stamp of cause and effect: whilst for the mass, such cause and effect
should be so little intrusive, that their easier religion might
recognise God in all things immediately, rather than mediately. For
instance: take the cases of stone, and of coal; the one so needful for
man's architecture, the other for his culinary warmth. Now, however
simple piety might well thank the Maker for having so stored earth with
these for necessary uses; they ought, to a more learned, though not less
pious ken, to seem not to have been created by an effort of the Great
Father _quâ stone_, or _quâ coal_. Such a view might satisfy the
ordinary mind: but thinkers would see no occasion for a miracle; when
Christ raises Lazarus from the dead, it would have been a philosophical
fault to have found the grave-clothes and swathing bandages ready
loosened also. Unassisted man can do that: and unhelped common causes
can generate stone and coal. The deposits of undated floods, the
periodical currents of lava, the still and stagnant lake, and the
furious up-bursting earthquake; all these would be called into play, and
not the unrequired, I had almost said unreasonable, energies, which we
call miracle. An agglutination of shells, once peopled with life; a
crystallized lump of segregate minerals, once in a molten state; a mass
of carbonated foliage and trunks of tropical trees, buried by long
changes under the soil, whereover they had once waved greenly luxuriant;
these, and no other, should have been man's stone and coal. This
instance affects the reasonableness of such material creation. Take
another, bearing upon its analogous responsibilities. As there was to be
warred in this world the contest between good and evil, it would be
expectable that the crust of man's earth, anteriorly to man's existence
on it, should be marked with some traces that the evil, though newly
born so far as might regard man's own disobedience, nevertheless had
existed antecedently. In other words: it was probable that there should
exist geological evidences of suffering and death: that the gigantic