On the one hand, Mr.Combe tells us that "'The Constitution of Man' not only admits the existence of God, but is throughout devoted to the object of expounding and proving that He exercises a real, practical, and intelligible government of this world, rewarding virtue with physical and moral well-being, and punishing vice with want and suffering." On the other hand, it is manifest, beyond the possibility of doubt or denial, that if his professed Theism has subjected him to the charge of being an inconsequent thinker in some of the organs of avowed Atheism,[195] his favorite arguments in support of "government by natural law" have been applied by himself, and eagerly welcomed by others, as conclusive objections to the doctrine of a special Providence and the efficacy of Prayer.
We do not object to the limitation of his inquiry to the one point of the relation subsisting between "the Constitution of Man and External Objects,"-- that is a perfectly legitimate, and might be a highly instructive field of investigation; but we do object to his utter forgetfulness of that limitation in the progress of his work, and to his attempt to introduce a variety of other topics which are manifestly alien from his professed design.

If he meant to discuss merely the relation between the constitution of man and external objects, he had nothing whatever to do with the far higher and more comprehensive doctrine respecting the relation between the constitution of man and the government of God, and, least of all, with the _revealed_ doctrines of a special Providence, of a fall into a state of sin, of death as its wages, and of "spiritual influences" by which the ruin occasioned by the fall may be redressed; and yet these topics, foreign as they are to the professed design of his work, are all introduced, and treated, too, in a way that is fitted, if not designed, to shake the confidence of his readers in what have hitherto been regarded as important articles of the Christian faith.

It has received this significant testimony, "'Combe's Constitution of Man' would be worth a hundred New Testaments on the banks of the Ganges."[196] There are _two points_, especially, on which he comes more directly into collision with our present argument: 1.

He speaks as if God governed the universe _only_ by "natural laws," so as to exclude any other dispensation of Providence.
2.

He speaks as if the "physical and organic" laws of Nature possessed the same authority and imposed the same obligation as the "moral" laws of Conscience and Revelation; and as if the breach or neglect of the former were _punishable_ in the same sense, and for the same reason, as the transgression of the latter.
Next to the omission of all reference to a future state, and the total exclusion of the connection which subsists between the temporal and the eternal under the Divine government, we hold these _two_ to be the capital defects of his treatise; and it may be useful, in the present state of public opinion, to offer a few remarks upon each of them.
In regard to the _first_, we need not repeat what we have already explicitly declared, that God does govern the world _in part_ by means of "natural laws" and "second causes;" but, not content with this concession, Mr.Combe speaks as if He governed the world _only_ by these means, to the exclusion of everything like a "special Providence," or "Divine influences." It is not so much in his dogmatic statements as in his illustrative examples that the real tendency of his theory becomes apparent.