RETROSPECT AND FORECAST 221 



that planned, and that upholds the wondrous whole, 

 and behold His working in the lighting and quenching 

 of solar systems " in the dark backward and abysm of 

 time," I am helped to understand the expression that 

 one clay is with the Lord as a thousand years and 

 a thousand years as one day, and to realise as a truth 

 the conception that to Him one inch is as a million 

 leagues and a million leagues as one inch. 



I hold that it is the purest folly for the finite to 

 attempt to measure or limit the Infinite. I can under- 

 stand a man bewildered by his contemplation of the 

 immensity of the material universe, in which the science 

 of the day beholds every atom throbbing with force, 

 persuading himself to accept, as a solution of the 

 vastest problem that can occupy the human mind, 

 the mathematical formulas of Spinoza, but I cannot 

 understand the position of the scientist who denies 

 the existence of a designing Intelligence as necessary 

 to account for the evidences of design everywhere 

 present in Nature, and of an all-comprehending, 

 harmonious and harmonising reign of order that 

 embraces at once the interactions of the solar systems 

 that people space and the germination in some lonely 

 nook of earth of flowers that are born to blush unseen. 

 It seems to me, therefore, not only not an intellectual 

 difficulty, but an intellectual exigency, to accept the 

 view that from the beginning the earth was the 

 predestined theatre of human life, and that all that 

 preceded the advent of man is to be regarded as the 

 preparation of the globe to receive him. 



