strange, no doubt, if, after throwing a stone ninety-nine times, it would not throw the hundredth, but either clung to your hand, dropped at your feet, or flew up to the sun; else, being thrown as before, it turned off at right angles within an inch of the mark. Why strange ? Because you have already learnt unconsciously to believe in the constancy of Nature's laws. Here, then, is the simplest element of physical continuity-constancy. You put a seed in the ground, and for some time it is practically lost to you. Nay, the greater part of it is really consumed in nourishing the lesser; and if you were to exhume it when that lesser part has begun to grow, you would be far from able to take oath on the identity of your seed. But how totally changed is it to you when fibres extend downwards and strengthen into roots, and a stem appears upwards and develops into branches, flowers, and fruit. The seed has disappeared and something altogether different, seemingly, both in look and in quality, come in its place. You now cut your fruit; of course, as you expected, there you have seeds, in numbers it may be, imbedded within it. "The growth or development here ends where it began," say you; "and I suppose that is what you call its continuity?" Right; but with a difference. You planted seed, and seed has been developed the whole growth, then, is of a piece, and would return on itself to infinity, practically. Here is continuity. But there is more than this. The growth ends where it began, in seed, yet not exactly; you have not the same seed, and may have many instead of one. There is still, you see, the element of constancy, but of constancy now united with progress, which progress we recognize under the very terms "growth," "development." Continuity, then, you perceive, unites great variety of form with oneness of principle. So great, indeed, may this variety be that we may, through its very vastness, lose sight of the uniting principle, or law, as it is called, which binds all the facts in one. Even in the case before us, which seems so simple, it might be possible to miss the uniting principle altogether in the complexity of the facts. Suppose a worm at the root, and a caterpillar on a branch of our crab, to be comparing notes of their observations and experiences; could you imagine them ever devising, by even their united wisdom, any law which would include two such different things as a root-fibre and a leaf? Their united wisdom would only drive them the further from agreement; where they would remain, each wrapped up in his own pet theory, till the advent of a linnet, say, whose genius could grasp all their facts and unite them in the higher idea of growth. Then that linnet would be king; our two friends of the grub species would almost worship him; and were it the law of gravitation he discovered they would call him Newton, the natural philosopher. From all which we gather, so far, that continuity does not mean the sameness or continuance of the things themselves which we see about us in the world, nor even of the material of which they are composed (for all that we see changes particle by particle, from moment to moment), but in reality means the unbroken persistence, the never-ceasing activity, of power or force in them, in virtue of which they are, and grow, and cease to be. In a word, continuity includes constancy of force, changeableness of material, and progress or development in the result; the element of variation now perceived in it being but constancy in a wider field, and at a longer interval, as shown, you know, in the growth force of our tree being as constant and continuous as the force of gravity in stonefalling, but much more varied and complex. An insect of a summer's day sees the sun set (he doesn't, but that's nothing); well, and if he be an imaginative insect he will probably reflect on the manifest instability of all things, conclude that their end has surely come, and feel in himself the prophetic endorsement of the reflection in the on-creeping dream and dissolving, fading thrills of imminent nothingness. Is a large, sage pity yours for this poor weak creature? Why, forsooth? except that you know, or think you know (for you don't), that the sun will rise to-morrow as to-day; that you shall have "to-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow, this petty pace" of sun-movement "creeping in from day to day." And, truly, so much may you have of it that your interest in it may be at zero; that is to say, the constancy of the solar system itself, and even of the whole fabric of things, has become to you an unconscious truism. You believe in continuity without knowing it, or at least in its simplest, deepest element. One day in June, say, lazily noticing for yourself the sunset, it occurs to you to think that the same thing will happen just there, in line with that church spire, every day of your life. A month after you observe it again, and find that you were wrong, for the sun has changed his place of setting, and is distinctly travelling south. You are interested, your lazy ideas are interrupted, and you continue to watch; every week you find him going further and further from your first point of observation. In course of time, however, i.e., after six months, he seems to be travelling back to his original setting-place; and there, at last, over the same trees, behind the same hill, you see him go down, exactly one year to the day since you first consciously observed his movements. You have now got some notion of what never struck you before, why a year is of a certain length; and you are now sure that if you were to watch the sun setting year after year you would see him go through the same movements within the same time. The wonderful regularity could not fail to impress you, nor the grandeur and permanent order of the vast system of which these motions are a sign. The sublime constancy, with variations therein, having causes which as yet are impenetrable to you, these, over an immense area of space, involve the exercise of power, of force, to you utterly inconceivable. What then shall we say to the wide universe itself, with its infinite complexity of masses, movements, systemsconstant, invariable, continuous a mighty whole or unit of matter and motion, displaying its endless diversities of form and power and direction, not one atom straying from its boundless relation to the grand, unbroken master-forces which unify that whole. The universe is one thing, regular, reliable, constant, inflexible, never-ceasing energy it is continuity embodied, because an embodied law, an embodied force. We have brought our thoughts gradually up to this conception-the continuity of the universe. Now let the scene change; let all this that we see about us, this ordered involvement of worlds, vanish; let us carry our thought sheer out and backward to the time when this continuous whole was not. Instead of it we find, what?—a universe of floating atoms. Whence these atoms? Science has had no answer; unless, indeed, this be one-that, having reached the beginning of things visible and found no beyond, there is no beyond, and matter is its own eternal cause. Have we then come to the very beginning? and is continuity brought to a dead halt, backward? "No," science has said, "there is no beginning and no ending. Continuity is coeval with eternity. These atoms are but our universe in the making; there has been universe before universe, backward to eternity. Nay," she has said, "re-descend the stream of universal development of atoms into worlds, and we behold at work, continuous, inflexible law, any irruption through which is in itself inconceivable and absurd, much more so (if it were possible) in the form of revelation, or of miracle so-called. No; continuous always, down the one line of natural law, through the whole course of the development of worlds. And going still onward into limitless futurity, we see in vision the decay of all visible things, systems gathered into suns and suns into other suns, till the return, as of old, of all these also to their primal atoms; not here to rest; only to be redistributed, to coalesce, to develop into another manifold universe, which, in incalculable ages, shall in turn be dissolved, and be replaced by universe upon universe in illimitable succession." Thus far science; and the mind goes backward, forward, striving hard to overtake, to realize, to grasp the trackless course of eternal progression, but falls back, baffled, saying, "How awful, how appalling! Verily, great is continuity of the scientist!" So stood the doctrine, with the modification and addition, within the last twenty years, of a distinct and avowed recognition, in a great system of philosophy, of a First Cause of things other than the things themselves; but no recognition of revelation, and none of miracle or its possibility. So it stood till within the last five years, when the complexion of science again offered an appearance of change; and we now have the remarkable fact, which none of you, however, who understand the matter will be surprised at, of the contention by men of science, on purely scientific grounds, for the legitimate issue of the principle of continuity in the doctrine of an unseen universe, the pre-existent, coincident, and cause of the one we know. Here, you perceive, is, so far as science is concerned, an altogether unexpected result. Our physical continuity is, as it were, checkmated, stopped in its glorious, eternal career, though it be but as by the puncture of a needle's point. And here for the present we leave it. So far my sermon has been all text, but, if you will wait a month, I will (my superior permitting) give you what some folks most of all desiderate about a text-some application of it. In the meantime, you cannot fail to see why I have started off with this special idea of continuity you will see how it plunges us at once into the middle of things, and brings us face to face with the deepest problems of being-God, revelation, miracles, the spiritual world, universal order, the grand man, and, by necessity, correspondence and the Word. Nor misunderstand me, my brothers and sisters; don't think that I am about to expound all these things to you, else our text would be like those of the fathers of a former generation, who delighted for Sundays together "in resuming the former subject of discourse ;" and, moreover, do not imagine that I imagine that these heavy names are in themselves attractive to many of you. I do not believe it; and I should not now be talking to you at all if I had nothing else in my thoughts than the bare exposition of the ideas they contain. My belief is that they are attractive to not a few of you who care about them, because of the difficulties with which they are invested in your thoughts; and if I could not solve some of these difficulties I should certainly not be your preacher here. Let me rejoice, though, in thinking that there are some few souls among you who have, or have the beginnings of, a genuine delight in the study of fundamental truths for their own sake; and if to these, and to those others who are either indifferent or perplexed, I can say one word of blessing, of drawing, or of helpfulness, then am I, to the extent of my use and service, willingly yours, THOMAS CHILD. CHRISTMAS. THE bells are ringing merrily Through heaven this song of gladness ran— Glory to God, on earth be peace, In Bethlehem the lowly, Our Saviour Lord was born, And from that Christmas morn That Bethlehem was holy; For He, the Heir of David's royal line, Was born to save from sin with power Divine. In poverty and trial, Christ's earthly life began; In loneliness and sorrow, He wrought redemption's plan. He sowed in tears of grief and pain, That man eternal joy might gain. And still as the merry bells shall ring, The dawn of higher, nobler truth; B |