The Harmony of Creation [pp. 278-290]

THE HARMONY OF CREATION.
are designed to produce that harmony in the revolutions of the
moral world which has ever existed in the physical. If asked
why it has not been manifested in man's moral agency, we answer
because he has broken down the laws of moral gravitation; he
has violated his nature by self-administered poison, and misapplied the laws of God. If in the physical world we discover the
harmony of antagonistic forces, does not the economy of Heaven
proclaim this moral antagonism? The living are always dying;
the dead liveth forever; not only is life the germ of death, but
death itself the very seed of a higher life. In the moral, as in
the physical death, a new and a spiritual birth continually succeed.
In our spiritual feelings the happiness of the Christian follows
the deepest contrition, and those who occupy the heights of Christian joy, attain it by ardent struggles in the vale of distress. "For
whom the Lord loveth, them also he chasteneth." The sturdy
oak drives its roots deeper in the soil when shaken by the storm;
and faith takes stronger hold on the cross when the storms of
adversity gather and darken about us.
We wish to illustrate what must be acknowledged to exist;
a scale of correspondences between the physical and the moral
world, which if applied in the moral as they exist in the physical,
would produce equal harm oy-each haviqg a separate system of
antagonisms upon which itsaharmony depends. Until these moral
forces are set in operation, controlling each other by opposite
principles, the government of the world, political, social and moral,
will continue wrong; for it can find no system of checks and balances but that of antagonism; an adjusted antagonism, which
keeping opposite principles in subjection to law, is still incapable
of violating its own law. The laws of retribution, which imply
the entire system of rewards and punishments, are designed to
produce a common result. The good are rewarded; the bad are
punished; this involves a principle of moral antagonism, for a
common purpose. How beautifully is the theory of criminal jurisprudence systematized under the legal ethics of the Old Testament. "Blood defileth the land; and the land cannot be cleansed
of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that
shed it."
The administration of the affairs of the world has been wrong
from the time the Jews departed from the moral government of
God. Why is it that church and state are wrong, and have
always been wrong? Why is it that men have been making
paper governments and building up sand.hill empires, as children
do paper card-houses? Why is it that the church, the great
engine of reform, has produced so little good? Is not government and church and sociology all wrong?
The lawyers appear to have caught this principle of equalizing
rights by antagonisms, when acknowledging the necessity for law,
and the importance of the stability of its principles; yet the machinery of the law works wrong; its principles are good, but in
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