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other animated tribes? It is as one to infinity. When we attempt to compute the numbers of these existences, language and imagination at once sink beneath the effort.

pasture overspread with ant

Go to the nearest

hillocks, and tell

how many millions of that single race are reposing in those receptacles. Observe on a summer evening the cloud of gnats incumbent over half an acre of marsh; and tell the millionth part of their numbers. Hear Linnæus striving to express his astonishment, in departing from Lapland, at the continuity of the migrating armies of water fowl which covered, during eight succeeding days and nights, the surface of the river Calix. Survey the annual host of herrings approaching the isles of Shetland. "Its breadth and its depth are such as to alter the appearance of the very ocean. It is divided into distinct columns of five or six miles in length, and three or four in breadth.1 the sky curtained by locusts. View the living inundation of the lemings. Expose to a powerful microscope a solitary drop of water, and try to enumerate the active animalcula which it includes. When you have pondered 1 Pennant's British Zoology, 1776, vol. iii. pp. 336, 337.

See

on these few and slight specimens of an interminable series of similar illustrations, represent to yourself a computer counting at the rate of sixty units in a minute, and enabled to prosecute his labour during the four and twenty hours of each succeeding day; and ask yourself how many thousands, how many myriads, of years would be occupied in thus approximating towards the sum of individual beings of the animal creation at this moment existing in the earth, in the air, and in the waters. Every one of these existences is a living proof of love on the part of God. Have not we in this stupendous survey most powerful attestations that God is Love?

"The proof," it will be replied, " is incomplete. Why is not the measure of happiness bestowed without the accompaniments and drawbacks of pain? To evince that God is Love, the happiness ought to be unsullied." Not necessarily. Not if the present measure of qualified happiness be as large a gift to the irrational creation as can be bestowed, consistently with the amplest and wisest manifestation of love to the universe. Never are we to forget that the earth forms an extremely

small portion of the illimitable dominions of the Most High. Nor are we ever to forget that we have scriptural evidence for the conclusion that the events which take place upon this globe, and the scheme of divine administration displayed in this little province of his empire, as connected with human transgression and its consequences, are objects of the most earnest inspection, of the warmest interest, and of the most important instruction, to other ranks of intelligent beings. Is it possible for us, in our contracted sphere, and amid our short-sighted ignorance, to affirm that the subsisting amount of animal suffering resulting from the fall of man, and the very modes in which the suffering takes place (although, if the amount of pain be definite, the mode can offer no just ground of objection), may not be arrangements conducive to purposes of universal good? May not they be arrangements which, at the same time that they are entirely accordant, as already has been shewn, both with justice and with love to the animal creation subjected to them, are physically and morally adapted to the condition of man as a sinner? And both to man himself, whose guilt introduced them, and also to unseen worlds,

may not they be most salutary exemplifications of hateful and widely diffused effects of sin? May they not thus be among the means selected by wisdom which cannot err for the production of the largest amount of ultimate happiness; and be in themselves among the proofs that God is Love?

91

CHAP. VII.

PROOFS OF THE DIVINE LOVE TO MAN

ANTECEDENTLY TO THE FALL.

is no

To the eye of Omniscience there is unknown or distant futurity. There is in fact no futurity. With the Lord a thousand years are as one day. By parity of reasoning, ten thousand or ten thousand millions of ages are with him as one day. When He created our first parents, He equally knew the state of holiness in which he created them; the condition of guilt and misery into which they would speedily plunge themselves and their posterity by disobedience; and the plan which His mercy had predetermined for their redemption by the Lamb slain for them in the divine counsels from the foundation of the world. The love of God then, if it was to be exemplified in perfection towards man, was to be adapted and exercised in modes corresponding to the peculiarities of these successive conditions of the beings who were to be the objects of that love.

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