mber more or less.
Still more, when we strain our weak eyes and, with superhuman power,
cast a more searching glance into the secrets of nature, when the
microscope discloses to us the silent laboratory of the seed, the bud
and the blossom, do we recognize the infinite, ever-recurring form in
the most minute tissues and cells, and the eternal unchangeableness of
Nature's plans in the most delicate fibre. Could we pierce still
deeper, the same form-world would reveal itself, and the vision would
lose itself as in a hall hung with mirrors. Such an infinity as this
lies hidden in this little flower. If we look up to the sky, we see
again the same system--the moon revolving around the planets, the
planets around suns, and the suns around new suns, while to the
straining eye the distant star-nebulae themselves seem to be a new and
beautiful world. Reflect then how these majestic constellations
periodically revolve, that the seasons may change, that the seed of
this forget-me-not may shed itself again and again, the cells open, the
leaves shoot out, and the blossoms decorate the carpet of the meadow;
and look upon the lady-bug which rocks itself in the blue cup of the
flower, and whose awakening into life, whose consciousness of
existence, whose living breath, are a thousand-fold more wonderful than
the tissue of the flower, or the dead mechanism of the heavenly bodies.
Consider that thou also belongest to this infinite warp and woof, and
that thou art permitted to comfort thyself with the infinite creatures
which revolve and live and disappear with thee. But if this All, with
its smallest and its greatest, with its wisdom and its power, with the
wonders of its existence, and the existence of its wonders, is the work
of a Being in whose presence thy soul does not shrink back, before whom
thou fallest prostrate in a feeling of weakness and nothingness, and to
whom thou risest again in the feeling of His love and mercy--if thou
really feelest that something dwells in thee more endless and eternal
than the cells of the flowers, the spheres of the planets, and the life
of the insect--if thou recognizest in thyself as in a shadow the
reflection of the Eternal which illuminates thee--if thou feelest in
thyself, and under and above thyself, the omnipresence of the Real, in
which thy seeming becomes being, thy trouble, rest, thy solitude,
universality--then thou knowest the One to Whom thou criest in the dark
night of life: "Crea