This complication of causes does not merely give variety to the works and operations of nature, but it enables God to produce effects which could never have resulted from each law acting singly; nor is there a scarcely conceivable limit to these modifications. Indeed, in this way can Providence accomplish all his beneficent purposes, and meet every individual case, just as infinite wisdom would have it met. "By this agency," says M'Cosh, "God can at one time increase, and at another time lessen, or completely nullify, the spontaneous efforts of the fixed properties of matter. Now he can make the most powerful agents in nature--such as wind, fire, and disease--coincide and cooperate to produce effects of such a tremendous magnitude as none of them separately could accomplish; and again, he can arrest their influence by counteracting agencies, or, rather, by making them counteract each other. He can, for instance, by a concurrence of natural laws, bring a person, who is in the enjoyment of health at present, to the very borders of death, an hour or an instant hence; and he can, by a like means, suddenly restore the same or another individual to health, after he has been on the very verge of the grave. By the confluence of two or more streams, he can bring agencies of tremendous potency to bear upon the production of a given effect, such as a war, a pestilence, or a revolution; and, on the other hand, by drawing aside the stream into another channel, he can arrest, at any given instant, the awful effects that would otherwise follow from these agencies, and save an individual, a family, or a nation, from the evils which seem ready to burst upon them. "Guided by these principles and guarded by sound sense, the inquiring mind will discover many and wonderful designed connections between the various events of divine providence. Read in the spirit of faith, striking coincidences will every where manifest themselves. What singular unions of two streams at the proper place to help on the exertions of the great and good! What curious intersections of cords to catch the wicked as in a net, when they are prowling as wild beasts! By strange but most apposite correspondences, human strength, when set against the will of God, is made to waste away under God's indignation burning against it, as, in heathen story, Meleager wasted away as the stick burned which his mother held in the fire."--_Method of the Divine Government_, pp. 176, 203.