It is to be deplored that certain Christian writers have deemed it necessary, on what they consider moral grounds, to give countenance to theories which in one form or another ascribe a real efficiency to natural laws, and dispense with the immediate and ceaseless agency of God in the conservation of the world. They imagine that some such hypothesis is needed to vindicate the Divine honor and righteousness. In their imagination, it derogates from the Divine majesty to be ceaselessly concerned and busied with the minute and insignificant operations of nature, or even cognizant of them. His eternal serenity would be disturbed, and his unsullied purity compromised by any connection therewith, and He would become responsible for the disorders and abnormities, the evils and sufferings, which appear in the world. He must, therefore, be released from a constant and direct connection with the universe. He must leave nature to the necessary predestinated course of self-evolution, or, if He interpose at all, it must be in some exceptional, extraordinary, and supernatural way; so that, if there be a providential administration, every act and incident thereof must be a _miracle_. We respect the motives, but we can not approve the procedure or commend the logic of these theologians. The moral difficulties they would by these hypotheses evade still remain in all their force. "Any hypothesis which essays to relieve these difficulties from pressing against Providence only transfers and leaves them to press with equal force against an original creation."[231] The Supreme Intelligence which originally endowed matter with its properties, and ordained the laws of force, must have foreseen all possible combinations, interactions, and consequences, and, if it be proper to speak of responsibilities in this connection, must be as responsible for these consequences as though they were the direct effect of immediate volition. An agent is accountable not only for his acts, but for all the foreseen consequences of his acts. The solution of these difficulties must be sought in another field.