the glowing domains of art and population, every item of the perspective which is afforded, realised though it had been by the busy hearts and hands of human beings, was also all settled and made sure in the counsels of eternity.

And it does give a semblance of great consistency and truth to this whole speculation-that, just as matter acts in virtue of certain powers and properties wherewith the Creator hath endowed it, so mind also hath powers and properties to which all its movements can be referred-and, more especially, that the part which man takes in the husbandry of the ground, may as distinctly be traced to the operation of a law in his nature, as the part which the elements have can be traced to certain fixed and unalienable principles, according to which they act on the physiology of the vegetable world. It is the Maker of all things who hath given to each of them its own peculiar characteristic, according to which each moves in its own peculiar and characteristic way. It is He, in particular, who hath adapted the economy of man's frame to the fruits of the earth; and who goads him on by the ever-recurring appetite of hunger; and who, making him wiser than the fowls of heaven, hath given to him a reach of anticipation through all the seasons of the year; and who hath enabled him to treasure up the experience of the past; and who hath supplied him with principles on which he can calculate and select and determine according to circumstances, and fix himself down in the abode

of his settlement and on the field of his industry. And with these busy processes of choice and deliberation and the agency of motives, doth God, not only decide the greater movements of his life, but in reality fills up all the subordinate details of it. And thus when man goeth forth unto his labour, he is all day long the creature of circumstances; and the soil, and the grain, and the exposure, and the local convenience, and the right successions for a profitable husbandry, and the facilities that may be opened, and the obstacles that must be overcome these act upon him as so many effective considerations every hour of the day, and they necessarily guide and influence him even through the minutest details of his agriculture. And it is thus that we may detect a real process in his part of the operation, as well as in the operation of the unconscious elements-a series of causes and effects, by which the instrument man is directed in the husbandry of art, along with all the other instruments that without him carried forward the husbandry of nature an actual and a firm concatenation of influences, by which he is guided to all his plans and all his performances, and which descends to every furrow that he draws, and every field that he incloses, and every handful of corn that he strews upon its surface. And thus it is that in the opinión, we shall not say of theologians only, but even of those who are profoundest in philosophy, the intervention of man is not conceived to affect the predestination of God-the creature is regarded as

but an instrument in the hand of the Creator, which He wieldeth at his pleasure—the mechanism of thought and desire and determination is held to be only one of those countless diversities of operation, through which it is God that worketh all in all. And, accordingly, it is the article of many a philosopher's as well as of many a theologian's creed, that the newly acquired features of the now cultivated island, were, one and all of them, in the perspective of God from the beginning-nay that it is the hand of God Himself which hath imprinted them all upon the face of the altered landscapethat with man, as the tool by which His own designs are carried into effect, every hedge-row hath been drawn, and every acre hath been reclaimed, and every edifice hath been raised, and one definite space hath been pencilled over with sweetest verdure, and another made to wave in foliage, and another to shine forth in flowery decoration, and another left in Nature's untamed luxuriance; but altogether, so as that with the agency of man, He hath as effectually imprest His own design and His own destination upon the whole of this territory, as when without this agency He had nothing but His own passive and unconscious elements to work by.

Thus far have we deemed it necessary, in justice to a topic, which, in the ordinary course of our lecturing, hath come in our way, to say something on the much controverted doctrine of predestinationYet, while we do not hesitate to affirm that all our

convictions are upon its side, such is our antipathy to any thing like mere speculation in the pulpit, that we are glad to dispose in half an hour of an argument, that would require a lengthened and elaborate treatise for the full solution of it. The particular illustration that we have chosen, is not perhaps the most effective for the purpose of convincing —yet we have preferred it, because we think it the best that has occurred to us, for elucidating all the particular uses that stand connected with this article of faith. These we shall defer till a future opportunity; and, meanwhile, we shall barely advert to one argument more, that, even apart from Scripture, (which according to my own view is altogether on the side of predestination,) but that even apart from Scripture, might we think be most triumphantly alleged in its behalf.

The argument is, that, by admitting of predestination in the world of matter, and excluding it from the world of mind, you, in fact, exclude God from the most dignified part of His own creation. While you invest Him with an entire and unexcepted supremacy over the mass of unconscious bodies, you rifle from Him His authority over the moral and the intelligent empire of spirits-Nay, by erecting each of the spirits into a principle of spontaneous and independent operation, the capricious movements of which God can neither predict nor predetermine, you lay open by far the noblest department of the universe, to an anarchy that no power can control, and no wisdom can foretell the issues

VOL. III.

M

of. He who hath made and who sustains all things, is represented as standing by, unable to foresee the turns, or to direct the transitions of all those random and unaccountable processes, that are now in the hands of His own creatures; and, let the plans and wishes of the Divine Mind have been what they may, there is nought in providence and nought in history that is sure. It is but a poor compensation that He presides over the motions of a sublime astronomy. It is but a poor compensation that the winds and the vapours, and the tides of ocean, and the changes of the atmosphere, and even all the processes of the vegetable kingdom-save when the usurper man hath wrested them from his grasp-It is but a poor compensation, that both the mechanism of the heavens above, and the whole of terrestrial physics on the earth below, are at His absolute disposal,—if He be thus dethroned from His ascendancy over the best and the fairest region of His works; and if, when once the elements of thought and life and will are caused to mingle their influence with other things, He, from that moment, is struck with impotency, and must suffer the progress of events to take its own fortuitous and unmanageable way. This consideration obtains great additional strength when we recur to the undoubted experience which I lately insisted on-even on the might and the magnitude of little things, in regard to their bearing on the grandest passages of history; and that therefore if God be wrested of His power and His