thousand years,
is that a basis whereon to theorise with regard to the proceedings of
Him in whose sight one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years
as one day? Might not as well some scientific member of an insect tribe
of ephemera, whom ancestral tradition, confirmed by personal experience,
had assured that an eight-day clock had already gone on for six days,
pronounce it to be a law of the clock's nature that it should go on for
ever without being again wound up? Would the insect philosopher's
dogmatism be one whit less absurd than that of those human ephemera who
so positively lay down the law about the clockwork of the universe?
Those laws of nature to which unerring regularity and perpetuity of
operation are so confidently attributed, may they not, perchance, be but
single clauses of much farther reaching laws, according to whose other
provisions the force of these isolated clauses may, in novel
combinations of circumstances, be counteracted by some latent and
hitherto unsuspected force? Or is it not, at all events, open to their
divine promulgator to suspend their operation at his pleasure? May it
not conceivably have been preordained that the globe of our earth, after
revolving for a given number of ages, in one direction, shall then, like
a meat-jack, or like an Ascidian's heart,[31] reverse its order of
procedure, and commence a contrary series of revolutions? Or might not
He who prescribed to the earth its rotatory movement, will that the
rotation should for some hours cease, and that the sun should in
consequence seem to stand still, as it is recorded to have done at the
command of Joshua? Improbable as these suppositions may be, who that has
not been taken into counsel by his Creator can presume to say that they
may not be correct? The events which they involve are not inconceivable,
and whatever is not utterly inconceivable may possibly occur, however
numerous the chances against its occurrence. It is not then the fact
that 'past experience,' however unvaried, affords full proof of the
future existence of any event, or constitutes certainty against the
future existence of the reverse of that event. Completest uniformity of
experience cannot create a certainty by which any opposite probability
would be completely annihilated. It only creates a probability which,
however great, is still only a probability, and which would become a
smaller probability by deduction from it of any opposite probability.