The reign of Law universal.

"In the first place, then, we must acknowledge that God governs the world by fixed laws, and does not alter these laws at our wish or request. This is that great truth of the order of nature which science presents to us in every possible form, and with every token and evidence—which experience teaches us (if we do but attend to her) in every act of our lives, and which nevertheless we seem to set aside or ignore, or to which we yield only a force or reluctant assent. Let us endeavour to put the thought of this clearly before page 55 the mind's eye; let us imagine some one, I will not say 'a little lower than the angels,' but a natural philosopher who is capable of seeing creation, not with our imperfect vision and hazy fancies, but with a real scientific insight into the world in which we live. He would behold the reign of law everywhere, in the least things as in the greatest, in the most complex as well as in the simplest, in the life of man as well as of the animals, extending to organic as well as inorganic substances; in all the sequences, combinations, adaptations, motions, intentions of nature, he would recognize the same law and order—one and continuous in all the different spheres of knowledge, in all the different realms of nature, through all time and over all space. Nowhere would the microscope or the telescope reveal to him any spring or interval in which as in some cracked jar a hand or a finger might be inserted: nowhere would there be an aperture in nature through which the light from another world might come streaming. He would trace the most seemingly capricious of earthly things, such as the winds and the mists, to their ocean home; to us they are the type of human mutability, but he would know that they are really subject to laws as fixed as those by which the stone falls to the ground; in the processes of birth and death he would also recognize the uniformity of causes which could not be set aside. He would confess, too, that the actions of men and the workings of the mind are inseparable from the physical antecedents or accompaniments which prepare for them or co-operate with them, and that they are ordered and adjusted as part of a whole. Nor will he deny, when he looks up at the heavens, that this earth with its endless variety of races, and languages, and infinity of human interests (each one so intense and particular at some time or other to some individual man), is only to be regarded as a pebble on the sea-shore or as a point in immensity in comparison with the universe. And in this universe, at the utmost limit to which the most powerful instruments will carry the eye of man, there is still the same order reappearing everywhere, the same uniformity of nature, the same force which acts upon the earth. This is that law—one and continuous in all times and places, which may be truly said to be the visible image of God and 'her voice the harmony of the world.'"

Rev. Professor Jowett.

"To grant our prayers would, we well know, be often the greatest unkindness God could do us. We know so little what would make us happy or what would do us good. If we saw a little truer, a little deeper, or a little further, we should pray to be delivered from the fate we are now passionately praying to attain, as from the worst of earthly evils. To pray for this or that blessing with the proviso, 'if it be good for us,' is superfluous, for our Creed is that God will always give His children what he sees to be good for them."

W. Rathbone Greg.

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"Men praying resemble sailors who have cast anchor on a rock, and who fancy that they are pulling the rock to them when they are pulling themselves to the rock."

"Fortnightly Review."

"Prayer with the view of working upon God's Will is idle."

The Hon. Auberon Herbert.