The stupid notion--still lingering in certain quarters--that when anything has been referred to a natural law or to a secondary cause under law, God may be dispensed with in relation to that thing, is merely a survival of the superstition that divine action must be of the nature of a capricious interference. The true theistic conception of law is that already stated, of a voluntary limitation of divine power in the interest of a material cosmos and its intelligent inhabitants. Nor is the permanence of law dependent on necessity or on mere mechanical routine, but on the unchanging will of the Legislator; while the countless varieties and vicissitudes of nature depend, not on caprice or on accidental interference, but on the interactions and adjustments of laws of different grades, and so numerous and varied in their scope and application and in the combinations of which they are capable that it is often impossible for finite minds to calculate their results. If, now, in conclusion, we are asked to sum up the hypotheses as to the origin of natural laws and of the properties and determinations of matter and force, we may do this under the following heads: 1. Absolute creation by the will of a Supreme Intelligence, self-existent and omnipotent. This may be the ultimate fact lying behind all materials, forces, and laws known to science. 2. Mediate creation, or the making of new complex products with material already created and under laws previously existing. This is applicable not so much to the primary origin of things as to their subsequent determinations and modifications. 3. Both of the above may be included under the expression "creation by law," implying the institution from the first of fixed laws or modes of action not to be subsequently deviated from. 4. Theistic evolution, or the gradual development of the divine plans by the apparently spontaneous interaction of things made. This is universally admitted to occur in the minor modifications of created things, though of course it can have no place as a mode of explaining actual origins, and it must be limited within the laws of nature established by the Creator. Practically, it might be difficult to make any sharp distinctions between such evolution and mediate creation. 5. Agnostic and monistic evolution, which hold the spontaneous origination and differentiation of things out of primitive matter and force, self-existent or fortuitous. The monistic form of this hypothesis assumes one primary substance or existence potentially embracing all subsequent developments.