OR THE ETERNAL PRINCIPLES AND THE NECESSARY BY LAURENS P. HICKOK, D. D. UNION COLLEGE. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON & COMPANY, 846 & 348 BROADWAY. LONDON: 16 LITTLE BRITAIN. 1858. 198. a. 6. ENTERED according to Act of Congress, in the year 1858, by LAURENS P. HICKOK, D. D. In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Northern District PREFACE. THERE must somewhere be a position from whence it may clearly be seen, that the universe has laws which are necessarily determined by immutable and eternal principles. Nothing in nature, and equally so not nature itself, can be made intelligible except as it has been subjected to rational principle, and such principle must both have been, and been made controlling, in the very origination of nature, or nature must forever be without meaning or end. That principle, then, to an allperfect insight, must disclose within itself what the facts must be, and no induction of facts can at all be needed by the absolute reason. But the finite reason, with its partial insight, must have too limited a comprehension of the eternal principle, to be able adequately to follow out all its determined results from itself, without a reference to the facts that have been determined by it to guide his intuitive processes. What already is must often help him to see what eternally must have been, and without the suggestive fact he would have failed to find the deter |