ON THE DEVELOPED CONCEPTION OF GOD. 363 



lievers in a religious sense are unintelligible, and their 

 soul experiences untranslatable. It is, however, not 

 altogether so. And it is just a possible explanation of 

 the state of soul of all such people, that they are mis- 

 taking the real nature and sources of a very genuine and 

 a very important class of emotions. For Nature, the 

 visible, bountiful, beautiful, mysterious Cosmos itself, 

 may powerfully stir and agitate the soul, while yet the 

 effect may be wrongly referred by its recipient to an 

 invisible personality resident behind or apart from it. 

 Nature, or the power behind Nature, one with arid in 

 S3^mpathy with the power at the bottom of our souls, 

 may effect the communion with God already referred to. 

 More particularly, there are certain great emotions which 

 the contemplation of Nature calls up within us, which, 

 taken singly or in blended composition, may be the very 

 identical intuitions supposed to be specially related to a 

 personal conscious Deity. There is before us mighty 

 and infinite Nature herself, the benignant and beautiful 

 mother, known but unknown, all-producing, all-absorbing; 

 full of mystery and awe and terror, as well as of grace 

 and bounty and beauty ; the all-sustainer, the all-de- 

 stroyer ; who produces us for a moment and then swallows 

 us up ; who has passed already through unimaginable 

 and eternal years, but who is still more fresh and beau- 

 tiful than in her earliest youth. Her infinity and 

 grandeur, her myriad worlds, her infinitely prodigal life, 

 the bounty scattered by her hands, the ever-changing 

 beauty of her face, the impenetrable mystery at her 

 heart, these, as well as the reverse side of her face, her 

 seeming cruelty and callous indifference, the misery as 

 well as the mystery of life, are all calculated to arouse 

 those mingled emotions of awe and reverence, of fear 

 and hope, of love and gratitude, as well as the sense of 



