POWER, WISDOM, AND GOODNESS 69.181 OF GOD, AS MANIFESTED IN THE ADAPTATION OF EXTERNAL NATURE, TO THE TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE AND RIGHT REVEREND CHARLES JAMES, LORD BISHOP OF LONDON. MY LORD, YOUR Lordship's personal kindness to myself would alone have inclined me to solicit for this work the honour of your patronage and name. But I must further confess the peculiar satisfaction which I feel, in offering it as a tribute and a public acknowledgment of my admiration for an order of men, who, more than all others, have enriched by their labours the moral and theological literature of England. In the prosecution of that arduous and hitherto almost unattempted theme which the late President of the Royal Society has, by your Lordship's recommendation, assigned to me, I have derived greater aid from the views and reasonings of Bishop Butler, than I have been able to find besides, in the whole range of our existent authorship. With his powerful aid I commenced the high investigation to which your Lordship has called me. To imagine that I have completed it, would be to forget at once the fulness of the Crea |