132 REV. -C. GODFREY ASHWIN, M.A. 
us back only a certain distance, then leaves us in the pre- 
sence of the avowedly inexplicable.”* And he concludes the 
article with these words :—‘‘ But amid the mysteries which be- 
come the more mysterious the more they are thought about, 
there will remain the one absolute certainty that he is ever 
in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Knergy.’? From 
this ‘Infinite and Hternal Energy ”—he is careful to use 
capital letters,—he declares ‘all things proceed.” + 
To this “ Infinite and Eternal Hnergy ” he only hesitates to 
apply the word Person, because “though the attributes of 
personality, as we know it, cannot be conceived by us as attri- 
butes of the Unknown Cause of things, yet duty requires us 
neither to affirm nor deny personality ; but the choice is not 
between personality and something lower than personality, 
but between personality and something higher, and the ulti- 
mate power is no more representable in terms of human con- 
sciousness than human consciousness is representable in terms 
of plant functions.” 
Again, he says: “I held at the outset, and continue to hold, 
that the Inscrutable Existence, which science in the last re- 
sort is compelled to recognise as unreached by its deepest 
analysis of matter, motion, thought, and feeling, stands 
towards our general conception of things in substantially 
the same relation as does the Creative Power asserted by 
Theology.” 
Uniting these “ different flowers of moncecious plants,” 
physical and metaphysical, what fruits of thought spring from 
their union? In the mineral world atoms are piled together 
indicating plan and design as distinctly as the final form of 
the pyramid expressed the thought of the human builder, 
by some hidden “force”! Could that have been effected with- 
out intelligence and foreknowledge? In the vegetable and 
animal kingdom, in the molecules of a corn grain, and the 
development of a chick from an egg, the processes are so 
regular, so orderly, so necessarily tending to the purpose pro- 
posed, that ‘‘an intellect, the same in kind as our own, if 
sufficiently expanded, would be able to follow the whole pro- 
cess from beginning to end.” Could that process have taken 
place without its having been designed by an Intellect pos- 
sessing the requisite expansion, accomplishing its object by 
the necessary power ? 
And men of the highest intellectual power and culture 
* Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1884, p. 10. 
Telos peal: 
