itself together by efforts that are apparent and undisguised; the colour and tone are subdued. We may feel, perhaps, the force of Walter Bagehot's jibe that no one would know from reading the Analogy, that the earth was not a square coal-pit. The arguments would all apply equally well.
Yet, in its very sense of effort, the passage has its literary effect. It conveys to the reader the bulk and volume of the over-mastering thought.
However, thus much is manifest, that the whole natural world and government of it is a scheme or system; not a fixed, but a progressive one; a scheme in which the operation of various means takes up a great length of time, before the ends they tend to can be attained. The change of seasons, the ripening of the fruits of the earth, the very history of a flower, is an instance of this; and so is human life. Thus vegetable bodies and those of animals, though possibly formed at once, yet grow up by degrees to a mature state. And thus rational agents, who animate these latter bodies, are naturally directed to form each his own manners and character, by the gradual gaining of knowledge and experience, and by a long course of action. Our existence is not only successive, as it must be of necessity; but one state of our life and being is appointed by God, to be a preparation for another; and that, to be the means of attaining to another succeeding one: infancy to childhood; childhood to youth; youth to mature age. Men are impatient, and for precipitating things; but the Author of nature appears deliberate throughout his operations; accomplishing his natural ends by slow successive steps. And there is a plan of things beforehand laid out, which, from the nature of it, requires various systems of means, as well as length of time, in order to the carrying on its several parts into execution. Thus, in the daily course of natural providence, God operates in the very same manner as in the dispensation of Christianity; making one thing subservient to another; this, to somewhat further; and so on, through a progressive series of means, which extend, both backward and forward, beyond our utmost view. Of this manner of operation, everything we see in the course of nature is as much an instance, as any part of the Christian dispensation (Anal. II. iv. 8).
After all, in this long-drawn labouring fashion, we are
