THE GLORY OF THE WAY 



leum of it. He is so afraid of the divine pro 

 cesses and so blind to the glory of going on that 

 he tries to petrify his own perishing body when 

 the life is out of it. Never does he show himself 

 such a dog in the manger as when he embalms 

 himself. 



Nature is forever emitting a pleasant irony at 

 our scale of values, trying to tell us that it is not 

 that which endures, but that which is transformed, 

 that best answers her equitable purpose. One 

 can easily fancy that in some other condition of 

 existence than ours, the evanescent best conforms 

 to the enduring, seeing that existence in any con 

 ceivable state cannot be static, but must still be 

 going on. That was rather a pretty conceit of 

 Swedenborg s that the best spirits in another world 

 concinually grow young. I say a &quot; conceit,&quot; but 

 now I think of it, how do I know it is a conceit ? 

 With our scale of values we lapse continually into 

 a primitive admiration for magnitude. Great dis 

 tances, measureless periods of time how Tyn- 

 dall revelled in one and Proctor in the other, and 

 how awe-struck their audiences were at the effective 

 ness of meaningless magnitude. But there is a 

 continual intimation in Nature that mere bulk and 

 prodigiousness are not ranked so high in her scale 

 of values as in ours. She certainly endows a pis 

 mire with more communal intelligence than an 

 ox, and spends as much ingenuity on a mushroom 

 as on an oak. Who can say with accurate knowl 

 edge that our measurement of time by the revo 

 lutions of the earth fits all conditions of existence 



in 



