interrupted and suspended? Will the great mechanical reasoners say, that matter does this wonder—matter, that is blind and impotent? Stuff: We must ascribe to a cause wise and powerful, not only the original contrivance of the thing, but the execution of this extraordinary scene. While you gaze upon this noblest muscle of the dog, you see the Deity at work.
And if we turn our eyes from the muscles of mere natural involuntary motion, (which performs by a contracting power, acting within them), to those muscles which move the bones and members of our bodies, by the command of the will, how adorable is the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty Author of nature, not only in providing the animal machine with antagonistical muscles, one of which is contracted, while the other is extended; but for stimulating, contracting, and compressing the nervous elastic cords and blood-vessels, as our minds command or determine! there is no possibility of accounting for the directions at pleasure of the antagonistic muscles, but by resolving them into the continual presence and action of the first cause. He enforces and executes. It is the active principle gives energy and motion both to voluntary and necessary muscles.

This, I think, is the truth of philosophy. To suppose every thing to be effect without cause, is to reduce religion and philosophy to the same desperate state. It destroys all the principles of reason, as well as of virtue and moral conduct.
To say all that can be said, in as few words as possible, upon this article, it is not only the muscular motion, necessary and spontaneous(14) , that is caused by the action of the Deity; but the constant motions in the

stomach, lungs, intestines, and other parts of the body, are caused by an acting Divine Power. It can be demonstrated, that in the action of soft bodies upon soft bodies, the motion is always diminished; and of consequence, it must be greatly lessened in the yielding softness of the flesh and fluids of animal bodies. We see how soon water settles, after motion imprest, by the bare attrition of its parts on one another; altho' it has no obstacles to encounter, or narrow passages to move through. What then can we think of motion in such narrow twining meanders, as veins, arteries, intestines, and lacteal vessels, thro' which the fluids of animal bodies are conveyed to parts innumerable? while the blood, lymph, and chyle creep thro' such narrow winding vessels, the whole motion of those fluids must be consumed every instant by