It is probable that some of the hurry and absence of precision and of tenacious research which characterize the modern form of mind may be the natural result of the sudden rush of new discoveries which have taken us, as it were, by surprise and carried us off our feet. By degrees it is probable we shall, as a race, accept the changes in our condition, and shall become gradually adapted to the varied forms of life imposed upon us by the vast and multiplied combinations which every day are extending our power over the external world and opening new paths for activity and enterprise. Doubtless this power will increase rather than diminish, and at the same time take less hold upon us in a revolutionary way, and we shall lose some of that flurry and excitement which now characterize us—much in the way that the young colt of a week old starts no more than does the old mare when the engine rushes down the railway that skirts the field; and yet when railways first began both were alike alarmed. But for the present we have lost much of our original moral and intellectual dignity. Upon such questions as interest us we are excited and flurried. Those which we do not affect to understand we cannot seriously listen to; and between the bustling activity of the first and the listless frivolity of the last it is not an easy task to bring forward old truths with new faces, old facts with a fresh moral, lest those who listen should persist in viewing the question from the wrong side, and in taking scandal where no scandal was meant. We have set ourselves the task of investigating the chief attributes of God’s government of creation and its uniformity of design in complexity of action. To do this we must condescend to the primary and natural law which he imposed on our world when he called it out of chaos; and we must endeavor to explain what were the special characteristics of that law, and what light it throws upon the attributes of Him who gave it.