sorrow, on
which the lips are sealed for ever; yet would it not be idle to ask
which of them has the truest affection? Are they not both in their own
way true? In the same East, men take off their sandals in devotion; we
exactly reverse the procedure, and uncover the head. The Oriental
prostrates himself in the dust before his sovereign; even before his
God the Briton only kneels; yet would it not again be idle to ask
which is the essential and proper form of reverence? Is not true
reverence in all cases modified by the individualities of temperament
and education? Should we not say, in all these forms worketh one and
the same spirit of reverence?

Again in the world as God has made it, one law shows itself under
diverse, even opposite manifestations; lead sinks in water, wood
floats upon the surface. In former times men assigned these different
results to different forces, laws, and gods. A knowledge of Nature has
demonstrated that they are expressions of one and the same law; and
the great difference between the educated and the uneducated man is
this--the uneducated sees in this world nothing but an infinite
collection of unconnected facts--a broken, distorted, and fragmentary
system, which his mind can by no means reduce to order. The educated
man, in proportion to his education, sees the number of laws
diminished--beholds in the manifold appearances of Nature the
expression of a few laws, by degrees fewer, till at last it becomes
possible to his conception that they are all reducible to one, and
that that which lies beneath the innumerable phenomena of Nature is
the One Spirit--God.

2. All _living_ unity is spiritual, not formal; not sameness, but
manifoldness. You may have a unity shown in identity of form; but it
is a lifeless unity. There is a sameness on the sea-beach--that unity
which the ocean waves have produced by curling and forcibly destroying
the angularities of individual form, so that every stone presents the
same monotony of aspect, and you must fracture each again in order to
distinguish whether you hold in your hand a mass of flint or fragment
of basalt. There is no life in unity such as this.

But as soon as you arrive at a unity that is living, the form becomes
more complex, and you search in vain for uniformity. In the parts, it
must be found, if found at all, in the sameness of the pervading life.
The illustration given by the apostle is that of the human