THE DIVINE SOIL 75 



game. If we did not every day witness the passage, 

 we could not believe it. The gulf between the crys- 

 tal and the cell we have not seen cleared, and 

 man has not yet been able to bridge it, and may 

 never be, but it has been bridged, and I dare say 

 without any more miracle than hourly goes on 

 around us. The production of water from two 

 invisible gases is a miracle to me. When water ap- 

 peared (what made it appear?) and the first cloud 

 floated across the blue sky, life w^as not far off, if 

 it was not already there. Some morning in spring 

 when the sun shone across the old Azoic hills, at 

 some point where the land and sea met, life began 

 — the first speck of protoplasm appeared. Call it 

 the result of the throb or push of the creative 

 energy that pervades all things, and whose action 

 is continuous and not intermittent, since we are 

 compelled to presuppose such energy to account 

 for anything, even our own efforts to account for 

 things. An ever active vital force pervades the 

 universe, and is felt and seen in all things, from 

 atomic attraction and repulsion up to wheeling suns 

 and systems. The very processes of thought seem 

 to require such premises to go upon. There is a 

 reason for the universe as w r e find it, else man's rea- 

 son is a delusion, and delusion itself is a meaning- 

 less term. The uncaused is unthinkable; thought 

 can find neither beginning nor ending to the uni- 

 verse because it cannot find the primal cause. Can 



