XII 



GOD AND NATURE 



"TITALF a century or more ago a pious Scotch fam- 

 ■^ — L ily lately come to this country moved into the 

 town where I was born. As they were coming through 

 a deep gorge in the mountains where the scenery was 

 unusually wild and forbidding, one of the little boys, 

 looking forth upon the savage and desolate prospect, 

 nestled closer to his mother and asked with bated 

 breath, " Mither, is there a God here ? " The little 

 boy's question sprang from a feeling which probably 

 most of us share. The desolate, the terrible, the 

 elemental, the inhuman in nature, are always more 

 or less a shook to one's notions of the existence of a 

 beneficent Supreme Being. In storms at sea, amid 

 the fury and wild careering of the elements, or in 

 tempest and darkness upon the land, when riot and 

 destruction stalk abroad, how faint and far off seems 

 the notion of the fatherhood of God ! The other 

 day in looking over some of Professor Langley's views 

 of the sun, photographic representations of those 

 immense craters or openings into the solar furnace 

 into which our little earth would disappear as 

 quickly as a snowflake into the mouth of a blast 

 furnace, the question of the little Scotch boy came 

 to me, " Is there a God here ? " It is incredible. 



