f the oldest and most
permanent ideas of our race. From the dawn of human thought it has
been the conclusion alike of philosophers, theologians, and the
common-sense of mankind that the seen can be explained only by
reference to the unseen, and that any merely physical theory of the
world is necessarily partial. This, too, is the position of our sacred
Scriptures, and is broadly stated in their opening verse; and indeed
it lies alike at the basis of all true religion and all sound
philosophy, for it must necessarily be that 'the things that are seen
are temporal, the things that are unseen eternal.' With reference to
the primal aggregation of energy in the visible universe, with
reference to the introduction of life, with reference to the soul of
man, with reference to the heavenly gifts of genius and prophecy, with
reference to the introduction of the Saviour himself into the world,
and with reference to the spiritual gifts and graces of God's
people--all these spring not from sporadic acts of intervention, but
from the continuous action of God and the unseen world, and this we
must never forget is the true ideal of creation in Scripture and in
sound theology. Only in such exceptional and little influential
philosophies as that of Democritus, and in the speculations of a few
men carried off their balance by the brilliant physical discoveries of
our age, has this necessarily partial and imperfect view been adopted.
Never, indeed, was its imperfection more clear than in the light of
modern science.

"Geology, by tracing back all present things to their origin, was the
first science to establish on a basis of observed facts the necessity
of a beginning and end of the world. But even physical science now
teaches us that the visible world is a vast machine for the
dissipation of energy; that the processes going on in it must have had
a beginning in time, and that all things tend to a final and helpless
equilibrium. This necessity implies an unseen power, an invisible
universe, in which the visible universe must have originated, and to
which its energy is ever returning. The hiatus between the seen and
the unseen may be bridged over by the conceptions of atomic vortices
of force, and by the universal and continuous ether; but whether or
not, it has become clear that the conception of the unseen as existing
has become necessary to our belief in the possible existence of the
physical universe itself, even without taking life