NSCIENCE THE VOICE OF GOD AND THE VOICE OF MAN.

We have already learnt in the study of the doctrine of Compensation
that the misfortunes of life are due to man's attempt to bisect the
world and life, and seize greedily on one half to the partial or total
neglect of the other. Life having been planned a whole, inevitable
disaster overtakes the man who would behave as though it were a thing
of shreds and fragments. Now this law of what we may call the Divine
unity is equally valid in the purely intellectual order. That,
likewise, refuses to admit schisms and divisions to break in on the
solidity of its unbroken ranks. An attempt to view life and its
problems exclusively from our own standpoint, is to fail to grasp
truth; our shadow gets projected over the surface, and the light is
partially concealed, if not wholly confused. No better illustration of
this fact, I believe, could be afforded than that supplied by
conscience, the practical dictate of reason which controls the moral
life of man.

In days of old when man was nothing in his own or anybody else's eyes,
in the ages when he thought to magnify the Deity by belittling himself,
an interfering agency of the Divine was necessarily invoked on almost
every conceivable occasion; "the hand of God" was seen in every
occurrence. From the comparatively minor matters of bodily ailments up
to the colossal disasters which nature is capable of inflicting--in all
the visible interference of the supra-mundane power was discerned.
Those were naturally the days of the "Divine right of kings," when all
civil power was held to have been centred in one individual by the
express act of the Divinity; those were likewise the days when the
conscience of man was exclusively interpreted as the articulate
utterance of God. But, inasmuch as man was too ignorant and wicked to
rightly interpret that supreme oracle, he was bidden to leave it in the
custody of a sanctified corporation, the Church, and to keep his
thoughts and his conduct in tune with the dominant ecclesiastical
sentiment of the hour.

Now, from that extraordinary position a reaction was of course
inevitable. Man could not go on for ever describing himself as "a
worm" and an outcast, or avowing himself "a miserable sinner" and a
limb of Satan; and consequently, with an awakened sense of human
dignity, inspiring him, not with vainglory, but with an ever-deepening
self-reverence, the ascription of all agency to supernatura