ct to-night. There the
thing is; and is as it is, and in no other way; and such it will be,
and so it will behave and act, in spite of me, and all my fancies
about it, and notions of what it ought to have been like, and what
it ought to have done. It is a thought of God's; and strong by the
eternal laws of matter, which are the will of God. It has the whole
universe, sun, and stars, and all, backing it by God's appointment,
to keep it where it is and what it is; and till (as Lord Bacon has
it) I have discovered and obeyed the will of God revealed in that
pebble, it is to me a riddle more insoluble than the Sphinx's, a
fortress more impregnable than Sevastopol. I may crush it: but
destroying is not conquering: but I cannot even mend the road with
it prudently, until I have discovered whether Almighty God has made
it fit to mend roads with. I may have the genius of a Plato or of a
Shakespeare, but all my genius will not avail to penetrate that
pebble, or see anything in it but a little round dirty stone, until
I have treated the pebble with reverence, as a thing independent of
my likes and dislikes, fancies, and aspirations; and have asked it
humbly to tell me its story, taking counsel meanwhile of hundreds of
kindred pebbles, each as silent and reserved as this one; and
watched and listened patiently, through many mistakes and
misreadings, to what it has to say for itself, and what God has made
it to be. And then at last that little black rounded pebble, from
the street outside, may, and will surely, if I be patient and honest
enough, tell me a tale wilder and grander than any which I could
have dreamed for myself; will shame the meanness of my imagination,
by the awful magnificence of God's facts, and say to me:

"Ages and AEons since, thousands on thousands of years before there
was a man to till the ground, I the little pebble was a living
sponge, in the milky depths of the great chalk ocean; and hundreds
of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter's
dreams, swam round me, and grew on me, and multiplied, till I became
a tiny hive of wonders, each one of which would take you a life to
understand. And then, I cannot yet tell you how, and till I tell
you you will never know, the delicate flint-needles in my skin
gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my
inhabitants became a stone; and the chalk-mud settled round us, I
know not how, and covered us in; and for ages on ages I lay