God is One. He is in every place, but the presence is incomprehensible. He is not here or there as a property or extension. His relation to place, time, extension, is peculiar to infinitude. Divine power is never put forth unaccompanied by Divine wisdom, nor apart from goodness and justice. No attribute is dormant, there is no parting nor divisibility in the Divine essence. His plan of the world, everlastingly present with Him, had temporal realisation in that effectual interference by which the material universe became a pavilion of the infinity in which it was developed. There was first a direct personal self-operation, a putting forth of Divine energy; afterwards, the use, of all natural means, as they were called into existence. The action continues in that spontaneousness of Nature by which she seems to do all things as of herself. The worldly structure rises story above story, nor are the chambers of uniform dimensions, embellishment, furniture. We behold from a distance, a thousand halls, grand and beautiful; we look through some of the courts, and take them as a gauge of some vast, wonderful, mysterious life, and the visible universe as a tent of sojourning for wayfarers to the eternal future.

A bird's-eye view of the whole argument:

Standing on the threshold of the universe, we behold infinitude, and are conscious of other and wider worlds than that in which we dwell. The Divine account of creation gives the work of ages as in a moment. The world, or creation, gave a beginning to time-there was no time without a creation, and creation is the work of Omnipresent Energy. Nature is not complete in itself, but rests on something infinitely beyond; cannot be limited to material things, which are but a low form of substance in process of glorification. Transitions from the visible material to the invisible, transformations from world to world, gradation from state to state, show a connection of all things, specially of our souls, with the Infinite. Our present stage lies between the ruins of worlds that have been and the chaotic materials of worlds to come. Language is not adequate to express the eternity, wisdom, might of God, or of His works. Plans of the worlds, everlastingly present with Him, have local and temporal realisation; might being ever

The Vestibule of Heaven.

73

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 saidAngel, I will go no further, for the spirit of man acheth with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down in the grave, and hide me from oppression of

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 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." 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

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