Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 15:60 (Oct 1858)
Article: Caprices And Laws Of Literature
Author: Leonard Withington

BSac 15:60 (Oct 1858) p. 805

Caprices And Laws Of Literature

Leonard Withington

The tendency of philosophical investigation is to extend the dominion of the laws of nature and to diminish the region of chance, until it dwindles to an unextended point. We behold a chip floating down a stream, or a feather floating on the air, — nothing at first view can be more apparently capricious than their motions; yet it is not more certain that they are passive things than it is that they are subjected to an invariable law, regulating all their movements and never for a moment relaxed or repealed.

When Dr. Paley, in the opening of his work on Natural Theology, was looking round for an antagonist power to his watch, he pitched upon a stone, lying on a heath, as an in-

BSac 15:60 (Oct 1858) p. 806

stance of chance in opposition to design. But every reader feels the illustration to be imperfect because the antithesis is a false one. The stone is not a counterpart to a watch; it is only itself one wheel in a still greater watch, that is, the universe. The imperfect sample is felt in the subsequent reasoning. There was no place to be found, no object in creation that could supply an adequate illustration. The author would have had to go back to the original chaos, about which we know so little, to find the shadow of a comparison; and even there another power first permits and then interposes

Hanc Deus, et melior litem Natura diremit.

The Anarch in Milton, the king of chaos and the nethermost abyss, complains that the creations of God had invaded the confusion of his realms:

I upon my frontiers here
Keep residence; if all I am will serve
That little which is left so to defend;
Encroached on still thro’ our intestine broils,
Weakening the sceptre of old Night; first hell
Your dungeon, stretching far and wide beneath,
Now lately heaven and earth, another world,
Hung o’er my realm linked in a golden chain
To that side heaven from whence your legions fell.

Paradise Lost, B. ii. lines 997–1005.

This is a striking illustration of the results of all our examinations into the laws of nature. The old Anarch is seen to retire and complain, until at last he vanishes into a shadow. “The laws,” says bishop Butler, “by which persons, born into the world at such a time and place, are of such capacities, geniuses, tempers; the laws by which thoughts come into our mind, in a multitude of cases; and by which innumerable things happen, of the greatest influence on the affairs and state of the world; these laws are so wholly unknown to us, that we call the events which come to pass by them, accidental; though all...