ind is Almighty.
Then you have read the first syllables, viz., being and power.

What is the continuous relation of the universe to the mind from
which it derived its power? Some say that it is the relation of
a wound-up watch to the winder. It was dowered with sufficient
power to revolve its ceaseless changes, and its maker is henceforth
an absentee God. Is it? Let us have courage to see. For twenty
years one devotes ten seconds every night to putting a little force
into a watch. It is so arranged that it distributes that force
over twenty-four hours. In that twenty years more power has been
put into that watch than a horse could exert at once. But suppose
[Page 253] one had tried to put all that force into the watch at
once: it would have pulverized it to atoms. But supposing the
universe had been dowered with power at first to run its enormous
rounds for twenty millions of years. It is inconceivable; steel
would be as friable as sand, and strengthless as smoke, in such
strain.

We have discovered some of the laws of the force we call gravitation.
But what do we know of its essence? How it appears to act we know a
little, what it is we are profoundly ignorant. Few men ever discuss
this question. All theories are sublimely ridiculous, and fail to
pass the most primary tests. How matter can act where it is not,
and on that with which it has no connection, is inconceivable.

Newton said that anyone who has in philosophical matters a competent
faculty of thinking, could not admit for a moment the possibility
of a sun reaching through millions of miles, and exercising there
an attractive power. A watch may run if wound up, but how the
watch-spring in one pocket can run the watch in another is hard
to see. A watch is a contrivance for distributing a force outside
of itself, and if the universe runs at all on that principle, it
distributes some force outside of itself.

Le Sage's theory of gravitation by the infinitive hail of atoms
cannot stand a minute, hence we come back as a necessity of thought
to Herschel's statement. "It is but reasonable to regard gravity
as a result of a consciousness and a will existent somewhere."
Where? I read an old book speaking of these matters, and it says
of God, He hangeth the earth upon nothing; he upholdeth constantly
all things by the word of his power. [Page 254] By him all things
consist or hold together. It teaches an imminent mind; an almighty,
constantly exerted power. Proof o