OCR Text |
Show 150 INFINITUDE. ultimately resist the force or action of heat. It ~s heat, indeed, which holds those powers of cry&talh· zation in restraint, and allows com pounds to. be formed, and ve<Tetables to grow, and animals to live; and were it not for the mysterious motion of hea~, which, for aught we know, may all have been originally produced by the sunbeams, the earth would not only be plantless and tenantless ; but earth, and sea, and sky would be reduced to one mass of crystals, probably to one crystal, and that crysta! so small~ and so near the verge of that mystenous nothing out of which Almighty powc! and goo?ness evolved all the worlds in all theu vanety and m all their beauty, that it might esc~pe the s~nses,.and we might be altogether unconsc1?us of 1t~ ex~stel!ce. With God all thin<Ts are possible, and m his s1ght there is no miracle~ Large as is the earth, vast as is the solar system, boundless as are those sys~ems of which the suns are the stars of our sky, and mdescribably distant as they glide off into the depths of space, and set at naught the eye and mock the .tele. scope, they, in their, to us, innum~rab~e ~ultltude and incomprehensible variety, are m his sight less than the " small dust of the balance ;" and howso. ever they may seem to change appear~nces, they.all obey the one commandment-the smgle creative fiat. When we glance back to the first stage of creation's history, which it is consistent wi~h finite minds to comprehend, weight and measure, time and space gradtJ.ally melt from our view, and we feel as if all nature were converging into one single point, and that one more look would reveal to us the first, the immaterial spring which was touched by the Almighty hand, in what was no time and yet included all time, and in what was no space and yet included all space. But the frailty of flesh is in the eye, the dimness of matter is upon it, and we cannot see. Yet here we can infer that the "glory to be r~y,e~led" shall as far exceed all the glories of all the THE SEASONS. 151 material works of God as the incomprehensible universe exceeds the stretch of the human hand, though we cannot push onr analysis any further than observation and rational inference would bear us out; and thus cannot approach either the infinitely great or the infinitely small, so near as to have even a conception of them farther than that they can differ from each other as material thin<Ts differ; and that any or both are perfectly capable Zr coexisting with an infinitude of knowledge-knowledge or intelligence, which is one and indivisible in its essence, but of which the manifestations can have no limit, and which cannot be divided in anv other way than through its manifestations, either in space or in time. There are many places of the world where, if a stranger were to come at certain seasons, he would never imagine that the fields would be clothed witP vegetation. A native of the green savannas of America, coming to England in winter, or after the fields were ploughed and the seeds sown and covered, would think it mockery if he were to be tolcl that it was from these black wastes that the people of England reaped their bread. so· also if one unacquainted with the changes of the seasons trod the snows atld the mountains wnen these lay deep and hard so that not even the top of the highest bush appeared, he would regard it as mockery if he were to be asked to come back again in six months to be feasted with delicious berries. And there are other cases much more mysterious to unthinking obser~ ers than these. The endless variety of fungi, and l~chens, a.nd moulds, and other plants, many of which h~ve their seeds too small for the eye or even the mtcr?scope; and the entire plants of many of the spectes are too small for the microscope even taken as wholes, are yet always found whenever circumstances are favourable for their production. The waste of the year, the refuse and rubbish that have |