Rev. Buckley's Sermon.

Rev. James Buckley of New York preached last night in Appleton Chapel from the text: "To an unknown god," Acts, 12th chapter, 23d verse. His sermon was a forcible explanation of the absolute necessity of believing our universe wisely ordered and ruled by divine intelligence, instead of believing it un-ruled and purposeless.

It was the question of divine power in the world, he said, which was filling the Greek mind when Paul made his sublime speech to the Athenians from Mars Hill, in which are found the words of the text. The Greeks had been imagining, just as men have always imagined, what forces ruled this world, and in their anxiety to reverence every divine power, they had erected an altar "to an unknown god." It was this god that Paul so marvelously described to them. His conception, familiar to all of us today, of the one all-powerful, all-loving God, was simply the fundamental conception which shines forth from the beginning to the end of the mysterious book we call the Bible.

It is for us to decide whether or not we shall accept this conception today. Some explanation of how man and the world came into existence and what are their destinies is absolutely essential to satisfy the inward cravings of human nature. Thinking men of all ages have been able to suggest but two ways of accounting for man and the world: one by supposing them the creations and creatures of great mechanical, dead "natural" laws, the other by supposing them due to natural laws, but laws the manifestation and will of divine intelligence.