INDICATIONS OF A SCHEME IN THE UNIVERSE. 161 



Of course all this sounds anthropomorphic. When v/e talk 

 of a scheme we are importing the idea of mind into the 

 universe, whilst to talk of chance is to import mindlessness. 

 If variations which are casual, i.e., unintentional to the 

 creature which embodies them, prove to be important links in a 

 long chain leading up to a fixed species, then as we look upon 

 such species we say there is mind here, only not the mind of 

 the clay, but of the potter. We hear much of town-planning 

 at present, but there is universe-planning also — many mansions, 

 but one house. In w^arfare a good general leaves nothing to 

 ■chance. He has his objective, and everything must lead up to 

 its completion. So it must be in the work of the Divine 

 Commander. A little girl imagines life in a doll because she 

 detects signs of life within and around herself. Her mistake 

 is that she (unconsciously) argues from the greater to the less. 

 But a grown up man argues from the less to the greater. He 

 says, ''Every building is made by some one. He that built all 

 things is God." He sees and feels the marks of variety, order, 

 progression, vitality, persistence ; and above all he detects a 

 harmony between the inner and the outer world, and recognises 

 that whilst his body is of earth his mind is of heaven, and 

 he — the mystic self — is the bond of union between the two. 



It is the conviction of modern science that all nature was 

 originally invisible. " The things which are seen are not made 

 of things which appeal to the senses " (Heb. xi, 3). They may 

 perhaps be reduced to one imponderable, ethereal, or electrical 

 substance which we could hardly call matter. Whatever it 

 was, there must have been plenty of it disseminated through 

 what seems to us infinite space. Lord Kelvin, writing of the 

 bulk of the universe, suggests that the total amount of matter 

 in the known universe equals a thousand million times the 

 mass of our sun ; hence you are to picture to yourselves a 

 thousand million suns disseminated in minute particles or 

 atoms uniformly throughout this gigantic sphere and gradually 

 falling together in nebulous masses. At first the density would 

 be imperceptibly small, and as they shrank together they would 

 take nearly 17,000,000 years to reach a sixth of the density of 

 water (supposing the particles came together with the velocity 

 of light). At length, there would be nebulae — then solar systems 

 — then worlds. Collisions would give rise to heat, and light, 

 which would be radiated away through the ether, the cooling of 

 condensing masses would give solid bodies, collisions between 

 which v/ould yield meteoric stones. Here is the story of 

 creation written by a devotee of physical science and of Biblical 



