of the earth on a scale of unprecedented magnitude, and bring about “catastrophes” to which the earthquake of Lisbon is but a trifle.  It is conceivable that man and his works and all the higher forms of animal life should be utterly destroyed; that mountain regions should he converted into ocean depths and the floor of oceans raised into mountains; and the earth become a scene of horror which even the lurid fancy of the writer of the Apocalypse would fail to portray.  And yet, to the eye of science, there would he no more disorder here than in the sabbatical peace of a summer sea.  Not a link in the chain of natural causes and effects would he broken, nowhere would there be the slightest indication of the “suspension of a lower law by a higher.”  If a sober scientific thinker is inclined to put little faith in the wild vaticinations of universal ruin which, in a less saintly person than the seer of Patmos, might seem to be dictated by the fury of a revengeful fanatic, rather than by the spirit of the teacher who bid men love their enemies, it is not on the ground that they contradict scientific principles; but because the evidence of their scientific value does not fulfil the conditions on which weight is attached to evidence.  The imagination which supposes that it does, simply does not “assume the air of scientific reason.”

I repeat that, if imagination is used within the limits laid down by science, disorder is unimaginable.  If a being endowed with perfect intellectual and aesthetic faculties, but devoid of the capacity for suffering pain, either physical or moral, were to devote his utmost powers to the investigation of nature, the universe would seem to him to be a sort of kaleidoscope, in which, at every successive moment of time, a new arrangement of parts of exquisite beauty and symmetry would present itself; and each of them would show itself to be the logical consequence of the preceding arrangement, under the conditions which we call the laws of nature.  Such a spectator might well be filled with that Amor intellectualis Dei, the beatific vision of the vita contemplativa, which some of the greatest thinkers of all ages, Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, have regarded as the only conceivable eternal felicity; and the vision of illimitable suffering, as if sensitive beings were unregarded animalcules which had got between the bits of glass of the kaleidoscope, which mars the prospect to us poor mortals, in no wise alters the fact that order is lord of all, and disorder only a name for that part of the order which gives us pain.

The other fallacious employment of the names of scientific conceptions which pervades the preacher’s utterance, brings me back to the proper topic of the present essay.  It is the use of the word “law” as if it denoted a thing—­as if a “law of nature,” as science understands it, were a being endowed with certain powers, in virtue of which the phenomena expressed by that law are brought about.