infinity, in one great design, with a power, which could fill infinity itself, with the splendid wonders that are, wherever we endeavour to extend our search. We know no limit to his wisdom, for all the knowledge which we are capable of acquiring, flows from him, as from its source; we know nothing which can limit his power, for every thing of which we know the existence, is the work of his hand. God, then, thus wise and powerful, exists, and we are subject to his sway. We are subject to his sway: but if all which we knew of his nature were his mere power and wisdom, the inquiry most interesting to us, would still remain. The awful power, to which we perceive no limit, may be the sway of a tyrant, with greater means of tyranny, than any earthly des pot can possess, or it may be the sway of a Father who has more than parental fondness, and a power of blessing far more extensive, than any parental power, which is but a shadow, and a faint shadow of the Divine goodness that has conferred it. If we were suddenly carried away into captivity, and sold as slaves, how eager should we be to discover whether our taskmaster were kind or cruel,-whether we could venture to look to him with hope, or only with the terror which they feel, who are to see constantly above them a power which is to be exercised only in oppression, or whose kindness of a moment is the short interval of hours of tyranny. But I will not use such an illustration in speaking of God and man. The paternal and filial relation, is the only one which can be considered as faintly representing it; and to what son can it be indifferent, whether his father be gentle or severe? The goodness of God is, of all subjects of inquiry, that which is most interesting to us. It is the goodness of him to whom we owe, not merely that we exist, but that we are happy or miserable now, and according to which we hope or fear for a future, that is not limited to a few years, but extends through all the ages of immortality. Have we, then, reason to believe that God is good? that the designing power, which it is impossible for us not to perceive and admit, is a power of cruelty or kindness? Of whom is this the question? of those whose whole life has been a continued display of the bountiful provision of Heaven from the first moment at which life began. It is the inquiry of those, who, by the goodness of that God, whose goodness they question, found, on their very entrance into this scene of life, sources of friendship already provided for them, merely because they had wants that already requir ed friendship,-whose first years, were years of cheeerfulness almost uninterrupted, as if existence were all that is necessary for happiness, to whom in after life, almost every exertion, VOL. III.-3 C which they were capable of making, was a pleasure, and almost every object which met their eye, a sense of direct gratification, or of knowledge, which was itself delightful,-who were not formed to be only thus selfishly happy, but seemed called, by some propitious voice of nature, to the diffusion of happiness, by the enjoyment which arose from that very diffusion, and warned from injuring others, by the pain which accompanied the very wish of doing evil, and the still greater pain of remorse, when evil, had at any time been intentionally inflicted. Nor is it to be counted a slight part of the goodness of God, that he has given us that very goodness as an object of our thought, and has thus opened to us, inexhaustibly, a pure and sublime pleasure in the contemplation of those divine qualities, which are themselves the source of all the pleasures that we feel. Such is the goodness of God, in its relation to mankind, in infancy, in manhood, in every period of life. But we are not to think, that the goodness of God extends only to man. The humblest life, which man despises, is not despised by him who made man of nothing, and all things of nothing, and "whose tender mercies are over all his works.” Has God, thou fool, work'd solely for thy good? The birds of Heaven shall vindicate their grain. In vain do we strive to represent to ourselves all nature as our own, and only our own. The happiness which we see the other races around us enjoying, is a proof that it is theirs as well as ours; and that he, who has given us the dominion of all things that live on earth, has not forgotten the creatures, which he has entrusted to our sway. Even in the deserts, in which our sway is not acknowledged, where the lion, if man approached, would see no Lord, before whom to tremble, but a creature far feebler than the ordinary victims of his hunger, or his wrath,-in the dens and the wildernesses, there are pleasures which owe nothing to us, but which are not the less felt by the fierce hearts that inhabit the dreadful recesses. Pope's Essay on Man, Ep. III. v. 27—39. They, too, have their happiness; because they too were created by a Power that is good,-and of whose beneficent design, in forming the world, with all its myriads of myriads of varied races of inhabitants, the happiness of these was a part. "Nor," as it has been truly said, "is the design abortive. It is a happy world after all. The air, the earth, the water, teem with delighted existence. In a spring noon, or a summer evening, on which ever side I turn my eyes, myriads of happy beings crowd upon my view. The insect youth are on the wing.' Swarms of new-born flies are trying their powers in the air. Their sportive motions, their wanton mazes, their gratuitous activity, their continual change of place without use or purpose, testify their joy and the exultation which they feel in their lately discovered faculties. A bee, amongst the flowers in spring, is one of the most cheerful objects that can be looked upon. Its life appears to be all enjoyment; so busy and so pleased: yet it is only a specimen of insect life, with which, by reason of the animal being half domesticated, we happen to be better acquainted than we are with that of others."* Such is the seemingly happy existence of that minute species of life, which is so abundant in every part of the great scene in which we dwell. I shall not attempt to trace the happiness upward, through all the alacrity and seeming delight in existence, of the larger animals,-an ever-flowing pleasure, of which, those who have had the best opportunities of witnessing multitudes of gregarious animals feeding together, and rejoicing in their common pasture, will be the best able to appreciate the amount. All have means of enjoyment within themselves; and, if man be the happy sovereign of the crea tion, he is not the sovereign of miserable subjects. Ask for what end the heavenly bodies shine, All these sources of blessings that are infinite, as the living beings that enjoy them, were made, indeed, for man, whose pride makes the arrogant exclusive assumption,--but they Paley's Nat. Theol. 8vo. p. 392. were made also for innumerable beings, whose very existence is unknown to man, and who know not, in their turn, the existence of him who supposes that all these means of happiness are for himself alone. There is, at every moment, an amount of happiness on the earth, of which the happiness of all mankind is an element indeed, but only one of many elements, that perhaps bears but a small proportion to the rest; and it is not of this single element that we are to think, when we consider the benevolence of that God who has willed the whole. It is this element of the universal happiness, however, with which we are best acquainted; and, when man is the inquirer, it is to this human part of course, that we may suppose his attention to be chiefly turned. But man the enjoyer, is very different from man the estimator of enjoyment. In making our estimate of happiness, we think, only or chiefly, of what is remarkable, not of what is ordinary; as, in physics, we think of the rarer phenomena, far more than of the appearances of nature, which are every moment before our eyes. There are innumerable delights, therefore, of the senses, of the understanding, of the heart, which we forget, because they are delights to which we are every hour accustomed, and which are shared with us by all mankind, or the greater number of mankind. It is what distinguishes us from our fellows that we consider, and this, the very circumstance of distinction, necessarily limits to a few ;--not what is common to us with our fellows, which, by the very wideness of the participation, is of an amount that is incomparably greater. We think of the benevolence of the Author of the whole race of mankind, therefore, as less than it is, because it is a benevolence that has provided for the whole race of mankind; and if the amount of good, provided for every living being, had been less in the extent of its diffusion, we should, in our erring estimate, have regarded it as more--at least if ourselves had been of the number of the privileged few, who alone enjoyed those general blessings of nature, which now are common to all. "Non dat Deus beneficia?-unde ergo ista quæ possides, quæ das, quæ negas, quæ servas, quæ rapis? unde hæc innumerabilia, oculos, aures, animum mulcentia? unde illa luxuriam quoque instruens copia. Neque enim necessitatibus tantummodo nostris provisum est: usque in delicias amamur.Si pauca quis tibi donasset jugera, accepisse te diceres beneficium: immensa terrarum late patentium, spatia negas esse beneficium!"* It is truly, as this eloquent writer says, the possession of the common glories of the earth, the sky, of all Senec. De Benef. Lib. IV. Tom. I. p. 700. nature that is before us and above us, which is the most valuable possession of man; and the few acres which he enjoys, or thinks that he enjoys, exclusively, compared with that greater gift of Heaven to all mankind, are scarcely worthy of being counted as a proof of Divine beneficence. But though life, to man, and to his fellow-inhabitants of earth, be a source of happiness upon the whole, it is not always, and in every instance, a source of happiness. There is not a moment, indeed, in which the quantity of agreeable sensation felt by myriads of creatures, may not be far greater than all the pain which is felt at the same moment. But still there is no moment, in which pain, and a very considerable amount of pain, is not felt. Can he be good, then, under whose supreme government, and therefore, almost, it may be said, at whose bidding, pain exists? Before entering on this inquiry, however, it may be necessary to obviate an objection, that arises from the mere limitation of our nature as finite beings. Many of the complaints of those who are dissatisfied with the system of the universe, arise from this mere limitation of our faculties and enjoyments,--a limitation in which ingratitude would find an argument, in whatever state of being, short of absolute divinity, it might be placed; and even though possessing all the functions of divinity from the moment at which it was created, might still look back through eternity, and complain with the same reason, that it had not been created earlier, to the exercise of such sublime functions. It surely is not necessary, for the proof of benevolence on the part of the Divine Being, that man should be himself a God, that he should be omniscient or omnipotent, any more than that he should have existed from eternity. His senses, with all his other faculties, are limited, because they are the faculties of a created being; as even his immortality may, in one sense of the word, be said to be limited, when considered in the relation to the eternity that preceded his existence. But how admirably does even the limitation of his nature, demonstrate the gracious benevolence of Heaven, when we consider the innumerable relations of the universe, that must have been contrived in adaptation to the exact degree of his capacity, so as to be most productive of good in these particular circumstances. If we think only how very slight a change in the qualities of external things, though perfectly suitable, perhaps, to a different degree of sensitive and intellectual capacity, might have rendered the existence of man absolutely miserable, how sublimely benevolent seems that wisdom, in the very minuteness of its care, which, by proportioning exactly the |