Would such an Intelligence think it necessary to require for our origin and maintenance the immediate intervention of God?
From the solar system let us descend to what is still more insignificant--a little portion of it; let us descend to our own earth.
In the lapse of time it has experienced great changes.

Have these been due to incessant divine interventions, or to the continuous operation of unfailing law?
The aspect of Nature perpetually varies under our eyes, still more grandly and strikingly has it altered in geological times.

But the laws guiding those changes never exhibit the slightest variation.

In the midst of immense vicissitudes they are immutable.
The present order of things is only a link in a vast connected chain reaching back to an incalculable past, and forward to an infinite future.
There is evidence, geological and astronomical, that the temperature of the earth and her satellite was in the remote past very much higher than it is now.

A decline so slow as to be imperceptible at short intervals, but manifest enough in the course of many ages, has occurred.