te whatever
for the old story, that Elohim "spoke, and it was done--he commanded,
and it stood fast." Whence the fiery mists by the rotation and cooling
of which the worlds were slowly evolved? We are told that the same
process is going on now within the ken of astronomers. But does any one
suppose that in those realms of space God is evoking something out of
nothing, or saying "be," and "there is"? No; we are assured that these
fiery mists are formed by the collision of misguided orbs; and we are
even asked--or, at least we _were_ asked--to believe that this process
must go on until all systems are agglomerated in one orb, to be
ultimately congealed into stone. What, then, is the office of the
Creator according to this scheme, as repulsive as it is absurd? It would
appear that, at some moment in a vacuous eternity, He calls matter out
of nothing, whirls it into fiery vortices, and then lets it cool down to
the absolute zero wherein death reigns for ever.

[Sidenote: The Protest of Faith.]

[Sidenote: Sustained by Latest Science.]

[Sidenote: Which Suggests an Infinite Unity.]

But, after all, "there is a spirit in man," and "the inspiration of the
Almighty," of the Eternal, of the glorious Whole to which we belong,
stirs in us a protest against this blasphemy of ignorance. Ignorance, I
say, for it was not the knowledge of our wise men that whispered such
things, but their sense of the vacuity beyond their knowledge. Up to
certain bounds, their grasp of facts, their insight into physical order,
their mathematical skill, were beyond all praise. But beyond that bound,
aye, and within it, in every inconceivable mode of the action of force,
as, for example, in gravitation, brooded the Unknowable. And it was not
their knowledge, but their ignorance that entailed absurd issues.
Already there are signs that even celestial physics and mathematics will
refuse to endorse as final so revolting a scheme of material evolution
and devolution, ending only in universal death.[23] And when once the
re-birth of new order out of the old is seen to be everywhere and
eternally taking place, then all the hints given us by science of the
ultimate oneness of all things, converge in the faith that All is God,
and God is All. For certainly, the latest observations on Matter suggest
that all forms of it are variations of one ultimate Substance. And the
convertibility of forces, as well as the conservation of force, point to
one eternal energy