Atmospheric and aqueous changes often, and, indeed, generally, appear more chaotic and destitute of a controlling force than any others in nature. When the winds are let loose from their prison-house; when the heavens become dark, and the clouds, rent by the lightnings, pour down their contents, and the swollen torrents carry desolation down the mountain's side and over the wide plain; when the ocean rolls in upon the land its giant waves; when the tornado sweeps all before it, in rich tropical regions; or when the sirocco sends its hot blast, loaded with sand, over the devoted surface,--in all these cases, how difficult for us to conceive that all this uproar among the elements is limited and controlled by laws as fixed and unalterable as those which regulate the heavenly bodies! Nevertheless, it must be so; and although the winds and the waters seem to be rioting at their pleasure, there are, in fact, at work antagonist agencies; which will confine their wild war to a narrow field, and soon bring them again into peaceful submission. For such has always been the case, and the limits of their irregularities are no wider now than six thousand years ago. In other words, the repressing agency has always been superior to the destroying force, when the latter has risen to a certain limit; and I doubt not but the profounder mathematics of angelic minds might as easily calculate the anomalies and perturbations of winds and waves as the formulas of La Place can determine those of the solar system. And if such constancy has existed for six thousand years in meteorological changes,--of all others in nature apparently the most irregular,--why, the atheist will ask, may not that constancy have been eternal? And with equal reason may he ask the same in respect to all changes resulting from mechanical, chemical, and organic laws, which we witness in nature, except those which come within the province of geology, and even concerning some of those; and what changes in the material world do not result, directly or remotely, from one or two, or all of these laws? Yet, in regard to all these changes, there is no inconsistency in supposing them to have gone on in an eternal series; and hence they furnish no proof of the non-eternity of the world. In the seventh and last place, the recent origin of society, as shown by historical monuments, is regarded as evidence of the recent origin of the world. This argument was well understood as long ago as the days of Lucretius, who states it very clearly in the oft-quoted lines,-- "Si nulla fuit genitalis origo, Terrarum et coeli, semperque eterna fuit, Cur, supra bellum Thebanum et funera Trojae, Non alias alii quoque res cecinere poetae?"