itation, even admitting that to be, as it were, a condition of the
creation of matter, would have made those bodies revolve in ellipses
of any degree of eccentricity just as well, provided the angle and the
force of projection had been varied. Then, why was this form rather,
than any other chosen? No one knew; yet no one doubted that there was
ample reason for it. Accordingly the sublime discoveries of Lagrange
and La Place have shown us that this small eccentricity is one material
element in the formula by which it is shown that all the irregularities
of the system are periodical, and that the deviation never can exceed a
certain amount on either hand.

But, again, while we are ignorant of this, perhaps the most sublime
truth in all science, we were always arguing as if the system had an
imperfection, as if the disturbing forces of the different planets and
the sun, acting on one another, constantly changed the orbits of each
planet, and must, in a course of ages, work the destruction of the whole
planetary arrangement which we had contemplated with so great
admiration and with awe. It was deemed enough if we could show that
this derangement must be extremely slow, and that, therefore, the system
might last for many more ages without requiring any interposition of
omnipotent skill to preserve it by rectifying its motions. Thus one of
the most celebrated writers above cited argues that, "from the nature
of gravitation and the concentricity of the orbits, the irregularities
produced are so slowly operated in contracting, dilating and inclining
those orbits, that the system may go on for many thousand years before
any extraordinary interference becomes necessary in order to correct
it." And Dr. Burnett adds, that "those small irregularities cast no
discredit on the good contrivance of the whole." Nothing, however,
could cast greater discredit if it were as he supposed, and as all men
previous to the late discoveries supposed; it was only, they rather
think, a "small irregularity," which was every hour tending to the
destruction of the whole system, and which must have deranged or
confounded its whole structure long before it destroyed it. Yet now
we see that the wisdom, to which a thousand years are as one day, not
satisfied with constructing a fabric which might last for "many thousand
years without His interference," has so formed it that it may thus
endure forever.

Now if such be the grounds of our belief in the univ