as St Augustine said-"He was before them, although He may never have been without them; because He did not precede them by an interval of time, but by immovable eternity." In this sense, God, as eternal Creator, is eternal Saviour.

Reasonings of this kind, illustrative of our feebleness, and of the vast meaning contained in so many texts of Scripture (2 Chron. vi. 18; Job xi. 7, 8; Isaiah lxvi. 1; Col. i. 15-17) formerly seemed visionary, but are highly useful as proof that the utmost exercise of all our powers enables us to take only a few steps within the threshold of creation. The telescope has manifested the world to be infinitely vast, and the microscope has revealed worlds within worlds, infinitely small. Moreover, Divine attributes are not like the faculties or impulses of a human nature, separate and distinct qualities or powers, God is One. He is in every place, but the presence is incomprehensible. He is not here or there as a property or extension. His relation to place, time, and extension is peculiar to infinitude. Divine power is never put forth unaccompanied by Divine wisdom, nor apart from goodness and justice. No attribute is ever latent; for there is no parting nor divisibility in the Divine essence. His plan of the world, everlastingly present with him, had temporal realisation in that effectual interference by which the material universe became a segment of the infinity in which it was developed. There was first a direct personal self-operation, a putting forth of Divine energy, and, afterwards, the use of all natural means, so soon as they were called into existence. The action continues in that spontaneousness of nature by which she seems to do all things as of herself. The worldly structure rises storey above storey, nor are the chambers of uniform dimensions, embellishment, and furniture. We look through some of the courts, behold, from a distance, a thousand halls, grand and beautiful; and we take all this as a gauge of some vast, wonderful, and mysterious life, and the visible universe as a tent of sojourning for wayfarers to the eternal future.

Pass from argument to figure-God called a man from dreams into the vestibule of heaven, "Come thou hither,

The Vestibule of Heaven.

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and see the glory of My house;" and to the angels round His throne, He said, "Take him, strip off his robes of flesh, cleanse his vision, put a new breath into his nostrils, but touch not with any change his human heart-the heart that weeps and trembles." It was done; and with a mighty angel as guide, the man stood ready for an infinite voyage. They launched without sound or farewell from the terraces of heaven, and wheeled away into endless space. Sometimes with the solemn flight of angel-wings, they passed through Saharas of darkness, through wildernesses of death, separating worlds of life. Sometimes they swept over frontiers quickening under prophetic motions from God. Then from a distance, measured only in heaven, light dawned through shapeless film, and in unspeakable space swept to them, and they with unspeakable pace to the light. In a moment the rushing of planets was upon them—in a moment the blazing of suns around them. Then came eternities of twilight, that revealed, but were not revealed. On the right hand and on the left, mighty constellations built up triumphal gates, whose architraves, whose archways, seemed ghostly from infinitude. Without measure were the architraves, past number were the archways, beyond memory the gates. Within were stairs that scaled eternities around, above was below, and below was above, to the man stripped of gravitating body. Depth was transcended by height insurmountable, height was swallowed up in depth unfathomable. Suddenly as thus they rode from infinite to infinite; suddenly as thus they tilted over abyssmal worlds; a mighty cry arose that systems more mysterious, worlds more billowy, other heights and other depths were coming, were nearing, were at hand. Then the man sighed and stopped, shuddered and wept. His over-laden heart poured itself forth in tears, and he said, "Angel, I will go no further, for the spirit of man acheth with this infinity. Insufferable is the glory of God. Let me lie down in the grave, and hide me from oppression of the Infinite, for end I see there is none." Then from all the listening stars that shone around issued a choral voice"The man speaks truly-end there is none." The angel solemnly demanded-" end there is none? Is there indeed

no end? Is this the sorrow that kills you?" But no voice answered, that he himself might answer. Then the angel threw up his glorious hands towards the Heaven of heavens, and said, "To the universe of God there is no end, lo! also, there is no beginning."1

1 Altered from De Quincey's Translation from the German of Jean Paul Richter.

STUDY IV.

RUDIMENTS OF THE WORLD.

"The world is not God, as the Pantheists affirm. It did not exist from eternity as the Peripatetics taught. It was not made by Fate and Necessity, as the Stoics said. It did not arise from a fortuitous concourse of atoms, as the Epicureans asserted, nor from the antagonism of two rival powers, as the Persians and Manicheans affirmed, nor was it made by angels, or by emanations of æons, as some of the ancient Gnostics held, nor out of matter co-eternal with God, as Hermogenes said, nor by the spontaneous energy and evolution of self-developing powers, as some have affirmed in later days, but it was created by One, Almighty, Eternal, Wise, and Good Being-God."

WHAT is, or was, the Primeval Matter?

NEWTON'S Principia.

Possibly something out of which all the varieties of matter have been formed. Something simpler than that which is now called elementary matter. The elements, now numbered sixty-four, owe their distinctive properties to the grouping of certain ultimate atoms, possibly not of one kind, but of several kinds; for there are elements which appear to be so related, as to have community of origin. If they were simple homogeneous masses, it is thought that their incandescent vapour would show in the spectrum one single bright line; but there is no substance known the spectrum of which has only one line. The flame of hydrogen, the lowest in the scale, has four spectral lines, made up, it is supposed, of four different sorts of matter; but no conclusion regarding the complexity of hydrogen can be come to by means of the lines. The thickness of the spectral lines depends on their relation to the spectrum, whether toward the violet or the red ends. Some lines depend probably on the normal vibrations of matter, and the other on the harmonic vibration.

No force, known to us, can separate the constitutional

E

atoms of the elements; or effect any change in them; but if what is thought of Sirius and Aldebaran be true, that they are younger and hotter suns than our own, there the various kinds of matter may possibly exist in simpler form. Sirius contains hydrogen, but the proportion of metallic vapours is small in its chromosphere, and the hydrogen lines. are enormously distended. The discovery of silicon in a new form, in the meteorites, renders possible the compound nature of that so-called element; and there is evidence of the compound nature of calcium in the Sun.

We are told--"by the different grouping of units, and by the combination of the unlike groups, each with its own kind, and each with other kinds, it is supposed that there have been produced the kinds of matter we call elementary."1 If we accept this statement, it must be against all logic and experience. Units possessing precisely the same properties, or rather no properties; and, by energy acting in a straight line, striking against one another; then going off in another direction; till, again striking, they go off in a third direction, and so on; will forever remain the same units and the same energy-neither creating new matter nor new energy. If, moreover, we bear in mind the all-important principle, that "nothing can be learned as to the physical world save by observation and experiment, or by mathematical deductions from data so obtained," we shall guard against those empirics who, reducing all existence to one element-destitute of all properties, and to one energy-acting only in a straight line, do then, to suit their theory, take in all that they have thrust out, and endue this one supposed form of matter with the mysterious faculties and occult powers of all terrestrial life.

Consider now the nature and constitution of matter.

If with Newton we speak of dense invisible units, those are only symbolic, yet still they seem verified in chemical experiments which manifest particles of specific weight and size. Get rid of the atom, as Boscovich does, substitute mere geometrical points, points without dimensions, as centres of force which attract and repel each other in such wise as to be kept apart and at specific distances; behaving, so far as external 1 "Principles of Psychology," vol i., p. 155: Mr Herbert Spencer.