operations, on the other hand, include something much higher. They take in the establishment of the laws of the elements, as well as the combination of these laws and the determination of the distribution and quantity of the materials on which they shall produce their effect. We must conceive that the Supreme Power has ordained that air shall be rarefied, and water turned into vapour, by heat; no less than that he has combined air and water so as to sprinkle the earth with showers, and determined the quantity of heat and air and water, so that the showers shall be as beneficial as they are. We may and must, therefore, in our conceptions of the Divine purpose and agency, go beyond the analogy of human contrivances. We must conceive the Deity, not only as constructing the most refined and vast machinery, with which, as we have already seen, the universe is filled; but we must also imagine him as establishing those properties by which such machinery is possible: as giving to the materials of his structure the qualities by which the material is fitted to its use. There is much to be found, in natural objects, of the same kind of contrivance which is common to these and to human inventions; there are mechanical devices, operations of the atmospheric elements, chemical processes;--many such have been pointed out, many more exist. But besides these cases of the combination of means, which, we seem able to understand without much difficulty, we are led to consider the Divine Being as the _author of the laws_ of chemical, of physical, and of mechanical action, and of such other laws as make matter what it is;--and this is a view which no analogy of human inventions, no knowledge of human powers, at all assists us to embody or understand. Science, therefore, as we have said, while it discloses to us the mode of instrumentality employed by the Deity, convinces us, more effectually than ever, of the impossibility of conceiving God’s actions by assimilating them to our own.