THE BEING OF GOD. 77 
5. The same idea in verse. 
These considerations have been put with point by a recent 
poet :— 
“What are stars 
But God’s thoughts indurate—the burning words 
That rolled forth blazing from His mighty lips ? 
For thought is one 
As souls are in their essence, and it works 
By kindred laws and processes in all ;— 
Whether it flames within Thy Mind, O God, 
Or publishes itself in spheres of light, 
In worlds of spirits (afiluences of T hee), 
Or show its mighty convoluted throes 
In embryonic suns and nebulas. 
What are suns, 
Systems, and worlds, but mighty thoughts of God 
All waiting to become the thoughts of man ? 
Books are man’s worlds—his great attempts to speak 
The meaning of the oracle within ; 
And worlds are God’s books, in the which He writes 
A memoir of Himself in love to man.” 
The world is but the Echo of the words 
Spoken by Him to old Eternity.* 
6. Little real hostility to a reasonable Faith, 
The writers who have influenced thought on these subjects 
are not dogmatically hostile. Darwin never denied God, 
and will probably be some day claimed as a revealer of His 
Nature. Tyndall declared that in his happier moods he 
shared the common faith and the common hopes of mankind. 
“Many of the most illustrious scientific men of the present 
day are clear confessors of theistic faith.” Fiske, treating 
of Darwinism, says that it may convince us that the existence 
of highly complicated organisms is the result of a combina- 
tion of circumstances infinitely various, each so minute as 
separately to seem trivial or accidental; yet the consistent 
believer in God will always occupy an impregnable position 
in maintaining that the entire series, in each and every one 
of its incidents, is an Immediate manifestation of His creative 
action.  “ Yes, ” says a thoughtful American writer, Washing- 
ton Gladden, in dealing with this most tremendous of all 
subjects, “the sublime statement with which the Holy Scrip- 
* J, Stanyan Bigg. 
