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and with whom the great and the little of created things are equally insignificant, cannot or will not condescend to take immediate cognizance of every thing that happens in his vast universe.
We are apt to suppose that the general principles which we call the laws of nature are so many agents, or, at least, so many moving powers impressed on the great machine of creation, by which the various changes and phenomena we behold have been brought to pass without the further superintendence of Him who made it;— whereas they are more justly viewed as being merely the modes of the divine operations; an expression of the order in which it has pleased Him that the successive events which constitute the course of nature should follow each other in the relation of physical cause and effect; and in conformity to which the energy of divine power is incessantly exerted for the government of the world in bringing about the various changes which it exhibits.
A pamphlet which Mr. Fleming published about this time, in reply to Thomas Chubb, a noted sceptical writer, who had adopted the ordinary notion of a general providence and attempted to derive from it an argument against revelation, places this question in an ingenious, and, on the whole, a just and satisfactory point of view.
It forms one of a series of publications by our author connected with the controversy so actively carried on at this period with the principal deistical writers of the day, and in which, as we have already seen, several other dissenting divines of the same school greatly distinguished themselves.
Fleming seems to have singled out Chubb as his
