It is obvious, then, that laws are not attributes of matter, but of intelligence. It is equally obvious that laws are not efficient causes, and can not execute themselves. They are the ideas and purposes of reason, and the rules or methods according to which the ideas are actualized. Law, therefore, presupposes a _Lawgiver_ and an _Executive_. Law without a lawgiver is the merest abstraction, and law without an agent to realize and execute it is, in fact, not a law, but an idea. To maintain that the universe is governed by laws, without ascending to the superior reason and source of these laws--to talk of laws, and yet not to recognize that every law implies a legislator, and an executor to put it in force--is to hypostatize laws, to make beings of them, and to substitute mythical and fabulous divinities in the place of the one living and true God, the source of all power and all law. Few men of recent times can claim a larger acquaintance with the history and the philosophy of the Inductive Sciences than the late Professor Whewell, and he may be fairly regarded as expressing the doctrine of the best scientists. "A law supposes an _agent_ and a _power_: for it is a mode according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficiency, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put in action, must be present in all places where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and agency of the Divine Being pervade every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. _The laws of nature are the laws which He in his wisdom prescribes to his own acts_; his universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events, his universal agency the only origin of any efficient force."[254] We grant that the term law may, by metonymy, be employed to designate "the uniformity of relations among phenomena," but then it must not be forgotten that here the effect is put for the cause, the consequence of law for the law itself. It may be that this is the only conception of law which is legitimate within the sphere of strictly physical science, and to limit the scientists solely to the knowledge of phenomena and their relations would simply be to take them at their word. The inquiry concerning Causes and First Principles must then, by common consent, be surrendered to pure metaphysics and theology. But if, after this truce, the scientist still persists in speaking of laws as efficient causes, and claiming for them "an eternal and necessary uniformity," thus virtually denying the liberty and personality of God, and the possibility of Creation and Providence, the Christian Theist must be permitted in the name of polemic fairness and logical consistency to protest. CHAPTER VII.