ignorance of the vast and venerable unknown. The physiologist, when he
considers the manifold combination of innumerable microscopic
circumstances which are required to bring any one creature into the world
with a perfectly hearing ear, ought to confess that the chances--if the
world were governed by chance--are infinitely greater in favour of a
child's being born with an imperfect ear rather than with a perfect one.
And if he should evade the difficulty; and try to explain the usual
success by saying that nature is governed by law: I answer--What is
nature? What is law? You never saw nature nor law either under the
microscope. They too are metaphysical abstractions, necessary notions
and conceptions of your own brain. You have seen nothing but the fact
and the custom; and all you can do, if you be strictly rational, is with
a certain modern school to say, with a despairing humility, which I
deplore while I respect--deploring it because it is needless despair, and
yet respecting it because it is humility, which is the path out of
despair and darkness into hope and light--to say with them, "Man can know
nothing of causes, he can only register positive facts." This, I say, is
one path--one which I trust none here will tread. The only other path, I
believe, is, to go back to the lessons which we ought to have learnt in
our childhood, for those to whom the human race owes most learnt them
thousands of years ago; and to ascribe the ever successful miracles of
nature to a Will, to a Mind, to a Providence so like that which each of
us exercises in his own petty sphere, that we are not only able to
understand in part the works of God, but to know from the very fact of
being able to understand them--as one of our greatest astronomers has so
well said lately--that we are made in the image of God. To say with the
old Psalmist, that the universe is governed by "a law which cannot be
broken:" but why? Because God has given it that law. To say "All things
continue as they were at the beginning:" but why? Because all things
serve Him in whom we live and move and have our being. To confess the
mystery and miracle of our mortal bodies, and say with David, "I am
fearfully and wonderfully made; such knowledge is too wonderful and
excellent for me, I cannot attain unto it:" but to add the one only
rational explanation of the mystery which, thank God, common sense has
taught, though it may be often in confused and defective forms