430 OF PLANTS AND ANIMALS. the motion of all the planets with all their satellites or moons in our age, to tell the world that so many distinct angels rolled them round the sun, and gave us day and night, summer and winter? Let us runback to the old solid spheres and their epicycles again, and please ourselves and our hearers with describing, how they are turned round by angelic powers with sweet and heavenly mu- sic, and this is the harmony of the spheres. But is this philoso- phy ? May not the original projectile force proposed by Sir Isaac Newton, which he supposes restrained by the centripetal forceor gravitation, completely answer this end without the incessant labours of an angel ? And is not this law of nature, supposing it to be originally appointed and still preserved by the Creator ? Is thereany need of immediate new interpositions ofhis almighty influence in any different manner to keep all the planetary worlds in their proper motions so long as he designs them to move ? And floes not this single principle of gravitation, or the mutual at- traction of all matter, perform various millions of effects in this our globe of earth and water among inanimate as well as animat- ed beings ? It may not be amiss to take notice here also, that some very ingenious moderns have supposed the peculiar powers of magne- tism, electricity, elasticity, and others, are divine laws of motion appointed by God himself in the material creation, and superad- ded to the essential properties of matter considered merely as an extended solid substance. And what if. we should. suppose there may be some other such general law of motion superadded to the vegetable world as the peculiar spring of all vegetation ? How simple a principle is gravity in itself ? How multiform and infinite are its effects ? May not all plants in their rise and growth, their verdant.foliage, their beautiful bloom and seed in successive ages, take their origin from another such simple principle applied by the skill of the divine artificer, who gave all these vegetable beauties their first existence ? And what if we should go one step further ? Perhaps the laws of motion which God has ordained in the animal world may still be somewhat different from, or superadded to those of the vegetable ; and these additional laws may be sufficient to form all the eggs and animals in the world : and if these laws are settled and constant, this is nature as much as the other. It is very un- . philosophical to introduce the divine agency, either contrary to or different from, the settled rules of his own creation, without a just apparent necessity, or where the case requires not a proper miracle to be wrought : yet how frequently is this done by men who pretend to philosophy ? Or if God himself be not imme- diately set at work afresh, what sort of strange inferior agents, what anima mundi's, what plastic powers have been invented and employed to mould and form every new plant and animal ?
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