Practically, this conception gives us a universe without a God; for the world, once created, and stocked with the necessary forces and adjustments and laws, will henceforth govern itself. It will run its predestinated course in obedience to an original impulse, and realize a perpetual motion without further oversight or care or control. The world is a huge soulless machine, and theology is reduced to Mechanical Deism! But surely no one pretends that this theory satisfies the demands of Scripture language, and fills up the complement of its idea. Practically, it renders the Word of God of no effect. This theory is equally inadequate to satisfy the cravings of the human heart. "The heart demands a present God--a God who is never far from any one of us; it demands the immediate presence and constant care of a heavenly Father; it demands, when it looks upon nature, to feel that God is there, not in his laws only, but in conscious and perpetual action; not in the sense of a Wisdom and Goodness, embodied in arrangements contrived and perfected long ago, as the mind of an artificer may be said to be present in the work of his hands, but in the sense of a Love co-present to every aspect of nature, and a Will inworking in every event that takes place."[233] "Reacting against the usurpation of secondary causation, wearied of its distance from the Fountain-head, it flings itself back with pathetic repentance into the arms of the Primary Infinitude." The relation of God to the world, however, is a problem which can not be solved by an appeal to sentiment. The religious consciousness may be the counter-proof, but it can not be the starting-point of a philosophy which aims at the explanation of things--that is, of their origin and continuance--by principles and ideas of the reason. For what is meant by _understanding_, but translation into ideas, and comprehending under necessary principles? Any theory which essays such explanation of things must therefore commend itself to the logical understanding, and be capable of logical construction. Now the various hypotheses which seek to dispense with the immediate agency of God, and to explain the conservation of the world by "secondary" or natural agencies, when critically examined do not satisfy the understanding. However convenient for the evasion of difficulties, however plausible for their simplicity and manageable clearness, on a closer inspection they are found to be inadequate. 1. _There is the hypothesis of natural law._ The world is governed by general laws which are fixed and immutable. These laws were impressed upon matter at the beginning, and in obedience to them the universe has gradually evolved itself in rigid continuity and necessary order. No room, therefore, is left for special direction or providential control, and if the term "providence" is at all permissible, it is only as a synonym for natural law.