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These words furnish no reasonable ground for a doubt as to the possibility of God's exercising a sustaining providence in favour of such a creature as man. They express a conviction which lies at the root of all natural as well as all revealed religion. The root and groundwork of all religion is the impulse which leads men to pray. Man's relation to God as a person; man's dependence on God; man's power to ask, and God's power to give such things as that dependence makes necessary. We pervert this conviction when we represent God under a form which makes providence a fiction and prayer a delusion, as an impersonal principle, as an immovable intelligence, as an inexorable fate, as a being who has no feeling for the wants of man, and is inaccessible to his prayers. The very conception of universal law and order, which science discloses as pervading the material world, is liable, if contemplated in an irreligious spirit, to lead our thoughts away from God, who is mindful of man and visits him, to represent to us a God of science, who is not a God of worship, to set before us an intelligence, it may be, manifested in the grand scheme of the universe, but to hide from us the personal God of each one of us, our Father who is in heaven. The first duty of man is enjoined upon him as the command of God: The first sin of man is disobedience against God. The first dim shadowing forth of man's deliverance from the power of sin is the redemption provided by God. We are not told that man transgressed against the moral order of things; we are not told that he disobeyed the dictates of his own reason; we are not told that he felt the reproofs of an accusing conscience. We are not told that man was created as a part of the world, and under the general law of the world; that his creation was a step in the development of forces acting under some natural and necessary impulse; that his fall was but a further continuation of that development, a stage in the course of progress which was determined for all things from the beginning. The opening of Scripture brings before us man in his religious nature, as a being created by and dependent upon God. This is the first teaching of Scripture, and it is also the last. Man, in the progress of his knowledge, is ever striving after unity, ever seeking to reduce many phenomena to one general principle. To reduce many effects to one cause, many phenomena to one law; to this tendency are due all the grander triumphs of science within her proper field, but to this also are due the most pernicious errors of a false science, striving to establish herself in a field which is not her own. The boundaries of the one and of the other are clearly marked out alike by the consciousness of man and by the Word of God. Obliterate distinctions, frame general laws as we will, there is one distinction which stands out marked and prominent as the basis of all philosophy and all religion, a distinction which neither philosophy nor religion can set aside without destroying themselves at the same time: the' distinction between mind and its objects, between moral and physical law, between liberty and necessity, in one word, between person and things. Man, like the natural world, is the work of God; but man, unlike the material world, can know that he is the work of God, and can worship the God who made him. And man too, unlike the material world, can obey or disobey the law which God has given him. Modern sophistry either regards man and the laws of man's conduct as but a part of the course of nature, or talks of necessary determinations and invariable antecedents of the human will. Against both perversions the language of Scripture furnishes a standing protest, and if read aright a safeguard. From the very beginning of the world man stands out apart and distinct from the rest of God's creation, alone made in the image of God, alone subject to a moral law, alone capable of obedience or disobedience to that law. God is revealed in relation to man as He is revealed in relation to no other of His visible creatures — the personal God of His personal creatures.

(Dean Mansel.)

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KJV: When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;

WEB: When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained;