It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.  It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.  It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.  The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.  Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg.  If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose.  It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain.  Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop.  Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career.  I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful:  now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful.  I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will.  In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic:  now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician.  And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person.  I had always felt life first as a story:  and if there is a story there is a story-teller.

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition.  It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions.  The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness.  Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did.  But he was an imperialist of the lowest type.  He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man.  Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale?  If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait.  It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree.  But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe.  He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals.  He turned mankind into a small nationality.  And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H.G.  Wells.  Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked.  But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked.  We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.