We need not employ more than a sentence in reply to this mode of reasoning. Hypothetically I would say, if God was to create a world at all, and to store it with living creatures, he would do all these things _directly_ of Himself. He created every individual particle of the original matter, in all their infinitesimally minute and myriad atoms. We do not know how, nor the manner thereof. But every one of them required his _special_ interference singly, as in combination and a whole; and had not Deity so specially acted with the parts as with the mass in willing them into being, none of them, of any kind or quality, would have been in existence.—Why not the same _manner_ of creating as to the species, genera, and orders of the animated tribes? These required not less His direct personal interference than the elementary particles and minims out of which they were formed; and superintendence in the one case is as dignified, if the term may be so applied, as in the other. Admit the omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence of Deity—and the author admits them all—and any other mode of reasoning is wholly nugatory—as useless in science as it is inadmissible in fact—as inconsistent with the subtilties of the profoundest analysis as with the conclusions of the most confiding theology. But the creation of the world by God being admitted, it is no less true, and it is equally a necessary truth, that the arrangement and disposition of its parts, the order and succession of its events, are each immediately an effect of the great First Cause. As no material substance could originate itself, so neither could it impart the principle of life, or construct the organization through which that principle is manifested and maintained in the exercise of its functions. Equally impossible is it for the course of events, the motion of the elements, the growth of plants and animals, and all those subtile processes in nature by which objects are produced and distinguished, each after their kind, to be the results of chance, or of any inherent, underived properties existing in the things themselves. Whether God acts _mediately_ by a course of nature originally established, or _immediately_ and _constantly_, by the same divine agency which produced all things at first, and impressed upon each its peculiar properties, may be a question in philosophy, but none in theology. We indeed may speculate respecting the manner of the Divine acting, and may speak of that manner as the laws according to which the system of nature proceeds; but we cannot doubt the source whence the chain of events takes its rise, or wherefore it is that there are order and regularity in the arrangements of the universe. And while everything is of God, and the course of nature precisely such as He intends upon whom the whole is dependent, it is interesting to find the closest analogy subsisting between the actings of the Divine Being in every department of his supreme and universal government.