history of thought—or inspiration. Well, according to Newton and others, the force of gravity at the sun's surface is twenty-seven times greater than that of the earth. Let me assume, therefore, that you are a man-it would take a very courageous preacher to borrow this illustration with its inferences, from woman-and weigh 150 pounds. Now if you could be transferred to the surface of the sun, you would weigh 4050 pounds, and be literally crushed beneath your own weight. Is it not perfectly safe to take for granted, considering this enormous increase in weight, that no woman would like to take up her residence in the sun? That is why the illustration is strictly confined to the masculine gender.

These, then, are some of the characteristics of matter. The thing itself is not fully known. But we are justified in thinking that matter is the servant of mind or spirit. "The presence of mind," said Sir John Herschel, " is what solves the whole problem of the material universe." Certainly nothing less than mind can solve the mystery, and nothing less than mind can give a satisfactory reason for the existence of the worlds of matter at all. These immeasurable physical fields must be for the exercise of spirit. Mind has gone into their making; they are built on mathematical laws and baptized with intelligence from thickest crust to thinnest vapour; and, therefore, mind is looking out of their every atom and star. The universe is just a vast

autograph album. Its covers are wrought of matter bound up in myriads of forms; its pages are molecules and constellations, planets and electrons, mountains and motes; and God has written His signature upon every single page, whether gigantically large or microscopically small.

II

The latter half of my text distinctly states man's relation to spirit: "And the Lord God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Physically speaking, a human being is fearfully and wonderfully made. But the physical existence borrows its meaning from the spiritual; man is a creature of inconceivable affiliations; he breaks bounds, exhausts the categories of time and sense, thrusts the roots of his nature deep into the soil of eternity, and, weeping over his weakness and imperfection, rejoices with joy unspeakable that he is the child of God and the heir of imperishable glory. In his transfigured moods, man is vividly and profoundly conscious of his celestial backgrounds. Like the psalmist, he then crushes the external universe to a handful of dust within his strong spiritual grasp, and declares: "Whom have I in Heaven but Thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire beside Thee."

But there are those who deny man's august kinship to the overarching, soliciting, intelligent and

intelligible realm of the spiritual. I find some of these atheists in hiding in my own house of dust. They are those clever traitors named my five senses. While here on earth I cannot get on without them, because they are the nervous wires by which I communicate with the outer world, by which the outer world communicates with me. I call them my Court Fools. They have their essential place in my court of life; but like all infidels, they assume entirely too much. For the moment, therefore, I am going to put some of these couriers of sensation on the witness stand.

First of all, I introduce Mr. Touch. Before he leaves the stand, he will have earned the reputation of being one of the biggest dunces infesting my entire realm. "What is your business, Mr. Touch?" I ask. "I am in most intimate relations with your brain, sir," he replies, somewhat haughtily. "I am an expert telegrapher, and my business is to keep you informed as to your dealings with matter and space. For example, I send a telegram to your brain which reads: 'The space with which you are in contact is occupied by matter; and the substance is either hard or soft in comparison to your body.'" "You are a very good servant, Mr. Touch," "Indeed I am, sir, and very smart, too." "How much do you know?" Everything there is to be known in the physical universe, sir." "Be careful, Mr. Touch, or you'll perjure yourself." "I'm not afraid; I can touch

66

all there is, seen and unseen." "Are you sure?" "Absolutely sure!" "You know, Mr. Touch, that it takes, chemically speaking, two atoms of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen to make a molecule of water. Suppose you multiply your atoms of hydrogen and oxygen until you have several molecules of water. Now, let me ask you, Mr. Touch, if you have ever placed your hand upon the gigantic forces at work between molecule and molecule?" "Well, I can't say that I have." "You know that the chemist has been wrestling with that problem a long time, do you not?” "And what does he think?"

Just this: That if the atomic and molecular forces contained in a single drop of water were suddenly liberated, the resulting energy would wreck the world, destroying every mountain, every sea, every nation, every city, every human, every animal, every small and large thing on the planet."

Thus my court fool named Touch tells me little or nothing about atomic or molecular forces. They are not among the familiar forces-these unimaginably subtle, these inconceivably powerful forces; they belong to a different order. We are utterly unaware of them-not because they do not exist, not because they are not in ceaseless operation, but solely because they are so perfectly balanced, held in such noiseless, frictionless equilibrium by the all-wise God who conceived and created them.

My next court fool-one of the jesters who go

along to make merriment for the king-is Hearing. What is your business, Mr. Hearing? "My business is to report to you all the sound there is in the universe." "Now be careful, Mr. Hearing: your brother Touch has already convicted himself of perjury." "Oh, but Touch is just a stupid fellow compared with me. Why, look at my wonderful instrument-just see this ear of mine! Those shells down on the shore, which hold the whispered murmur of the sea, have all been patterned after my external and internal ear. Would you like me to tell you how sound reaches my brain through this ear? Very well. After entering my outer ear, sound waves pass inwards, reaching the membrane stretched over my inner ear. That is what I call the drum, because sound smites it and it trembles. The message is taken from this drum by those marvellous little bones called, because of their grotesque shapes, the hammer, the anvil, and the stirrup. Then the stirrup, agitated by this news from the outer court of things, knocks at a little window and is hospitably received. But the sound is in a hurry to reach my brain, and so it is taken from this mysterious window by a tiny pool of water, just beyond it. And then comes that most bewildering of all the factors of the ear-that little musical instrument with its scores of delicate strings made of nerves so fine and tenuous that it requires a microscope to see them. Waves from that microscopic pool of water are the elflike fingers that play the many-stringed instru