_Nehemiah 9:6_—“_Thou art Jehovah, even thou alone; thou hast made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all things that are thereon, the seas and all that is in them, and thou preservest them all_”; _Job 7:20_—“_O thou watcher_ [marg. “preserver”] _of men!_”; _Ps. 36:6_—“_thou preservest man and beast_”; _104:29, 30_—“_Thou takest away their breath, they die, And return to their dust. Thou sendest forth thy Spirit, they are created, And thou renewest the face of the ground._” See Perowne on _Ps. 104_—“A psalm to the God who is in and with nature for good.” Humboldt, Cosmos, 2:413—“Psalm 104 presents an image of the whole Cosmos.” _Acts 17:28_—“_in him we live, and move, and have our being_”; _Col. 1:17_—“_in him all things consist_”; _Heb. 1:2, 3_—“_upholding all things by the word of his power._” _John 5:17_—“_My Father worketh even until now, and I work_”—refers most naturally to preservation, since creation is a work completed; compare _Gen. 2:2_—“_on the seventh day God finished his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made._” God is the upholder of physical life; see _Ps. 66:8, 9_—“_O bless our God ... who holdeth our soul in life._” God is also the upholder of spiritual life; see _1 Tim. 6:13_—“_I charge thee in the sight of God who preserveth all things alive_” (ζωογονοῦντος τὰ πάντα)—the great Preserver enables us to persist in our Christian course. _Mat. 4:4_—“_Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God_”—though originally referring to physical nourishment is equally true of spiritual sustentation. In _Ps. 104:26_—“_There go the ships,_” Dawson, Mod. Ideas of Evolution, thinks the reference is not to man’s works but to God’s, as the parallelism: “There is leviathan” would indicate, and that by “ships” are meant “floaters” like the nautilus, which is a “little ship.” The 104th Psalm is a long hymn to the preserving power of God, who keeps alive all the creatures of the deep, both small and great. 2. From Reason. We may argue the preserving agency of God from the following considerations: (_a_) Matter and mind are not self-existent. Since they have not the cause of their being in themselves, their continuance as well as their origin must be due to a superior power. Dorner, Glaubenslehre: “Were the world self-existent, it would be God, not world, and no religion would be possible.... The world has receptivity for new creations; but these, once introduced, are subject, like the rest, to the law of preservation”—_i. e._, are dependent for their continued existence upon God.