than that plants not only live, they are sensitive; animals not only live and feel, they are graduated in intelligence, and some of them intelligently commune with us; as for ourselves, our thought travels to the sun, to the planets, and beyond them, discerning everywhere tokens of a life, a wisdom, a power, binding all things into one glorious continuing system; in which outward uniformity is maintained by inward and ceaseless change. Everywhere eternal Power, eternal Wisdom, eternal Life, flow in, through, and around all things. Nothing ceases; no, not for a moment; and death is the birth-pang that ushers in another existence. The extremely little, not less than the immeasurably great, affords evidences of one Life, one Power, one Science, differently manifested-possessing all in everything, and everything in all. "Thou art in small things great, not small in any ; Thy even praise can neither rise nor fall. Thou art in all things one, in each thing many, For Thou art infinite in one and all." George Herbert, Providence. Even when the dirt and coarse ugliness of mechanical processes "are like a pain within us;" or when we look at the unreasoning work of nature; we know that in the mechanical and unreasoning is the message of some magic touch, not yet understood. A stone curiously marked, kicked about for ages, or used as stop-gap in a wall, and seen by generations of clowns, is looked on by the eye of a scholar; and, as in a moment, histories, mysteries, and religions, are explained. The world is so wonderful that what we call trivialities are, when duly tended, seeds of joy for ever and ever, growing into plants of renown, trees of life and knowledge. Magic, effective thought, the touch-conveying quality, which changes the aspect and meaning of the world, is transcendent: is more than nature. Our desire to be perfectly good, even though we hardly know what it is, shows that we are part in a power against evil; we are widening the reign of light, and making the struggle with darkness narrower. By investigation we get at the grain of things, know how to consider ultimate facts, living structures, and obtain a physical basis for men's thoughts in the vibration of material atoms. Thought is invisible, so are the ultimate atoms; but they are both real powers which become visible in many effects, and constitute all that we know of in the world as matter and mind, life and spirit. Hence, all is sometimes visible, sometimes invisible. The realities, with which we have to do, are in themselves unseen; are independent of all outward appearance. Our true life is not that which the accidental may hurt or destroy. It is hidden in that majesty whose power gives light to the sky, shows itself in all forms and forces, and continues for ever, the life of all. What is it that drives the railway train? The engine; not the engine, the driver. Yet driver, engine, train, were useless without the coal; which is heat given by the sun, that was compressed, bottled, stored away, myriads of years ago; and is now made to live again. and work. Dark sayings are opened on the harp. There is a mystery and a meaning in music, that we can neither explore nor expound. In sorrow and sickness it is solace and medicine; in joy, one of the fairest and most glorious gifts of Nature. There is in it a soul. for us which, leaping out from material chords and pipes, plays upon our spirit. Inner hidden numbers and combinations awake otherwise unknown and inexpressible emotions and desires. That which long ago sent light and heat, that which flows in a stream of melody, is as a soul, using the sun and the harp as instruments; they are the physical basis, as is the body of man to his soul. Without this spirit, life, meaning, things would be disjointed and dead. Words lie in the dictionary, as stone in the quarry; but what a world of thought and language may be condensed into a sentence ! By new combinations of common words, power is created, a blaze of light illumines a whole realm of knowledge, and delicate hues clothe human genius with angelic garb. All physical things, not omitting the very lowest, are used for discipline. Transformed ever and ever, they gain a grander history and further meaning. They are being built into the house of our habitation, and when we possess immortality as the manifested sons of God, we shall understand it all even from the beginning. "Till from the straw the flail the corn doth beat, Until the chaff be purged from the wheat, Yea, till the mill the grain in pieces tear, Yea, till His flail upon us He doth lay, Tribulation, quoted by Archbishop Trench, in "Study of Words." RESEARCH XXI. HIGHER PHYSICAL BASIS OF IMMORTALITY. "We come face to face with the moral, the intellectual, the spiritual emotions, the inmost secrets of men's hearts, and we are electrified by what we see. The natural sounds of earth, wind in the branches, a wave falling on the sea-shore, appeal to all; but not in the same way as does some subtle chord struck by a great musician; some string with its pathetic vox humana, thrilling from the touch of the master violinist.”—WILLIAM SHARP, Introductory Note to Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. LORD TENNYSON, In Memoriam, xxii. WORLDS, like men, have a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer can make the dark unseen path of a planet to shine as a thread of light to the observant mind; but behind all things, even those most clearly seen, are mysteries great as the marvels which make our own inner life to be so strange. Besides that: Nature, in her grandest and sublimest array, is but a delineation of the outside extremities of the works of eternal Power. All matter, all known things, electricity, magnetism, heat, represent something greater-past, present, future. There is in the animate and inanimate, in the plant and the animal, in time and space, something that represents the greatest and the least, the nearest and the furthest off. It must be so; for all things are by the Infinite |