Mr.Combe affirms that each of the three great classes of "natural laws" requires _obedience_ to itself, and that each, in its own specific way, rewards obedience and punishes disobedience.

And he gives, as one example, the case of the most pious and benevolent missionaries sailing to civilize and Christianize the heathen, but embarking in an unsound ship, and being drowned _by disobeying a "natural law;"_ as another, the case of "a child or an aged person, stumbling into the fire, through mere lack of physical strength to keep out of it;" as another, the case of "an ignorant child, groping about for something to eat and drink, and stumbling on a phial of laudanum, drinking it and dying;" and as another, the case of "a slater slipping from the roof of a high building, in consequence of a stone of the ridge having given way as he walked upright along it."[201] In all these cases, the accident or misfortune which befalls the individual is represented as the _punishment_ connected with the neglect or transgression of a "natural law," just as remorse, shame, conviction, and condemnation may be the punishment for a moral offence.

In other words, a child who ignorantly drinks laudanum is _punished with death_, in the same sense, and for the same reason, that the murderer is punished with death for shedding the blood of a fellow-creature; and the poor slater who misses his foot, and falls, most unwillingly, from a roof or parapet, is _punished with death_, just as a man would be who threw himself over _with the intention_ of committing suicide! Surely there is some grave error here,--an error opposed to the surest dictates of our moral nature, and one that cannot be glossed over by any apologue, however ingeniously constructed, to show the evil effects which would follow from a suspension of the general laws of Nature.

For, in the words of Mr.
Scott, it is only where "the law is previously known"-- and not only so, but where the "circumstances which determine the effect might be foreseen"-- that "the pleasures or pains annexed to actions can properly be termed _rewards and punishments_;" for "these have reference to the state of mind of the party who is to be rewarded or punished; it is the intention or disposition of the mind, and not the mere act of the body, that is ever considered as obedience or disobedience, or thought worthy, in a moral sense, of either reward or punishment." And as the theory is thus subversive of all our ideas of moral retribution, so it demands of man a kind of obedience which it is _impossible_ for him to render, since _all_ the laws of Nature, and _all_ the states of particular things at a given time, cannot possibly be known by the ignorant many, nor even by the philosophic few.

The philosopher, not less than the peasant, may perish through the explosion of a steam engine, or the unsoundness of a ship, or the casual ignition of his dwelling; and that, too, without blame or punishment being involved in either case.