Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that science can tell us when we come to ultimates.  We go away from its oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very impressive till we examine their emptiness.  What, for example, is all this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of the dust of the ground?  To say that God took a handful of dust and breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the various phantasmagoria of life.  If anything, it is more explanatory.  It leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.

In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science.  It has done much in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking, and in instituting sounder methods of observation.  In some directions it has deepened our sense of wonder.  It has broadened our conception of the universe, though I fear it has been at the expense of narrowing our conception of man.  With Hamlet it contemptuously says, ’What is this quintessence of dust!’ It is so impressed by the mileage and tonnage of the universe, so abased before the stupendous measurements of the cosmos, the appalling infinity and eternity of its space and time, that it forgets the marvel of the mind that can grasp all these conceptions, forgets, too, that, big and bullying as the forces of nature may be, man has been able in a large measure to control, indeed to domesticate, them.  Surely the original fact of lightning is little more marvellous than the power of man to turn it into his errand-boy or his horse, to light his rooms with it, and imprison it in pennyworths, like the genius in the bottle, in the underground railway.  Mere size seems unimpressive when we contemplate such an extreme of littleness as say the ant, that pin-point of a personality, that mere speck of being, yet including within its infinitesimal proportions a clever, busy brain, a soldier, a politician, and a merchant.  That such and so many faculties should have room to operate within that tiny body—­there is a marvel before which, it seems to me, the billions of miles that keep us from falling into the jaws of the sun, and the tonnage of Jupiter, are comparatively insignificant and conceivable.

No, we must not allow ourselves to be frightened by the mere size and weight of the universe, or be depressed because our immediate genealogy is not considered aristocratic.  Perhaps, after all, we are sons of God, and as Mr. Meredith finely puts it, our life here may still be

  ’... a little holding
  To do a mighty service.’

‘Things of a day!’ exclaims Pindar.  ‘What is a man?  What is a man not?’