Look round our world, behold the chain of love.
Combining all below and all above;
See plastic nature working to this end,
The single atoms each to other tend;
Attract, attracted to, the next in place
Formed and impelled its neighbor to embrace,
See matter next, with various life endued,
Press to one center still the gen'ral good.
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving, vegetate again;
All forms that perish, other forms supply,
(By turns we catch the vital breath, and die)
Like bubbles on the sea of matter borne,
They rise, they break, and to that sea return,
Nothing is foreign—parts relate to whole;
One all-extending, all-preserving soul
Connects each being greatest with the least;
Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;
All served, all serving; nothing stands alone;
The chain holds on, and where it ends, unknown.
But power alone is not sufficient to produce action. There must be a cause to call it forth, to set in operation and exhibit its latent energies. It will remain hid in its secret chambers till efficient causes have set in operation the means by which its existence is to be discovered in the production of change, effects, or results. There is, it is said, in every created thing a power sufficient to produce its own destruction, as well as to preserve its being. In the human body, for instance, there is a constant tendency to decay, to waste; which a counteracting power resists, and, with proper assistance, keeps alive.
The same may be said of vegetables which are constantly throwing off, or exhaling the waste, offensive, or useless matter, and yet a restoring power, assisted by heat, moisture, and the nourishment of the earth, resists the tendency to decay and preserves it alive and growing. The air, the earth, nay, the ocean itself, philosophers assure us, contain powers sufficient to self-destruction. But I will not enlarge here. Let the necessary cause be exerted which will give vent to this hidden power and actions the most astonishing and destructive would be the effect. These are often witnessed in the tremendous earthquakes which devastate whole cities, states, and empires; in the tornados which pass, like the genius of evil, over the land, levelling whatever is found in its course; or in the waterspouts and maelstroms which prove the grave of all that comes within their grasp.
In the attempted destruction of the royal family and parliament of England, by what is usually called the "gunpowder plot," the arrangements were all made; two hogsheads and thirty-six barrels of powder, sufficient to blow up the house of lords and the surrounding buildings, were secreted in a vault beneath it, strown over with faggots. Guy Fawkes, a spanish officer, employed for the purpose, lay at the door, on the 5th of November, 1605, with the matches, or means, in his pocket, which should set in operation the prodigious dormant power, which would hurl to destruction James I., the royal family, and the protestant parliament, give the ascendancy to the Catholics, and change the whole political condition of the nation. The project was discovered, the means were removed, the cause taken away, and the threatened effects were prevented.
The cause of action is the immediate subject which precedes or tends to produce the action, without which it would not take place. It may result from volition, inherent tendency, or communicated impulse; and is known to exist from the effects produced by it, in the altered or new condition of the thing on which it operates; which change would not have been effected without it.
Causes are to be sought for by tracing back thro the effects which are produced by them. The factory is put in operation, and the cloth is manufactured. The careless observer would enter the building and see the spindles, looms, and wheels operated by the hands, and go away satisfied that he has seen enough, seen all. But the more careful will look farther. He will trace each band and wheel, each cog and shaft, down by the balance power, to the water race and floom; or thro the complicated machinery of the steam engine to the piston, condenser, water, wood, and fire; marking a new, more secret, and yet more efficient cause at each advancing step. But all this curiously wrought machinery is not the product of chance, operated without care. A superior cause must be sought in human skill, in the deep and active ingenuity of man. Every contrivance presupposes a contriver. Hence there must have been a power and means sufficient to combine and regulate the power of the water, or generate and direct the steam. That power is vested in man; and hence, man stands as the cause, in relation to the whole process operated by wheels, bands, spindles, and looms. Yet we may say, with propriety, that the water, or the steam; the water-wheel, or the piston; the shafts, bands, cogs, pullies, spindles, springs, treddles, harnesses, reeds, shuttles, an almost endless concatenation of instruments, are alike the causes, which tend to produce the final result; for let one of these intermediate causes be removed, and the whole power will be diverted, and all will go wrong—the effect will not be produced.
There must be a first cause to set in operation all inferior ones in the production of action; and to that first cause all action, nay, the existence of all other causes, may be traced, directly, or more distant. The intervening causes, in the consecutive order of things, may be as diversified as the links in the chain of variant beings. Yet all these causes are moved by the all-sufficient and ever present agency of the Almighty Father, the Uncaused Cause of all things and beings; who spoke into existence the universe with all its various and complicated parts and orders; who set the sun, moon, and stars in the firmament, gave the earth a place, and fixed the sea a bed; throwing around them barriers over which they can never pass. From the height of his eternal throne, his eye pervades all his works; from the tall archangel, that "adores and burns," down to the very hairs of our heads, which are all numbered, his wise, benevolent, and powerful supervision may be traced in legible lines, which may be seen and read of all men. And from effects, the most diminutive in character, may be traced back, from cause to cause, upward in the ascending scale of being, to the same unrivalled Source of all power, splendor, and perfection, the presence of Him, who spake, and it was done; who commanded, and it stood still; or, as the poet has it:
"Look thro nature up to nature's God."
The means of action are those aids which are displayed as the medium thro which existing causes are to exhibit their hidden powers in producing changes or effects. The matches in the pocket of Guy Fawkes were the direct means by which he intended to set in operation a train of causes which should terminate in the destruction of the house of lords and all its inmates. Those matches, set on fire, would convey a spark to the faggots, and thence to the powder, and means after means, and cause after cause, in the rapid succession of events, would ensue, tending to a final, inevitable, and melancholy result.