Page:Gods Glory in the Heavens.djvu/139

Rh the sun is transmitted to our globe, and conveniently stored up for man's use, is to us a far more striking illustration of divine intelligence, than the mechanism of the solar system by which its stability is maintained. The attention of theologians has been almost exclusively turned, since the days of Newton, towards this one point, as the grand proof of a presiding intelligence. But it may be questioned whether a divine intelligence might not as well be proved from the order of a system, one element of which was, that the present arrangement was not permanent, but only a cycle in some grander evolution. Were it proved, as some astronomers hold, that the solar system and the system of Saturn's rings are hastening to a dissolution, or rather fulfilling their rôle as parts of a grander scheme, would we be forced to abandon the whole as proving a divine intelligence? There may be as much beauty and order in a mutable as in a permanent system, and where these elements are found, we have proof of intelligence. The argument for intelligence rises to a higher species of proof, when we consider not merely the beautiful adaptation of one part of the material machine to another, but also the correlation of the machine to life and intellect Now, the most marvellous of such correlations are those which are furnished by the sun, as the grand moving power on the face of our globe, and a moving power in virtue of its light and heat. Gravitation is not properly a