ON THE DEVELOPED CONCEPTION OF GOD. 367 



its sum of contained matter from eternity to eternity 

 the same ; its stock of energy, passing through thermal, 

 mechanical, electrical, vital forms, without the least 

 fraction being ever lost or gained. She has shown us, 

 too, the slow steps, and in some cases at least, the simple 

 means by which Nature travelled from the inorganic 

 to the organic, from matter to spirit, from the rude 

 tentative to the finished production. She has completed 

 for us the disastrous and yet glorious history of life, and 

 above all, of man, glorious at least so far as relates to 

 our favoured species ; for life has been prodigiously 

 multiplied, happiness ever widened, and art, morality, 

 religion, knowledge, have been born and wonderfully 

 developed amongst men. To-day Science shows us the 

 universal reign of law, but teaches also that the very 

 inflexibility of Nature's behaviour constitutes her chief 

 claim upon our gratitude, since it is this invariability of 

 law which makes science, invention, life itself, with all 

 its conquered advantages, possible and permanent things. 

 She has shown us that where Nature is apparently cruel 

 she is really kind, and that while she punishes ignorance 

 of her laws or rebellion against them with merciless 

 severity, to those who know her laws and fall in with 

 them she will grant all things liberally to enjoy. 



And Art has added to the scientific conception in 

 discovering for us a new divineness spread over all the 

 face of Nature, a divine beauty, invisible to the people 

 of the infant world, invisible even for the most part to 

 former civilizations, because the inward perceptions 

 which create the external beauty were not yet born 

 in men; and Religion, which still lives in man's soul 

 -as ever, reinforced by Science and Art, sees Nature 

 powerful, benignant, working by fixed law, beautiful 

 but also at times awful and terrible to all, and in the 



