THOUGHT XXV. LIGHT OF NATURE. "In tantum videbimus Deum, in quantum sumus similes." "Narratives of a miraculous character must not be rejected because of their marvellousness. Rather, we may conclude that but for their marvellousness they would not have been remembered and recorded."-THOMAS GRIFFITHS, Studies of the Divine Master, p. 405. EVERY blade of grass on our green flowery well-built earth points to a realm of mystery out of which all phenomena spring. All history, all experience, our irrepressible instincts, bespeak an eternal reality-something more than surface forms and vanishing semblances. Not our eye can see it, not our words can utter it, we understand by our spirit; and when we understand there is nothing however small, no passing gleam of nature, no wayside flower, but has a divine meaning and reveals a divine presence. "All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Breathes in our soul." POPE, Essay on Man, i. Quackery and dupery have been busy among us, babbling poorly, with sounding nomenclature, physical experimenting, and what not, to prove-that God everywhere is not God with Us. Common sense is now awaking, and thinks, "Mind makes the man, and the soul stamps him as of worth." Mind carries man to see the reason of matter's thousand-fold complexity of forces; and mind discerns that Intelligence cannot be darkest where thought shines brightest. Mind says, "If God reveals His thoughts in material thousand-fold complexity, which cannot know anything, is it not that those able to know may be instructed? Is it not to brighten the intelligence of reasonable creatures, and that men may have courts of science, and halls of literature? We certainly have a revelation in the worlds of Eternal Power and Godhead, we certainly possess Godconsciousness. These two are, in a sense, incarnation and inspiration; so that the greater Incarnation-God in Christ, and the greater Inspiration-God in the Word -Holy Scripture, well comport themselves with our sacred persuasion that the true man is a pavilion of Deity, and that our intellect and emotion are candles lighted by the Lord. The essence of our idea of God, of a First Cause, is that everything which exists is produced by Him; and that there is no period at which creation might not have taken place. The phenomena constituting the present order of nature, are the result of antecedents acting in unknown ways; and could we travel further and ever further back, we should arrive at direct operation by the First Cause; otherwise there is no First Cause. This philosophic certitude satisfies our reason. It is the great On this foundation we erect our science. element in theology. The other practical causes of our belief, scientific and theologic, except in so far as the Divine Spirit works certitude of conviction, do not attain philosophic surety; but, nevertheless, are of so sufficing a nature that we do not even desire to be released from them. The assailants of religion are generally ignorant of the fact, that the premises of all their science are inferred, and not even yet properly determined; so that science, as to actual matter of proof, is worse off than theology; and, in so far as determined, explicitly known but to few persons. The need for science is of a specially imperative character, regulating our animal actions. The need for religious truth is one from which we would not if we could be freed: it belongs to the loftiest region of our moral nature, it is the spiritual life of millions-ignorant alike of science and philosophy, and it affords to man the only lasting satisfaction. God has endowed man with attributes that we know are not matter-even as light, heat, gravity are not matter-but transformers of matter; something by which he rises above material nature, subdues its laws, possesses a human supernatural, and partakes of the Divine Nature (2 Pet. i. 4), in token of the Divine Supernatural. Man does not confine himself to finite things. -nor can he: there are no limits, or if so, they are ever enlarging to the range of his activity. He traces the presence and the organic movement or process of reason in nature, and the world's progressive advancement. By thought he emerges from the narrowness of individuality, or nation, or age; and he seeks not so much what seems as what is, and why it is. Every addition to real knowledge deepens our consciousness of the difference between seeming and reality-we shall not believe and cannot believe that our thought is shut out for ever from the Supreme Reality. Men ever have believed, do believe, will believe, that they can know God: not in His essence, but as the great thinkable, intelligent reality. Because God is a thinkable reality, He enters our thought. We do not create the thought, but our thought elicits the presence of rational relations in nature, and hence arrives at objective Reason as the ground of reality. This Permanent Unity beyond all things, discerned by science, is certainly that which the manifold phenomena of time and space and sense reveal to thinking creatures. It is folly to say He has no relation to thought, and is not apprehensible by thought, for if we are unable to conceive of the great unity, power, reality, truth-the Being whence all being emerges; then the basis of all things, of all intelligence, is virtually a blank non-entity, which is absurd. That the Supreme suffers diminution from reality by becoming relative to our finite thought is not true: a revelation of Godhead is the realization in nature of Divine Thought. Our perception of that Divine Thought conducts us to the highest and fullest realities of our own life. Pure thought takes to itself a logic of genius, and by exact furthest exercise of imagination, which it leads out with enlarging intelligence, attains rich and full content in a "peace that passeth understanding," a "joy unspeakable and full of glory." Materialists attribute to matter all the properties usually counted spiritual; drag invisible and heavenly things down to earth, do not advance our knowledge, Now for they declare that nothing is real but what we strike against and touch, forgetting that these properties prove that energy has entered and abides within matter. if energy enters matter, and constructs the worlds by atomic and molecular arrangement, uses microscopic living workers of whom twenty-seven millions and more live and labour within an inch of space, are we to account their insignificance the cause of the world's magnificence? Is man, who finds that every human handy-work is graven with man's device, to say that the skilled work of the universe was wrought without skill; or that the intelligence comes from those little labourers who have no mind nor will? Certainly not. Sydney Smith was at a dinner-party with an atheist who argued against the evidence of design in the world. Presently this man praised a pudding very much. Sydney Smith said, “You find the pudding good, sir; pray do you believe in the cook?" The universe is a vast visible embodied plan. Nor is that all: vegetable life contains, so to speak, a soul in the bud; animal life, anima bruti, is the soul looking out of the windows of sense; in man there is a sparkling and glitter of intelligence—a very lamp of God. We shall never cease to believe that the body of man— understood in the highest sense-is a divine incarnation; and that the spirit—so advanced beyond all other things —is, pre-eminently, a manifestation of the Holy Ghost. This blessed Light, part of our nature, enlightening us so that we trace the past; and possess the future; “ ἄπορος ἐπ ̓ οὐδὲν ἔρχεται τὸ μέλλον” SOPHOCLES, Antig., 359. is, in itself, a guarantee that we shall not go down to |