all this beautiful and exact machinery, if we accept not that which would refer its origin to the antecedent Will and Power of a Supreme Creator; a Being, whose nature is confessedly incomprehensible to our finite faculties, but Whom the "things which do appear" proclaim to be supremely Wise, and Great, and Good.
To attribute all this harmony and order to any fortuitous causes that would exclude Design, would be to reject conclusions founded on that kind of evidence, on which the human mind reposes with undoubting confidence in all the ordinary business of life, as well as in physical and metaphysical investigations. "Si mundum efficere potest concursus atomorum, cur porticum, cur templem, cur domum, cur urbem non potest? quæ sunt minus operosa et multo quidem faciliora."[1]
Such was the interrogatory of the Roman Moralist, arising from his contemplation of the obvious phenomena of the natural world; and the conclusion of Bentley from a wider view of more recondite phenomena, in an age remarkable for the advancement of some of the highest branches of Physical Science, has been most abundantly confirmed by the manifold discoveries of a succeeding century. We therefore of the present age have a thousand additional reasons to affirm with him, that "though universal matter should have endured from everlasting, divided into infinite particles in the Epicurean way, and though motion should have been coeval and co eternal with it; yet those particles or atoms could never of themselves, by omnifarious kinds of motion, whether fortuitous or mechanical, have fallen, or been disposed into this or a like visible system."[2]—Bentley, Serm. vi. of Atheism, p. 192.
- ↑ Cicero de Natura Deorum, lib. ii. 37.
- ↑ Dr. Prout has pursued this subject still further in the third Chapter of his Bridgewater Treatise, and shown that the molecular constitution of matter with its admirable adaptations to the economy of the natural world, cannot have endured from eternity, and is by no means a necessary condition of its existence; but has resulted from the Will of some intelligent and voluntary Agent, possessing power commensurate with his Will.
