428 OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS. he has a mind to shew himself the sovereign and the controller of nature : Without his immediate commission not one creature can invade the province of another, nor perform any thing of this work but within its own peculiar tribe. Even man the glory Of this lower creation, and the wisest thing on earth, would in lain attempt to make one of these common vegetables, or these curious animated moving machines. Not all the united powers of human nature, nor acouncil or club of the nicest artificers with all their engiury and skill can form the least part of these works, can compose a fox's-tail, a goose-quill, or a tulip-leaf. Nature is the art of God, and it it must for ever be unrivalled by the sons of men. Yet man can produce a man. Admirable effect, but artless cause ! A poor, limited, inferior agent ! The plant and the brute in this matter are his rivals, and his equals too. The human parent and the parent-bird form their own images with equal skill, and are confined each to its own work. So the iron Beal transfers its own figure to the clay with as much exactness and curiosity as the goldenone: Both can transfer only their own figure. This appears to me a glorious instance wherein the wis- dom and power of God maintain their own supremacy, and triumph over all the boasted reason and intellectual skill of men; that the wisest son of Adam in this noblest work of nature, can do no more than a flower or a fly; and if he would go out of his own species and the appointed order of things, he is not able to make a fly, nor a flower ; no, not a worm nor a simple bul- rush. In those productions wherein mankind are merely the in- struments of the God of nature, their work is vital and divine ; but if they would set up for prime artificers, they can do nothing : A dead statue, a painted shadow on a canvass, or perhaps a little brazen clock-work is the supreme pride of their art, their highest excellence and perfection. Let the atheist then exert his utmost stretch of understand- ing, let him try the force of all his mechanical powers, to com- posethe wing of a butterfly, or the meanest feather of a sparrow Let him labour, and sweat and faint, and acknowledge his own weakness : then let him turn his eye, and look at those wondrous composures, his son or his little daughter : and when their infant tongues shall enquire of him, and say, Father, who made us? Let him not Clare to assume the honour of that work tohimself, but teach the young creatures that there is a God, and fall down on his face, and repent and worship. It was God who saidat first, Let the earth bringforth grass, and the herb yielding seed after his kind and the living crea- ture after his kind ; and when this was done, then with a creat- ing voice he bid those herbs and those living creatures, be fruit-
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