ngth should have arisen a race of creatures, human beings,
that should be able to reconstruct, however faintly, by investigation,
imagination, and deduction, a picture of the dead life of the world.
It is this capacity for arriving at what has been, for tracing out the
huge mystery of the work of God, that appears to me the most wonderful
thing of all. And yet we seem no nearer to the solution of the secret;
we come into the world with this incredible gift of placing ourselves,
so to speak, on the side of the Creator, of surveying his work; and yet
we cannot guess what is in his heart; the stern and majestic eyes of
Nature behold us stonily, permitting us to make question, to explore,
to investigate, but withholding the secret. And in the light of those
inscrutable eyes, how weak and arrogant appear our dogmatic systems of
religion, that would profess to define and read the very purposes of
God; our dearest conceptions of morality, our pathetic principles, pale
and fade before these gigantic indications of mysterious, indifferent
energy.

Yet even here, I think, the golden thread gleams out in the darkness;
for slight and frail as our so-called knowledge, our beliefs, appear,
before that awful, accumulated testimony of the past, yet the latest
development is none the less the instant guiding of God; it is all as
much a gift from him as the blind impulses of the great lizard in the
dark forest; and again there emerges the mighty thought, the only
thought that can give us the peace we seek, that we are all in his
hand, that nothing is forgotten, nothing is small or great in his
sight; and that each of our frail, trembling spirits has its place in
the prodigious scheme, as much as the vast and fiery globe of the sun
on the one hand, and, on the other, the smallest atom of dust that
welters deep beneath the sea. All that is, exists; indestructible,
august, divine, capable of endless rearrangement, infinite
modifications, but undeniably there.

This truth, however dimly apprehended, however fitfully followed, ought
to give us a certain confidence, a certain patience. In careless moods
we may neglect it; in days of grief and pain we may feel that it cannot
help us; but it is the truth; and the more we can make it our own, the
deeper that we can set it in our trivial spirits, the better are we
prepared to learn the lesson which the deepest instinct of our nature
bids us believe, that the Father is trying to teach us, or i