We live not merely in a world of material facts, and of objects and things cognizable through the senses, but also in a spiritual world.  We live not only in presence of visible creation, but in presence of the invisible Creator.  With the creation we are in contact through the intellect.  Knowledge of all objects and the qualities of objects that are within reach of the senses; distance and other material relations; the bonds of cause and effect and of analogy, that bind all created things in countless multiplicity of subtle relations,—­these the intellect gathers in its grasp.  But with the Creator we are in communication only through feeling.  The presence, the existence of God cannot by pure intellect be demonstrated:  it must be felt in order to be proved.  The mass of objects and relations presented to us in nature the intellect can learn, count, and arrange; but the life that incessantly permeates the whole and every part, the spirit that looks out from every object and every fact,—­of the range and pitch of whose power we have a faint token in the tornado and the earthquake,—­of this divine essence we should not have even an intimation through the intellect alone.  Not chemists, astronomers, mechanicians have uttered the deepest thoughts about God, but prophets and poets:  not Davys, but Coleridges; not Herschels, but Wordsworths.  It is a common belief, indeed, that men addicted to the exact sciences are rather wanting than otherwise in power to appreciate the invisible, a belief pungently embodied by Wordsworth in the lines,—­

  “Physician art thou? one all eyes,
  Philosopher! a fingering slave,
  One that would peep and botanize
  Upon his mother’s grave?”

This is as much under the mark as is above it that saying of some one, “An undevout astronomer is mad.”  A man’s being endowed with rare mathematical talent is no cause why he should or should not be devout.  His gifts to weigh and measure the stars are purely intellectual; and nature being seldom profuse upon one individual,—­as she was upon Pascal and Newton,—­the presumption as to an astronomer, of whom we know nothing, would be that what may be termed his emotive appreciation of stars and stellar systems is probably not so full as his intellectual.  And no amount or quality of intellectual insight can supply or compensate a want of sensibility.  No matter how many hundreds of millions of miles he may pierce into space, he has still to do with the visible and calculable.  But religion is the putting of the human mind in relation with the invisible, the incalculable.  A man gets no nearer to God through a telescope than through a microscope, and no nearer through either than through the naked eye.  Who cannot recognize the divine spirit in the hourly phenomena of nature and of his own mind will not be helped by the differential calculus, or any magnitude or arrangement of telescopic lenses.