are willing to believe. We have already
mentioned gravity and the other attractive forces, such as cohesion and
adhesion; but seemingly very few people have ever paused to consider how
utterly inexplicable they still remain in any physical or materialistic
sense.

It is easy to explain any form of a _push_ in a physical way; but
gravity is _not a push but a pull_. And how are we to explain the method
by which a body can act where it is not, how explain in detail the way
by which it can reach out and pull in toward itself another separated
body, and exert this pull across the immeasurably wide fields of space?
The law of inverse squares may tell us very accurately the manner in
which the results are accomplished, for our Creator is a God of order.
But there is no materialistic theory of the _why_ of gravitation that is
worth employing the time of sensible, truth-loving people. And we can
rest assured that there never will be any such real "explanation," save
that this is the way which the great Jehovah has ordained. Since such
theories only explain the known in terms of the unknown, they can serve
only as a sort of mental buffer or shield between us and the conception
of the direct working of a personal God, whose word must always be as
effective throughout the remotest corners of His universe as near at
hand, for the very simple reason that matter has no "properties" which
He has not imparted to it, and accordingly it can have no innate inertia
or reluctance to act which God's word would need to overcome in order to
induce it to act, even when this word operates across the wide fields
of space. On this explanation these phenomena of "action at a distance"
are at least intelligible; while to me, and I speak now as a scientist,
they are intelligible in no other way.

III

There is another line of thought which has to do with living organisms,
but which I shall beg leave to anticipate and bring in here at the close
of this chapter, since it follows as a direct corollary from the law of
the Conservation of Energy. Indeed, we might even term it the biological
aspect of that law.

As we have seen, we can neither create energy nor destroy it; though we
can _lose it_,--so far as this earth is concerned. The vast fund of
energy that daily comes streaming to us from the sun is transmuted back
and forth in a thousand ways, though little by little it is dissipated
off into space, and we are dependent upon a fresh supply from