THAT life on which it is proposed to found an argument for Divinity was singular in the materials and the mode of its formation. The outward and the inward aspects of every earthly course are mysteriously related to each other. The age, the country, the physical organization, education, society, and the like, exert an acknowledged influence in the intellectual and moral development of a human being. Native force of character may rise above the accidents of birth and early position and all the external conditions by which the soul is limited, so that it can never be predicted with certainty, from any given circumstances, what a man’s future life shall be, because we can never foresee how the action of these circumstances may be modified, and what minute and delicate influences may either neutralize or assist their effect in the progress of years. But the fact of dependence and of moral causation, nevertheless, has almost the constancy and sovereignty of a universal law. 30The seeds of that definite form which each individual life eventually assumes will be found to lie within its early history. The future is never accidental and capricious, a void filled up with materials, gathered according to no principle and disposed without order or law. It is rather the natural product of elements which existed and acted in the earlier period of life. The present and the future stand almost in the relation of cause and effect. Events, influences, incidents in the one largely contribute to make the other what it ultimately becomes. Usually a man’s early life and position will be found to contain the germ and to furnish the true interpretation Of his future character in history.