In the third place, this view of the subject is strongly confirmed by the Christian Scriptures.
How universal is the divine agency represented in the well-known passage—for of him, and through him, and to him, are all things. Equally vivid is Paul’s statement on Mars Hill—In him we live, and move, and have our being. How graphic a description is the 147th Psalm of God’s agency in the natural world! Not only is all good ascribed to God, but evil also. By the mouth of Isaiah he says, I form light and create darkness; I make peace and create evil; I the Lord do all these things. In short, no event in the material or spiritual world is by the sacred writers ascribed to chance, or to nature, or the laws of nature, as it is among men; but to the direct efficiency of God. Nor is there any difference in this respect between miracles and common events. The one class is represented as originating in the agency of God, just as much as the other.
Finally. It will hardly be thought strange, in view of the preceding considerations, that a large proportion of the most acute and philosophical minds in modern times have preferred this view of divine providence to any other.
Sir Isaac Newton declares that the various parts of the world, organic and inorganic, “can be the effect of nothing else than the wisdom and skill of a powerful, ever-living Agent, who, being in all places, is more able by his will to move the bodies within his boundless, uniform sensorium, thereby to form and reform the parts of the universe, than we are by our will to move the parts of our own bodies.”
Says Dr. Clarke, the friend and disciple of Newton, “All things which we commonly say are the effects of the natural powers of matter, and laws of motion, are, indeed, if we will speak strictly and properly, the effects of God’s action upon matter continually, and at every moment, either immediately by himself, or mediately by some created, intelligent being. Consequently there is no such thing as the course of nature, or the power of nature, independent of the effects produced by the will of God.”
In speaking of the principle of vegetable life, Sir James Edward Smith, the eminent botanist, says, “I humbly conceive that, if the human understanding can in any case flatter itself with obtaining, in the natural world, a glimpse of the immediate agency of the Deity, it is in the contemplation of this vital principle, which seems independent of material organization, and an impulse, of his own divine energy.”—Introduction to Botany, p. 26, (Boston edition.)
“We would no way be understood,” says Sir John Herschel, “to deny the constant exercise of this [God’s] direct power in maintaining the system of nature, or the ultimate emanation of every energy, which material agents exert, from his immediate will, acting in conformity with his own laws.”—Discourse on Nat. Philosophy.
“A law,” says Professor Whewell, “supposes an agent and a power; for it is the mode according to which the agent proceeds, the order according to which the power acts. Without the presence of such an agent, of such a power, conscious of the relations on which the law depends, producing the effects which the law prescribes, the law can have no efficiency, no existence. Hence we infer that the intelligence by which the law is ordained, the power by which it is put in action, must be present at all times and in all places where the effects of the law occur; that thus the knowledge and the agency of the divine Being pervades every portion of the universe, producing all action and passion, all permanence and change. The laws of nature are the laws which He, in his wisdom, prescribes to his own acts; his universal presence is the necessary condition of any course of events; his universal agency the only origin of any efficient force.”—Bridgewater Treatise, p. 270.
“The student in natural philosophy,” observes the Bishop of London, “will find rest from all those perplexities, which are occasioned by the obscurity of causation, in the proposition which, although it was discredited by the patronage of Malebranche and the Cartesians, has been adopted by Clarke and Dugald Stewart, and which is by far the most simple and sublime account of the matter—that all events which are continually taking place in the different parts of the material universe are the immediate effects of the divine agency.”—Whewell’s Bridgewater Treatise, p. 273.
“Jonathan Edwards,” says M’Cosh in his Method of the Divine Government, “somewhere illustrates the manner in which God upholds the universe, by the way in which an image is upheld in a mirror. That image is maintained by a continual flow of rays of light, each succeeding pencil of which does not differ from that by which the image was first produced. He conceives that the universe is, in every part of it, supported in a similar way by a continual succession of acts of the divine will, and these not differing from that which at first caused the world to spring into existence. Now, it may be safely said of this theory that it cannot be disproved. Several considerations may be urged in support of it.”