The influence of the divine on the human, and on the material world, has been variously conceived in different ages, and various forms of difficulty have been at different times felt and suggested; but always some sort of analogy between human action and divine action has had perforce to be drawn, in order to make the latter in the least intelligible to our conception. The latest form of difficulty is peculiarly deep-seated, and is a natural outcome of an age of physical science. It consists in denying the possibility of any guidance or control,—not only on the part of a Deity, but on the part of every one of his creatures. It consists in pressing the laws of physics to what may seem their logical and ultimate conclusion, in applying the conservation of energy without ruth or hesitation, and so excluding, as some have fancied, the possibility of free-will action, of guidance, of the self-determined action of mind or living things upon matter, altogether. The appearance of control has accordingly been considered illusory, and has been replaced by a doctrine of pure mechanism, enveloping living things as well as inorganic nature. And those who for any reason have felt disinclined or unable to acquiesce in this exclusion of non-mechanical agencies, whether it be by reason of faith and instinct or by reason of direct experience and sensation to the contrary, have thought it necessary of late years to seek to undermine the foundation of Physics, and to show that its much-vaunted laws rest upon a hollow basis, that their exactitude is illusory,—that the conservation of energy, for instance, has been too rapid an induction, that there may be ways of eluding many physical laws and of avoiding submission to their sovereign sway. By this sacrifice it has been thought that the eliminated guidance and control can philosophically be reintroduced. This, I gather, may have been the chief motive of a critical examination of the foundations of Physics by an American author, J. B. Stallo, in a little book called the _Concepts of Physics_. But the worst of that book was that Judge Stallo was not fully familiar with the teachings of the great physicists; he appears to have collected his information from popular writings, where the doctrines were very imperfectly laid down; so that some of his book is occupied in demolishing constructions of straw, unrecognisable by professed physicists except as caricatures at which they also might be willing to heave an occasional missile. The armoury pressed into the service of Professor James Ward's not wholly dissimilar attack on Physics is of heavy calibre, and his criticism cannot in general be ignored as based upon inadequate acquaintance with the principles under discussion; but still his Gifford lectures raise an antithesis or antagonism between the fundamental laws of mechanics and the possibility of any intervention whether human or divine.