reason. What wonderful co-working of internal and
external influences was provided to keep thought in sleepless
action; to open, one by one, the myriad petals of the mind! Nature,
with all its shifting sceneries, filled every new scope of vision
with objects that hourly set thought at play in a new line of
reflection. Then, out of man's physical being came a thousand still
small voices daily, whispering, Think! think! The first-born
necessities, few and simple, cried, "_Think_! for we want bread, we
want drink, we want shelter and raiment against the cold." The
finer senses cried continually, "Give! give thought to this, to
that." The Eye, the Ear, the Palate and every other organ that
could receive and diffuse delight, worked the mental faculties by
day and night, up to the last sunset of the antediluvian world; and
all the intellectual result of this working Noah took with him into
the ark, and gave to his sons to hand over to succeeding ages.
Flowers that Eve stuck in the hair of the infant Abel are just now
opening the last casket of their beauty to the favored children of
our time. This, in itself, is a marvellous instance of the law we
are noticing. But what is this to the processes of thought and
observation through which the mind of man has reached its present
expansion; through which it has developed all these sciences, arts,
industries and tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of
these bright days of humanity! The figure is weak, and every figure
would be weak when applied to the ratio or the result of this
progression; but, at what future age of time, or of the existence
beyond time, will the mind, that has thus wrought on earth, open its
last petal, put forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under
the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal atom of His
own essence, into the being of man?

Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle, and we see
this law working to finer and sublimer issues in man's moral nature.
We have glanced at what the mind has done for and through his
physical faculties and being; how that being has re-acted upon the
mind, and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new delight
to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that yearned for
enjoyment. We have noticed how the inside and outside world acted
upon his reasoning powers in the dawn of creation; how slowly they
mastered the simplest facts and phenomena of life in and around
t