DEEPER HARMONIES OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION. 79 



its laws on the part of those Avho feel themselves dependent on it. 

 But such awe and fear, it may be said, do not constitute worship ; 

 "worship implies admiration, and something which may be called love. 

 Now, it is true that the scientific man cannot feel for Xature such love 

 as a pious mind may feel for the God of Christians. The highest love 

 is inspired by love, or by justice and goodness, and of these qualities 

 science as yet discerns little or nothing in Nature. But a very gen- 

 uine love, though of a lower kind, is felt by the contemplator of Na- 

 ture. Nature, if not morally good, is infinitely interesting, infinitely 

 beautiful. He who studies it has continually the exquisite pleasure of 

 discerning or half discerning and divining laics ; regularities glimmer 

 through an appearance of confusion; analogies between phenomena 

 of a different order sus^est themselves and set the imao-ination in 

 motion ; the mind is haunted with the sense of a vast unity not yet 

 discoverable or namable. There is food for contemplation which 

 never runs short ; you are gazing at an object which is always grow- 

 ing clearer, and yet always, in the very act of growing clearer, pre- 

 senting new mysteries. And this arresting and absorbing spectacle, 

 so fascinating by its variety, is at the same time overwhelming by its 

 greatness ; so that those who have devoted their lives to the contem- 

 plation scarcely ever fail to testify to the endless delight it gives 

 them, and also to the overpowering awe with which from time to time 

 it surprises them. 



There is one more feeling which a worshiper should have for his 

 Deity, a sense of personal connection, and, as it were, relationship. 

 The last verse of a hymn of praise is very appropriately this " for 

 this God is our God forever and ever ; He will be our guide even unto 

 death." This feeling, too, the worshiper of Nature has. He cannot 

 separate himself from that which he contemplates. Though he has 

 the power of gazing upon it as something outside himself, yet he 

 knows himself to be a part of it. The same laws whose operations he 

 watches in the universe he may study in his own body. Heat and 

 light and gravitation govern himself as they govern plants and heav- 

 enly bodies. "In him," may the worshiper of this Deity say with 

 intimate conviction, " in him we live and move and have our being." 

 When men whose minds are possessed with a thought like this, and 

 whose lives are devoted to such a contemplation, say, " As for God, 

 we know nothing of him ; science knows nothing of him ; it is a 

 name belonging to an extinct system of philosophy ; " I think they 

 are playing with words. By what name they call the object of their 

 contemplation is in itself a matter of little importance. Whether 

 they say God, or prefer to say Nature, the important thing is that 

 their minds are filled with the sense of a Power to all appearance in- 

 finite and eternal, a Power to which their own being is inseparably 

 connected, in the knowledge of whose ways alone are safety and well- 

 being, in the contemplation of which they find a beatific vision. 



