150 INFINITUDE. 



ultimately resist the force or action of heat. It is 

 heat, indeed, which holds those powers of crystalli- 

 zation in restraint, and allows compounds to be 

 formed, and vegetables to grow, and animals to live ; 

 and were it not for the mysterious motion of heat, 

 which, for aught we know, may all have been ori- 

 ginally produced by the sunbeams, the earth would 

 not only be plantless and tenantless ; but earth, and 

 sea* and sky would be reduced to one mass of crys- 

 tals, probably, to one crystal, and that crystal so 

 small, and so near the verge of that mysterious 

 nothing out of which Almighty power and goodness 

 evolved all the worlds in all their variety and in all 

 their beauty, that it might escape the senses, and we 

 might be altogether unconscious of its existence. 

 With God all things are possible, and in his sight 

 there is no miracle. Large as is the earth, vast as 

 is the solar system, boundless as are those systems 

 of which the suns are the stars of our sky, and inde- 

 scribably distant as they glide off into the depths of 

 space, and set at naught the eye and mock the tele- 

 scope, they, in their, to us, innumerable multitude 

 and incomprehensible variety, are in his sight less 

 than the " small dust of the balance ;" and howso- 

 ever they may seem to change appearances, they all 

 obey the one commandment the single creative 

 fiat. When we glance back to the first stage of 

 creation's history, which it is consistent with finite 

 minds to comprehend, weight and measure, time and 

 space gradually melt from our view, and we feel as 

 if all nature were converging into one single point* 

 and that one more look would reveal to us the first, 

 the immaterial spring which was touched by the 

 Almighty hand, in what was no time and yet in-^ 

 eluded all time, and in what was no space and yet 

 included all space. But the frailty of flesh is in the 

 eye, the dimness of matter is upon it, and we cannot 

 see. Yet here we can infer that the " glory to be 

 tevealed" shall as far exceed all the glories of all the 



