THE PHANTOMS BEHIND US 
tial laws and forces; matter, indeed, but matter in- 
formed with spirit and intelligence; the creative 
energy inherent and active in the ground underfoot 
not less than in the stars and nebule overhead. 
We look for the divine afar off. We gaze upon the 
beauty and purity of the heavenly bodies without 
thinking that we are also in the heavens. We must 
open our minds to the stupendous fact that God is 
immanent in his universe and that it is literally and 
exactly true, as we were taught long ago, that, during 
every moment of our lives, in Him we live and move 
and have our being. 
Moreover, we are staggered by the element of vast 
time that is implied in the history of development. 
Were it not for the records in the rocks, we could not 
believe it at all. All the grand movements and pro- 
cesses of nature are quite beyond our ken. In the 
heavens only the astronomer with his prisms and 
telescopes traces them; only the geologist and pale- 
ontologist read their history in the earth’s crust. 
The soil we cultivate was once solid rock, but not 
in one lifetime, not in many lifetimes, do we see the 
transformation of the rocks into soil. Nations may 
rise and fall, and the rocks they looked upon and the 
soil they tilled remain practically unchanged. Geo- 
logists talk about the ancient continents that have 
passed away. What an abyss of time such things 
open! They talk about the birth of a mountain or 
the decay of a mountain as we talk of the birth 
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