to make itself not only a microcosm, or little world, but a little
unwritten history of the universe from its own point of view into the
bargain? From everlasting, in time past, only in so far as life has
lasted; invisible, only in so far as the ultimate connection between the
will to do and the thing which does is invisible; imperishable, only in
so far as life as a whole is imperishable; omniscient and omnipotent,
within the limits only of a very long and large experience, but ignorant
and impotent in respect of all else--limited in all the above respects,
yet even so incalculably vaster than anything that we can conceive?

Or shall we see God as we were taught to say we saw him when we were
children--as an artificial and violent attempt to combine ideas which
fly asunder and asunder, no matter how often we try to force them into
combination?

"The true mainspring of our existence," says Buffon, "lies not in those
muscles, veins, arteries, and nerves, which have been described with so
much minuteness, it is to be found in the more hidden forces which are
not bounden by the gross mechanical laws which we would fain set over
them. Instead of trying to know these forces by their effects, we have
endeavoured to uproot even their very idea, so as to banish them utterly
from philosophy. But they return to us and with renewed vigour; they
return to us in gravitation, in chemical affinity, in the phenomena of
electricity, &c. Their existence rests upon the clearest evidence; the
omnipresence of their action is indisputable, but that action is hidden
away from our eyes, and is a matter of inference only; we cannot
actually see them, therefore we find difficulty in admitting that they
exist; we wish to judge of everything by its exterior; we imagine that
the exterior is the whole, and deeming that it is not permitted us to
go beyond it, we neglect all that may enable us to do so."[22]

Or may we not say that the unseen parts of God are those deep buried
histories, the antiquity and the repeatedness of which go as far beyond
that of any habit handed down to us from our earliest protoplasmic
ancestor, as the distance of the remotest star in space transcends our
distance from the sun?

By vivisection and painful introspection we can rediscover many a long
buried history--rekindling that sense of novelty in respect of its
action, whereby we can alone become aware of it. But there are other
remoter histories, and more repeated th