There are in the Churches Militant on both sides of the Tweed shrewd combatants, who have nearly as much wit as ourselves.” I think I understand the reference of the author of the “Vestiges” to the _dream_ “of a special action of Deity in every change of wind and the results of each season.” Taken with what immediately goes before, it means something considerably different from those fancies of the “untutored Indian,” who, according to the poet, “Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.” There is a school of infidelity, tolerably well known in the capital of Scotland as by far the most superficial which our country has yet seen, that measures mind with a tape-line and the callipers, and, albeit not Christian, laudably exemplifies, in a loudly expressed regard for science, the Christian grace of loving its enemy. And the belief in a special Providence, who watches over and orders all things, and without whose permission there falleth not even a “sparrow to the ground,” the apostles of this school set wholly aside, substituting, instead, a belief in the indiscriminating operation of natural laws; as if, with the broad fact before them that even man can work out his will merely by knowing and directing these laws, the God by whom they were instituted should lack either the power or the wisdom to make them the pliant ministers of _his_. It is, I fear, to the distinctive tenet in the creed of this hapless school that the author of the “Vestiges” refers. Nor is it in the least surprising, that a writer who labors through two carefully written volumes,[39] to destroy the existing belief in “God’s works of Creation,” should affect to hold that the belief in his “works of Providence” had been destroyed already. But faith in a special superintendence of Deity is not yet dead: nay, more, He who created the human mind took especial care, in its construction, that, save in a few defective specimens of the race, the belief should never die.