Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 5.djvu/412

396 system of laws has spontaneously been developed out of another, we cannot avoid making a comparison between the feeble contrivances of men and the means resorted to for the conservation of the world. We are accustomed to look back with admiration to the wisdom of those great men who laid the foundations of this republic, and established a constitution for it; but what would our admiration be if it had been possible for them to have enacted one single law of such simplicity and comprehensiveness, that every other law, by any possibility required in all the contingencies of a thousand years, should have spontaneously sprung out of it? if it had been possible for them, by one legislative act, to have completed and brought to a conclusion all legislation? The good and evil which we constantly see arising in our political assemblies, what are they but commentaries on the want of wisdom and want of power of man? But what is not possible to man is possible to God; and I think it will always elicit from a reflecting mind a tribute of veneration, to know that this great and intricate machine of the universe, with all the millions of beings, living and inanimate, that compose it, with all their affections, attributes, and relations, are sustained and governed according to the original and unvarying intention of their changeless Author; that from the beginning of things, as respects its physical condition, there never has arisen occasion for retouching a work perfect in itself from the first. I am not among those who regard this system of acting through ancient and self-imposed law as in any wise derogatory to the Great First Cause. I appeal to the common decision of mankind, whose admiration of any human contrivance or machine is greater in proportion as the machine is self-acting, performing its effects with rigorous precision, according to the conditions under which it was constructed; but less, if the engineer has from time to time to interfere in order to insure its successful action. I recall that well-known maxim of the law, "Qui facit per alium facit per se"—whoso acts through another, acts himself. It makes no difference in my estimation, in this respect, whether the Architect of the universe himself directly interposed, and compelled such a constitution of the earth's atmosphere as was conducive to the ends he had in view, or whether, under the laws he had imposed on it, the obedient sun proceeded to discharge that task, and put forth his rays with unwonted effulgence, bringing on a great increase in the amount of vegetable life, a great depuration of the atmosphere, the burial of enormous quantities of carbon in the ground, and the gradual assumption by the air of that condition suited to the support of a high organization, and of the life of man. I appeal to the experience of us all—each of the celestial phenomena we witness, the revolutions of the stars, the return of comets, the occurrence of eclipses, each of the changes that happen on earth, the flux of the tides, day and night, summer and winter, the budding of trees and unfolding of flowers, the rise and fall of empires—do they not all take