have understood, they believed they had made an important discovery by
subtilly distinguishing nature from herself--from her own peculiar
energies--from her faculty of action. By degrees they made an
incomprehensible being of this energy, which as before they personified,
this they called the mover of nature, divided it into two, one congenial
to man's happiness, the other inimical to his welfare; these they
deified in the same manner as they had before done nature with her
various parts. These abstract, metaphysical beings, became the sole
object of their thoughts; were the subject of their continual
contemplation; they looked upon them as realities of the highest
importance: thus nature quite disappeared; she was despoiled of her
rights; she was considered as nothing more than an unwieldy mass,
destitute of power; devoid of energy, as an heap of ignoble matter
purely passive: who, incapable of acting by herself, was not competent
to any of the operations they beheld, without the direct, the immediate
agency of the moving powers they had associated with her: which they had
made the fulcrum necessary to the action of the lever. They either did
not or would not perceive, that the _great Cause of causes, ens entium,
Parent of parents_, had, in unravelling chaotic matter, with a wisdom
for which man can never be sufficiently grateful, with a sagacity which
he can never sufficiently admire, foreseen every thing that could
contribute not only to his own individual happiness, but also to that of
all the beings in nature; that he had given this nature immutable laws,
according to which she is for ever regulated; after which she is obliged
invariably to act; that he has described for her an eternal course, from
which it is not permitted her to deviate, even for an instant; that she
is therefore, rendered competent to the production of every phenomena,
not only that he beholds, but of an infinity that he has never yet
contemplated; that she needs not any exterior energy for this purpose,
having received her powers from a hand far superior to any the feeble