We must rise to a far higher platform if we would survey the whole scheme of the Divine administration: we must consider, not merely _the independent operation_ of the several classes of "natural laws," but also their _mutual relations_, as distinct but connected parts of one vast system, in which the "physical and organic" laws are made subordinate and subservient to the "moral," under the superintendence of that Supreme Intelligence which makes the things that are "seen and temporal" to minister to those things which are "unseen and eternal;" we must carefully discriminate, as Bishop Butler has done, between the mere "natural government" which is common to man with the inferior and irresponsible creation, and the higher "moral government" which is peculiar to intelligent and accountable agents; and we must seek to know how far--the reality of both being admitted--the former is auxiliary or subservient to the latter, and whether, on the whole, the system is fitted to generate that frame of mind, and to inculcate those lessons of truth, which are appropriate to the condition of man, as a subject of moral discipline in a state of probation and trial.

Nothing short of this will suffice for the explanation of the Divine government, or for the satisfaction of the human mind.

It is felt to be a mere insult to the understandings, and a bitter mockery to the feelings, of men, to talk only of "natural laws," or even of their "independent action" in such a case, to tell a weeping mother that her child died, and died too as the transgressor of a wise and salutary "natural law" which establishes a certain relation between opium and the nervous system: for, grant that the law is wise and salutary, grant that evil would result from its abolition, grant even that it acts independently of any other law, physical or moral, still the profounder question remains, whether such an event as the death of a tender child, through the operation of a law of which that child was necessarily ignorant, can properly be regarded as a punishment inflicted by Divine justice?
and whether a theory of this kind can afford "a key to the government of God ?" Such are some of the radical and incurable defects of Mr.Combe's theory of "natural laws." We ascribe it to him simply because he has been the most recent and the most popular expounder of it.

But it is not original, nor in any sense peculiar to him alone.

He acknowledges his obligations in this respect to a manuscript work of Dr.Spurzheim, entitled, "A Sketch of the Natural Laws of Man;" and he refers, somewhat incidentally, to Volney's "Law of Nature," published originally as a Catechism, and afterwards reprinted under the title, "La Loi Naturelle; _ou, Principes Physiques de la Morale_." The same theory, in substance, had been broached in the "Systeme de la Nature," and _there_ it was applied in support of the atheistic conclusions of that remarkable treatise.