ook
abroad, even on the face of our small earth, and find them change with
every climate, and no country where some action is not honoured for a
virtue and none where it is not branded for a vice; and we look in our
experience, and find no vital congruity in the wisest rules, but at the
best a municipal fitness. It is not strange if we are tempted to despair
of good. We ask too much. Our religions and moralities have been trimmed
to flatter us, till they are all emasculate and sentimentalised, and
only please and weaken. Truth is of a rougher strain. In the harsh face
of life, faith can read a bracing gospel. The human race is a thing more
ancient than the ten commandments; and the bones and revolutions of the
Kosmos, in whose joints we are but moss and fungus, more ancient still.

I

Of the Kosmos in the last resort, science reports many doubtful things,
and all of them appalling. There seems no substance to this solid globe
on which we stamp: nothing but symbols and ratios. Symbols and ratios
carry us and bring us forth and beat us down; gravity, that swings the
incommensurable suns and worlds through space, is but a figment varying
inversely as the squares of distances; and the suns and worlds
themselves, imponderable figures of abstraction, NH_{3} and H_{2}O.
Consideration dares not dwell upon this view; that way madness lies;
science carries us into zones of speculation, where there is no
habitable city for the mind of man.

But take the Kosmos with a grosser faith, as our senses give it us. We
behold space sown with rotatory islands, suns and worlds and the shards
and wrecks of systems: some, like the sun, still blazing; some rotting,
like the earth; others, like the moon, stable in desolation. All of
these we take to be made of something we call matter: a thing which no
analysis can help us to conceive; to whose incredible properties no
familiarity can reconcile our minds. This stuff, when not purified by
the lustration of fire, rots uncleanly into something we call life;
seized through all its atoms with a pediculous malady; swelling in
tumours that become independent, sometimes even (by an abhorrent
prodigy) locomotory; one splitting into millions, millions cohering into
one, as the malady proceeds through varying stages. This vital
putrescence of the dust, used as we are to it, yet strikes us with
occasional disgust, and the profusion of worms in a piece of ancient
turf, or the air of a marsh darkened w