displayed in the universe, yet it may suffice to indicate the necessity of a living and determining First Cause. The fact that all the manifestations of force are regulated by law by no means favors the agnostic view. The laws of nature are merely mental generalizations of our own, and, so far as they go, show a remarkable harmony between our mental nature and that manifested in the universe. They are not themselves powers capable of producing effects, but merely express what we can ascertain of uniformity of action in nature. The law of gravitation, for example, gives no clew to the origin of that force, but merely expresses its constant mode of action, in whatever way that may have been determined at first. Nor are natural laws decrees of necessity. They might have been otherwise--nay, many of them may be otherwise in parts of the universe inaccessible to us, or they may change in process of time; for the period over which our knowledge extends may be to the plans of the Creator like the lifetime of some minute insect which might imagine human arrangements of no great permanence to be of eternal duration. Unless the laws of nature were constant, in so far as our experience extends, we could have no certain basis either for science or for practical life. All would be capricious and uncertain, and we could calculate on nothing. Law thus adapts the universe to be the residence of rational beings, and nothing else could. Viewed in this way, we see that natural laws must be, in their relation to a Creator, voluntary limitations of his power in certain directions for the benefit of his creatures. To secure this end, nature must be a perfect machine, all the parts of which are adjusted for permanent and harmonious action. It may perhaps rather be compared to a vast series of machines, each running independently like the trains on a railway, but all connected and regulated by an invisible guidance which determines the time and the distance of each, and the manner in which the less urgent and less important shall give place to others. Even this does not express the whole truth; for the harmony of nature must be connected with constant change and progress toward higher perfection. Does this conception of natural law give us any warrant for the idea that the universe is a product of chance? Is it not the highest realization of all that we can conceive of the plans of superhuman intelligence?