book written both on the inside and the outside. These two ideas, then, of the free will of man and of the living development of nature, must be taken as the basis, and serve as the fixed point of every attempt to ascertain the divine order in nature. On this account we have placed them in the foreground of the present Lecture, which will, in the main, be consecrated to such an investigation. If, now, this demonstration of a divine order in nature seem to contain nothing less than a kind of Theodicée[29] (so far as man can establish a justification of God’s ways), I, for my part, must confess that I would much rather have before my eyes a Theodicée for the feelings, conceived in the very spirit of love, than any purely rational theory. For such theories, founded in general on far-fetched hypotheses, subtilly introduce into nature numberless divine purposes and designs, of which, however, we are able neither clearly to understand, much less to prove that they were intended by the everlasting counsels, or even that such vestiges of a divine purpose are really discernible in the universe. In this province of speculation we must not be too rigorous in our determinations, and especially we must guard against systematizing. But, above all, we can not be too watchful against the fault which so many reasoners fall into, of transferring into the realm of nature, or of God, that logical necessary connection which is a part of and connatural with our rational constitution, and an indispensable aid to our limited intellectual powers. Such a way of thinking would inevitably lead us to that most mistaken notion of a blind fate--the phantom of destiny. On the other hand, how many are the questioning feelings and perplexities which arise in the human heart at the sight of certain natural objects. And these even, because they are far from amounting to doubts and objections, or at least from assuming a definite expression or a scientific dignity, seem, on that account, only the more loudly to demand an answer. The mournful cry of some helpless and innocent animal when killed by man--or in a different category--the hissing of the venomous serpent; the lothsome mass of maggots in the putrid corpse: all these are but so many dumb exclamations which, as it were, do but keep back the question, Are, then, these the productions of the all-perfect Being--of the Supreme Intelligence?