GOD AND NATURE 169 



The mystery of life deepens wlien we set up a 

 being, no matter how large and all powerful, over 

 the universe apart from and independent of it, and to 

 whom we assign human motives and purposes, — 

 some sort of economic scheme with reference to it. 

 When a good man dies with his work half done, how 

 mysterious, we say, that the master of the vineyard 

 should thus strike down one of his most useful ser- 

 vants and spare so many worthless and worse than 

 worthless ones. The universe viewed in the light of 

 anything like human economy is indeed a puzzle. 

 But this is not the right view. We must get rid of 

 the great moral governor, or head director. He is a 

 fiction of our own brains. We must recognize only 

 Nature, the All ; call it God if we will, but divest it 

 of all anthropological conceptions. Nature we know ; 

 we are of it ; we are in it. But this paternal Provi- 

 dence above Nature — events are constantly knocking 

 it down. Here is this vast congeries of vital forces 

 which we call Nature, regardless of time, because it 

 has all time, regardless of waste because it is the 

 All, regardless of space because it is infinite, regard- 

 less of man because man is a part of it, regardless of 

 life because it is the sum total of life, gaining what 

 it spends, conserving what it destroys, always young, 

 always old, reconciling all contradictions — the sum 

 and synthesis of all powers and qualities, infinite 

 and incomprehensible. This is all the God we can 

 know, and this we cannot help but know. We want 

 no evidence of this God. 



