"Providence, whose operations are so sensibly exhibited in the whole physical constitution of the world, has not abandoned to chance the government of the moral or intellectual world. By means often imperceptible even to the eye of the man of observation, and which seem reserved for his own secret counsel, God directs second causes, gives them efficiency according to his will, and makes them serve, sometimes even contrary to their natural tendency, to accomplish his own immutable decrees, and to propagate and support that religion which he has revealed to us. It is in this way that, consistently with his own will, he delays or accelerates the march of human intellect; that he gives it a direction such as he pleases; that he causes discoveries to spring up in their time, as fruits ripen in their season; and that the revolutions which renew the sciences, like those which change the face of empires, enter into the plan which he traced out for himself from all eternity. "Does not this sublime truth, which affords an inexhaustible subject of meditation to the well instructed and reflecting man, but which needs for its development the pen of a Bossuet,--does it not apply with great force to the subject that we have been considering? "Since the studies of our age have been principally directed to the natural sciences, which the irreligious levity of the last age had so strangely abused to the prejudice of religion, we have seen the most admirable discoveries confirming the physical history of the primitive world, as it is given by Moses. It is sufficient to cite in proof of this fact, the geological labours of our celebrated Cuvier. Now that historic researches are pursued with a greater activity than ever before, and the monuments of antiquity illustrated by a judicious and promising criticism, Providence has also ordered, that the writings of ancient Egypt should in turn confirm the historic facts of the holy books: facts against which a _systematic_ erudition had furnished infidelity with so many objections that were unceasingly repeated, though they had been a thousand times refuted. We cannot doubt that human knowledge, as it becomes more and more disengaged from the spirit of system, and pursues truth as its only aim, will still attain, as it advances, to other analogous results.