I am sorry to believe, is the prevailing and increasing tendency of the physical science of the present day, — to reduce the study of nature to the determination of its laws or regularities of succession and arrangement, to maintain that any one of these principles has no object or function but its subserviency to a higher one, and that the widest generalization of them is the highest truth attainable by the human faculties.* Accord

* One great cause of infidelity at the present day is the want of consistency, the apparent contradiction, between most persons' religious views and their scientific opinions, or their ideas of the course of nature and the operation of physical causes. The doctrine of an immediately superintending Providence, ordering all events for the moral instruction and government of man, cannot be reconciled with the idea of a chain of events, each link of which is determined by an inherent necessity, growing out of its relations to those which precede and follow it in the succession.

Religion requires us to consider ourselves as the objects of a Divine Providence, of an infinite superintending care, which orders all events for good. This doctrine is a necessary consequence of a belief in the benevolence and justice of the Deity, and in his moral government of the world. A devout mind recognizes it almost instinctively as such, and considers all events, especially those which concern one's personal welfare or happiness, as dispensations which are required for his instruction or improvement. It discerns a moral purpose in all things, believing that they were specially