The discovery of laws of nature, truly and satisfactorily connecting and explaining phenomena, of which, before, the connexion and causes had been unknown, displays much of a similar process, of obscurity succeeded by evidence, of effort and perplexity followed by conviction and repose. The innumerable conjectures and failures, the glimpses of light perpetually opening and as often clouded over, the unwearied perseverance and inexhaustible ingenuity exercised by Kepler in seeking for the laws which he finally discovered, are, thanks to his communicative disposition, curiously exhibited in his works, and have been narrated by his biographers; and such efforts and alternations, modified by character and circumstances, must generally precede the detection of any of the wider laws and dependencies by which the events of the universe are regulated. We may readily conceive the satisfaction and delight with which, after this perplexity and struggle, the discoverer finds himself in light and tranquillity; able to look at the province of nature which has been the subject of his study, and to read there an intelligible connexion, a sufficing reason, which no one before him had understood or apprehended. This step so much resembles the mode in which one intelligent being understands and apprehends the conceptions of another, that we cannot be surprised if those persons in whose minds such a process has taken place, have been most ready to acknowledge the existence and operation of a superintending intelligence, whose ordinances it was their employment to study. When they had just read a sentence of the table of the laws of the universe, they could not doubt whether it had had a legislator. When they had deciphered there a comprehensive and substantial truth, they could not believe that the letters had been thrown together by chance. They could not but readily acknowledge that what their faculties had enabled them to read, must have been written by some higher and profounder mind. And accordingly, we conceive it will be found, on examining the works of those to whom we owe our knowledge of the laws of nature, and especially of the wider and more comprehensive laws, that such persons have been strongly and habitually impressed with the persuasion of a Divine Purpose and Power which had regulated the events which they had attended to, and ordained the laws which they had detected.