The Vestibule of Heaven.

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accompanied by wisdom and goodness in operations tending to yet more wonderful and glorious manifestations.

Pass from argument to figure-God called a man from dreams into the vestibule of heaven, "Come thou hither, and see the glory of My house;" and to the angels round His throne, He said "Take him, strip off his robes of flesh, cleanse his vision, put a new breath into his nostrils, but touch not with any change his human heart-the heart that weeps, and trembles." It was done; and, with a mighty angel as guide, the man stood ready for an infinite voyage. They launched without sound or farewell from the terraces of heaven, and wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel-wings, they passed through Saharas of darkness, through wildernesses of death, separating worlds of life. Sometimes they swept over frontiers quickening under prophetic motions from God. Then from a distance, measured only in heaven, light dawned through shapeless film, and in unspeakable space swept to them, and they with unspeakable quickness to the light. In a moment the rushing of planets was upon them-in a moment the blazing of suns around them. Then came eternities of twilight, that revealed, but were not revealed. On the right hand and on the left, mighty constellations built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose archways, seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measure were the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates. Within were stairs that scaled eternities around, above was below and below was above to the man stripped of gravitating body. Depth was transcended by height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite; suddenly as thus they tilted over abysmal worlds; a mighty cry arose that systems more mysterious, worlds more billowy, other heights and other depths were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed and stopped, shuddered and wept. His over-laden heart poured itself forth in tears, and he said"Angel, I will go no further, for the spirit of man acheth with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. me lie down in the grave, and hide me from oppression of

Let

the Infinite, for end I see there is none." Then from all the listening stars that shone around issued a choral voice-" The man speaks truly-end there is none." The angel solemnly demanded-"End there is none? Is there indeed no end? Is this the sorrow that kills you?" But no voice answered, that he himself might answer. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands towards the Heaven of heavens, and said—“To the universe of God there is no end, lo! also, there is no beginning." 1

1 1 Altered from De Quincey's translation from the German of Jean Paul Richter.

STUDY IV.

RUDIMENTS OF THE WORLD.

"The world is not God, as the Pantheists affirm. It did not exist from eternity as the Peripatetics taught. It was not made by Fate and Necessity, as the Stoics said. It did not arise from a fortuitous concourse of atoms, as the Epicureans asserted; nor from the antagonism of two rival powers, as the Persians and Manicheans affirmed; nor was it made by angels, or by emanations of æons, as some of the ancient Gnostics held; nor out of matter co-eternal with God, as Hermogenes said; nor by the spontaneous energy and evolution of self-developing powers, as some have affirmed in later days; but it was created by One, Almighty, Eternal, Wise, and Good Being-God.”—NEWTON's Principia.

WHAT is, or was, the Primeval Matter?

Possibly something out of which all the varieties of matter have been formed. Something simpler than that which is now called elementary matter. The mathematical idea of the nature of “mass " is opposed to the notion of substances being composed of a vast variety of separate elements. The elements, now numbered sixty-four (probably to be increased by recent American discoveries), owe their distinctive properties to the grouping of certain ultimate atoms, possibly not of one kind, but of several kinds; for there are elements which appear to be so related as to have community of origin. If they were simple homogeneous masses, it is thought that their incandescent vapour would show in the spectrum one single bright line. The flame of hydrogen, the lowest in the scale, has four spectral lines, made up, it is supposed, of four different sorts of matter, but no conclusion regarding the complexity of hydrogen can be come to by means of the lines. The thickness of the spectral lines depends on their relation to the spectrum, whether toward the violet or the red ends. Some lines depend probably on the normal vibrations of matter, and the other on the harmonic vibration.

No force, known to us, can separate the constitutional atoms of the elements; or effect any change in them; but if what is

thought of Sirius and Aldebaran be true, that they are younger and hotter suns than our own, there the various kinds of matter may possibly exist in simpler form. Sirius contains hydrogen, but the proportion of metallic vapours is small in its chromosphere, and the hydrogen lines are enormously distended. The discovery of silicon in a new form, in the meteorites, renders possible the compound nature of that socalled element; and there is evidence of the compound nature of calcium in the Sun.

We are told-" by the different grouping of units, and by the combination of the unlike groups, each with its own kind, and each with other kinds, it is supposed that there have been produced the kinds of matter we call elementary."1 If we accept this statement, it must be against all logic and experience. Units possessing precisely the same properties, or rather no properties; and, by energy acting in a straight line, striking against one another; then going off in another direction; till, again striking, they go off in a third direction, and so on; will for ever remain the same units and the same energy-neither creating new matter nor new energy. If, moreover, we bear in mind the all-important principle, that "nothing can be learned as to the physical world save by observation and experiment, or by mathematical deductions from data so obtained," we shall guard against those empirics who, reducing all existence to one element-destitute of all properties, and to one energy-acting only in a straight line, do then, to suit their theory, take in all that they have thrust out, and endue this one supposed form of matter with mysterious faculties and occult powers.

Consider now the nature and constitution of matter.

Lockyer states, as the result of very prolonged and careful investigation, that unless certain so-called elements are compound bodies, the elements of the sun and of the earth are not identical. This dilemma, if of positive value in argument, will necessitate the choice of believing in the existence of simpler bodies; or of crediting that the uniformity of chemical composition of the solar system, a most philosophical conception, is not true. As meteorites falling on the earth

"Principles of Psychology," vol. i. p. 155: Herbert Spencer.

Structure of Matter.

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yield no new or strange elements, the probabilities are in favour of the compound nature of many "elements" of the chemist.

If with Newton we speak of dense invisible units, those are only symbolic, yet still they seem verified in chemical experiments which manifest particles of specific weight, size, elasticity, affinity, differences of quality, with chronometric vibrations-not force, but conditions of force. Get rid of the atom, as Boscovich does, substitute mere geometrical points, points without dimensions, as centres of force, force loci, which attract and repel each other in such wise as to be kept apart and at specific distances; behaving, so far as external bodies are concerned, just as an atom would. Pass on with Sir William Thomson and Helmholtz, to the vortex-atom theory, that matter consists of rotating portions of a something which fills the whole of space, that is, vortex-motion of an everywhere present fluid. Add to this, every so-called atom of any one substance, wheresoever we find it, on the earth, in the sun, or coming to us from cosmical spaces, possesses precisely the same physical properties, measurable dimensions, with shape, motion, laws of action, which we subject to scientific investigation. Then take a drop of water, and by means of a galvanic battery decompose it into the constituent gases; this shows that the parts may be separated until they are so small, that if again divided, the halves or parts are no longer similar to one another; but one is oxygen, the other hydrogen. Thus we have arrived at the grained structure of the whole. We are not wholly without hope that we may some day know the real weight of every atom—not merely the relative weight of several atoms; but the number in the given volume of any material; that the form and motion of the parts of every atom, and the distances by which they are separated, may be calculated; that the motions by which heat, electricity, light, are produced, may be shown by exact mathematical diagrams; that the fundamental properties of the intermediate and possibly constituent medium may be discovered. We shall then, for a while, turn from the motion of planets and music of spheres, to take our fill of wonder as to the mystic maze in which those tiny atoms run.