What, then, is the office of the
Creator according to this scheme, as repulsive as it is absurd? It would
appear that, at some moment in a vacuous eternity, He calls matter out
of nothing, whirls it into fiery vortices, and then lets it cool down to
the absolute zero wherein death reigns for ever.
[Sidenote: The Protest of Faith.]
[Sidenote: Sustained by Latest Science.]
[Sidenote: Which Suggests an Infinite Unity.]
But, after all, "there is a spirit in man," and "the inspiration of the
Almighty," of the Eternal, of the glorious Whole to which we belong,
stirs in us a protest against this blasphemy of ignorance. Ignorance, I
say, for it was not the knowledge of our wise men that whispered such
things, but their sense of the vacuity beyond their knowledge. Up to
certain bounds, their grasp of facts, their insight into physical order,
their mathematical skill, were beyond all praise. But beyond that bound,
aye, and within it, in every inconceivable mode of the action of force,
as, for example, in gravitation, brooded the Unknowable. And it was not
their knowledge, but their ignorance that entailed absurd issues.
Already there are signs that even celestial physics and mathematics will
refuse to endorse as final so revolting a scheme of material evolution
and devolution, ending only in universal death.[23] And when once the
re-birth of new order out of the old is seen to be everywhere and
eternally taking place, then all the hints given us by science of the
ultimate oneness of all things, converge in the faith that All is God,
and God is All.
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