ESSAY IX. 427 Amazing proof, and incontestible argument of some supe rior wisdom ! Some transcendent contriving mind, some divine artificer that made all these wondrous machines,* and set them at work ! The animal and the vegetable in these productions are but mere instruments under his supreme ruling power ; like artless pencils in a painter's hand, to form the images that his thought had before designed : And it is that God alone who before all worlds contrived these models of every species in his own original idea, that appoints what under -agents he will em- ploy to copy them. In the week of the creation, he bid the earth teem with beasts and plants ; and the earth like a common mother brought forth the lion, the fox, and the dog, as well as the cedar and the tulip ; Gen. i. 11, 24. He commanded the water to pro- duce the first fish and the fowl ; behold the waters grow preg- nant; the trout and the dolphin break forth into life, the goose and the sparrow arise and shake their wings ; Gen. i. 20, 21. But two common parents earth and water to the whole ani- mal and vegetable world ! A God needs no more. And though he was pleased to make use of the water and the earth in these first productions, yet the power and the skill were much the same as if he had made them immediately with his own hands. Ever since that week of creative wonders God has ordered all these creatures to fill the world with inhabitants of their own kind ; and they have obeyed him ina long succession of almost six thousand years. He has granted (shall I say) a divine pa- tent to each creature for the sole production of its own likeness, with an utter prohibition to all the rest ; but still under the ever- lasting influence of his own supreme agency upon the moving atoms that form these plants or animals. God himself is the Creator still. And it is evident, that lie has kept a reserve of sovereignty to himself, and has displayed the ensigns of it in some important hours. Egypt was once a glorious and tremen- dous scene of this sovereignty : It was there that he ordered the rod of Moses, a dryand lifeless vegetable, to raise a swarm of living animals, to call up a brood of lice in millions without a parent, and to animate the dust of the ground into a noisome army. It was there he bid .Aaron wave the same rod over the streams and the ponds, and the silent rod, under divine influence, could bring forth croaking legions out of the waters without end or number. But these are his works of miracle and astonishment, when >x Note, I call them all machines here, not presuming to determine that the nature of brutes is mere machinery ; but when I speak of the natural production of their bodie , I think these bodies, as well as the bodies of man, are mere en. gines or machines, whatsoever souls may be united to them.
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