In reality the seeming conflict between the doctrine of second causes and that of God's omnipresence is closely analogous to the old (imaginary) conflict between the Law and the Gospel, read from the book of nature instead of from the Bible. The reign of second causes is the reign of law; but God's immediate action brings in the supernatural, the miraculous, or the Gospel. Each has its proper place; and neither must be dwelt on to the exclusion of the other. We are all under the hard exactitude of the law, with its irrevocable condemnation, until the Gospel intervenes, and not only pardons the past, but enables us to fulfil the law's requirements for the future. The reign of second causes alone would take away man's moral responsibility, making us all mere creatures of our environment, the victims of a merciless determinism, and death would be the inevitable result of the violation of the slightest physical or physiological law. But we are all given power to live above environment, and a beneficent healing power is constantly intervening to save us from the consequences of our errors, healing our wounds and curing our diseases, in this giving us an object lesson of the forgiveness of sin and a promise of our ultimate conquest over all its power. We are all ineluctably bound about by countless chains of second causes, "awful with inevitable fates," until we see through them all the close providential working of our Creator, who is also our Saviour, and who is in no way shackled by His own laws, but conducts all things according to the counsel of His own will.
The Bible teaches us of a Creation as a definite act, completed at a definite period in the past, and it gives us the Sabbath as the divine memorial of this
completed
Creation. We have seen how science also points backward along the various diverging lines of the great perspective of the ages to the vanishing point whence they all begin, the birth-day of the world; and we say that thus science confirms the Bible record of Creation. But we also know that when Christ was being examined by the Sanhedrin for healing on the Sabbath, He defended Himself by saying, "My Father worketh hitherto, and I work." That is, although "the works were finished from the foundation of the world," and second causes are now largely operative in nature all around us, still there is everywhere manifest an active energy, a presence, an Intelligence, "in Whom we live, and move, and have our being."
That we cannot comprehend all this, that we cannot set definite boundaries to these seemingly conflicting views, is not at all surprising; for we are but finite.
Even His universe partakes so much of His prerogative of infinity that it is utterly beyond the compass of our finite minds. Indeed, if either the Bible or the book of nature contained nothing beyond what we could easily comprehend, would it not diminish our reverence and awe for the One behind them, Whom we now regard as infinite in power and in wisdom?
True, the natural human heart cannot bear this thought of the direct acting throughout nature of the infinite Creator. It brings us too close beneath His gaze in our sinful shortcoming and nakedness.
And so men draw the veil of their pantheistic or monistic philosophy over their hearts, to hide them from His all-searching gaze. In ancient times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first dawn of secular history. It is only the child of God, the redeemed man, who can view without flinching the sublime fact of a direct Creation, or face the other great fact that what we call second causes are not the real causes of natural action, that the ordinary phenomena of light, heat, gravity, vital action, etc., do not occur because certain "properties" have been once imparted to matter and it then left to act of itself, any more than the child of God is left to struggle along with the supply of divine grace which was imparted to him at his conversion. The Christian feels his constant dependence upon his Creator for overcoming power day by day, and he sees the whole universe just as momently dependent upon the tireless watchcare of the great Sustainer of all. The Christian alone delights to look upon the ceaseless service of his Father's love, perpetually ministering to the needs and even to the whims of His creatures. But if this tireless ministry reminds man of his own spiritual nakedness and insular selfishness, it serves also to remind him that it is only the free gift of a righteousness not his own that can clothe the ashamed soul cowering beneath the eye of infinite Purity and unselfish Love.
In our natural state we are like the dead, inorganic matter. Only by a new life that must be imparted to us from above, a real, individual, new creation, can we become alive spiritually. And then only by constant dependence for spiritual life and growth upon the word of the One who first created us can we hope to develop into His true sons and daughters, whose continuous care is momently exercised in controlling every particle of our bodily frame, and by whose continuous guidance in the development of character we hope to become worthy of a place in His presence forevermore.