DISCOURSE II.

ON THE CONSISTENCY BETWEEN THE EFFICACY OF PRAYER-AND THE UNIFORMITY OF NATURE.

"Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts,-and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."2 PETER iii. 3, 4.

THE infidelity spoken of in our text, had for its basis the stability of nature, or rested on the imagination that her economy was perpetual and everlasting and every day of nature's continuance added to the strength and inveteracy of this delusion. In proportion to the length of her past endurance, was there a firm confidence felt in her future perpetuity. The longer that nature lasted, or the older she grew, her final dissolution was held to be all the more improbable-till nothing seemed so unlikely to the atheistical men of that period, as the intervention of a God with a system of visible things, which looked so unchanging and so indestructible. It was like the contest of experience and faith, in which the former grew every day stronger and stronger, and the latter weaker and weaker, till at length it was wholly extinguished; and men in the spirit of defiance or ridicule, braved the announcement of a Judge who

should appear at the end of the world, and mocked at the promise of His coming.

But there is another direction which infidelity often takes, beside the one specified in our text. It not only perverts to its own argument, what experience tells of the stability of nature; and so concludes that we have nothing to fear from the mandate of a God, laying sudden arrest and termination on its processes. It also perverts what experience tells of the uniformity of nature; and so concludes that we have nothing either to hope or to fear, from the intervention of a God during the continuance or the currency of these processes. Beside making nature independent of God for its duration, which they hold to be everlasting; they would also make nature to be independent of God for its course, which they hold to be unalterable. They tell us of the rigid and undeviating constancy from which nature is never known to fluctuate; and that in her immutable laws, in the march and regularity of her orderly progressions, they can discover no trace whatever of any interposition by the finger of a Deity. It is not only that all things continue to be, as they were from the beginning of creation; but that all things continue to act, as they did from the beginning of the creation—causes and effects following each other in wonted and invariable succession, and the same circumstances ever issuing in the same consequents as before. With such a system of things, there is no room in their creed or in their imagination, for the actings of a God. To their eye, nature proceeds by the sure footsteps of a mute and uncon

scious materialism; nor can they recognize in its evolutions those characters of the spontaneous or the wilful, which bespeak a living God to have had any concern with it. He may have formed the mundane system at the first: he may have devised for matter its properties and its laws: but these properties, they tell us, never change; these laws never are relaxed or receded from. And so we may as well bid the storm itself cease from its violence, as supplicate the unseen Being whom we fancy to be sitting aloft and to direct the storm. This they hold to be a superstitious imagination, which all their experience of nature and of nature's immutability forbids them to entertain. By the one infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of judgment. By the other infidelity, they have banished a God from the throne of providence. By the first they tell us, that a God has nought to do with the consummation of nature; or, rather, that nature has no consummation. By the second, they tell us that a God has nought to do with the history of nature. The first infidelity would expunge from our creed the doctrine of a coming judgment. The second would expunge from it the doctrine of a present and a special providence, and the doctrine of the efficacy of prayer.

Now this last, though not just the infidelity of the text-yet being very much the same with it in principle-we hold it sufficiently textual, though we make it, and not the other the subject of our present argument. We admit the uniformity of visible nature—a lesson forced upon us by all experience. We admit that as far as our obser

vation extends, nature has always proceeded in one invariable order-insomuch that the same antecedents have, without exception, been ever followed up by the same consequents; and that, saving the well accredited miracles of the Jewish and Christian dispensations, all things have so continued since the beginning of the creation.

We admit that, never in our whole lives, have we witnessed as the effect of man's prayer, any infringement made on the known laws of the universe; or that nature by receding from her constancy, to the extent that we have discovered it, has ever in one instance yielded to his supplicating cry. We admit that by no importunity from the voice of faith, or from any number and combination of voices, have we seen an arrest or a shift laid on the ascertained courses, whether of the material or the mental economy; or a single fulfilment of any sort, brought about in contravention, either to the known properties of any substance, or to the known principles of any established succession in the history of nature. These are our experiences; and we are aware the very experiences which ministered to the infidelity of our text, and do minister to the practical infidelity of thousands in the present day-yet, in opposition to, or rather notwithstanding these experiences, universal and unexcepted though they be, do we affirm the doctrine of a superintending providence, as various and as special, as our necessities-the doctrine of a perpetual interposition from above, as manifoldly and minutely special, as are the believing requests which ascend from us to Heaven's throne.

We feel the importance of the subject, both in

its application to the judgment that now hangs over us, and to the infidelity of the present times. But we cannot hope to be fully understood, without your most strenuous and sustained attention-an attention, however, which we request may be kept up to the end, even though certain parts in the train of observation may not have been followed by you. What some may lose in those passages, where the subject is presented in the form of a general argument, may again be recovered, when we attempt to establish our doctrine by scripture, or to illustrate it by instances taken from the history of human affairs. In one way or other, you may seize on the reigning principle of that explanation, by which we endeavour to reconcile the efficacy of prayer with the uniformity of experience. And our purpose shall have been obtained, if we can at all help you to a greater confidence in the reality of a superintending providence, to a greater comfort and confidence in the act of making your requests known unto God.

Let us first give our view in all its generality, in the hope that any obscurity which may rest upon it in this form, will be dissipated or cleared up, in the subsequent appeals that we shall make, both to the lessons of the Bible, and to the lessons of human experience.

We grant then, we unreservedly grant, the uniformity of visible nature; and now let us compute how much, or how little, it amounts to. Grant of all our progressions, that, as far as our eye can carry us, they are invariable; and then let us only

This sermon was preached during the prevalence of cholera.