In _Luke 10:31_, our Savior says: “_By chance a certain priest was going down that way_.” Janet: “Chance is not a cause, but a coincidence of causes.” Bowne, Theory of Thought and Knowledge, 197—“By chance is not meant lack of causation, but the coincidence in an event of mutually independent series of causation. Thus the unpurposed meeting of two persons is spoken of as a chance one, when the movement of neither implies that of the other. Here the antithesis of chance is purpose.” (_c_) If chance be used in the sense of undesigning cause,—it is evidently insufficient to explain the regular and uniform sequences of nature, or the moral progress of the human race. These things argue a superintending and designing mind—in other words, a providence. Since reason demands not only a cause, but a sufficient cause, for the order of the physical and moral world, casualism must be ruled out. The observer at the signal station was asked what was the climate of Rochester. “Climate?” he replied; “Rochester has no climate,—only weather!” So Chauncey Wright spoke of the ups and downs of human affairs as simply “cosmical weather.” But our intuition of design compels us to see mind and purpose in individual and national history, as well as in the physical universe. The same argument which proves the existence of God proves also the existence of a providence. See Farrar, Life of Christ, 1:155, note. 3. Theory of a merely general providence. Many who acknowledge God’s control over the movements of planets and the destinies of nations deny any divine arrangement of particular events. Most of the arguments against deism are equally valid against the theory of a merely general providence. This view is indeed only a form of deism, which holds that God has not wholly withdrawn himself from the universe, but that his activity within it is limited to the maintenance of general laws.