We conceive, therefore, that the laws by which God governs his moral creatures, reside in his mind, invested with that kind of generality, whatever it be, of which such laws are capable; but of the character of such general laws, we know nothing more certainly than this, that it must be altogether different from the character of those laws which regulate the material world. The inevitable necessity of such a total difference is suggested by the analogy of all the knowledge which we possess and all the conceptions which we can form. And, accordingly, no persons, except those whose minds have been biassed by some peculiar habit or course of thought, are likely to run into the confusion and perplexity which are produced by assimilating too closely the government and direction of voluntary agents to the production of trains of mechanical and physical phenomena. In whatever manner voluntary and moral agency depend upon the Supreme Being, it must be in some such way that they still continue to bear the character of will, action, and morality. And, though too exclusive an attention to material phenomena may sometimes have made physical philosophers blind to this manifest difference, it has been clearly seen and plainly asserted by those who have taken the most comprehensive views of the nature and tendency of science. “I believe,” says Bacon, in his Confession of Faith, “that, at the first the soul of man was not produced by heaven or earth, but was breathed immediately from God; so that _the ways and proceedings of God with spirits are not included in nature; that is in the laws of heaven and earth_; but are reserved to the law of his secret will and grace; wherein God worketh still, and resteth not from the work of redemption, as he resteth from the work of creation; but continueth working to the end of the world.” We may be permitted to observe here, that, when Bacon has thus to speak of God’s dealings with his moral creatures, he does not take his phraseology from those sciences which can offer none but false and delusive analogies; but helps out the inevitable scantiness of our human knowledge, by words borrowed from a source more fitted to supply our imperfections. Our natural speculations cannot carry us to the ideas of “grace” and “redemption;” but in the wide blank which they leave, of all that concerns our hopes of the Divine support and favour, the inestimable knowledge which revelation, as we conceive, gives us, finds ample room and appropriate place.