12 NATURE STUDIES. 



I do not know whether the grandeur of the 

 universe., as pictured by Newtonian astronomy, or 

 the vastness of past and future time, as pictured by 

 the Darwinian system, is the more impressive. Cer- 

 tainly there can be imagined nothing much more 

 wonderful than those vast depths of space in which 

 we are absolutely compelled to believe since Newton 

 established the great law which bears his name. But 

 if there is aught grander than this, aught more solemn 

 in its impressiveness, it is the thought of the immea- 

 surable vistas of past time, during which the races in- 

 habiting earth came into being under the action of the 

 laws assigned to them; the still vaster time-intervals 

 belonging to the generation of systems of worlds ; the 

 periods so vast that we cannot regard them otherwise 

 than as infinite, during which not solar systems, but 

 whole galaxies of such systems, and systems of such 

 galaxies nay, higher and higher orders of such sys- 

 tems, absolutely without end, as without beginning 

 came into existence. 



That this widening of our conceptions of time as 

 of space, and thence the widening of our ideas as to> 

 the domain of law, and consequently the recognition 

 of the infinitely perfect nature of the laws of the 

 universe (for only very excellent laws can work for 

 long, and only perfect laws can work for ever) should 

 have been regarded as antagonistic to religion in its 

 wider and nobler sense, can only be regarded as 

 resulting from the blindness, or the perversity, or the 

 wrong-headedness, of the ignorant. That some of 



