8-42 ECCLESIASTICAL INSTITUTIONS. 



greatest perplexity when a speck of protoplasm under the 

 microscope shows him life in its simplest form, and makes 

 him feel that however he formulates its processes the actual 

 play of forces remains unimaginable. Neither in the ordinary 

 tourist nor in the deer-stalker climbing the mountains above 

 him, does a highland glen rouse ideas beyond those of sport 

 or of the picturesque ; but it may, and often does, in the geo 

 logist. He, observing that the glacier-rounded rock he sits 

 on has lost by weathering but half an inch of its surface 

 since a time far more remote than the beginnings of human 

 civilization, and then trying to conceive the slow denudation 

 which has cut out the whole valley, has thoughts of time and 

 of power to which they are strangers thoughts which, 

 already utterly inadequate to their objects, he feels to be still 

 more futile on noting the contorted beds of gneiss around, 

 which tell him of a time, immeasurably more remote, when far 

 beneath the Earth s surface they were in a half-melted state, 

 and again tell him of a time, immensely exceeding this in 

 remoteness, when their components were sand and mud on 

 the shores of an ancient sea. Nor is it in the primitive 

 peoples who supposed that the heavens rested on the moun 

 tain tops, any more than in the modern inheritors of their 

 cosmogony who repeat that &quot; the heavens declare the glory 

 of God/ that we find the largest conceptions of the Universe 

 or the greatest amount of wonder excited by contempla 

 tion of it. Bather, it is in the astronomer, who sees in the 

 Sun a mass so vast that even into one of his spots our Earth 

 might, be plunged without touching its edges ; and who by 

 every finer telescope is shown an increased multitude of such 

 suns, many of them far larger. 



Hereafter as heretofore, higher faculty and deeper insight 

 will raise rather than lower this sentiment. At present 

 the most powerful and most instructed mind has neither 

 the knowledge nor the capacity required for symbolizing 

 in thought the totality of things. Occupied with one or 

 other division of Nature, the man of science usually does 



