And if a modern philosopher—­or one so called—­had said to him,—­’This is unthinkable and inconceivable, and therefore cannot be.  I cannot “think of”—­I cannot conceive a mind—­or as I call it—­“a series of states of consciousness,” as antecedent to the infinity of processes simultaneously going on in all the plants that cover the globe, from scattered polar lichens to crowded tropical palms, and in all the millions of animals which roam among them, and the millions of millions of insects which buzz among them:’—­Then the Psalmist would have answered him, I believe,—­’If you cannot, my friend, I can.  And you must not make your power of thought and conception the measure of the universe, or even of other men’s intellects; or say—­“Because I cannot conceive a thing, therefore no man can conceive it, and therefore it does not exist.”  But pray, O philosopher, if you cannot think and conceive of the omnipresence and omnipotence of God, what can you think and conceive?’

Then if that philosopher had answered him—­as some would now-a-days—­’I can conceive that the properties of very different elements,—­and therefore the infinite variety and richness of nature which I cannot conceive as caused by a God—­that the properties—­I say—­of different elements result from differences of arrangement arising by the compounding and recompounding of ultimate homogeneous units’—­Then, I think, the Psalmist would have replied, as soon as he had—­like Socrates of old in a like case—­recovered from the ‘dizziness’ caused by an eloquence so unlike his own—­’Why, this proposition is far more “unthinkable” to me, and will be to 999 of 1000 of the human race, than mine about a God and a Providence.  Alas! for the vagaries of the mind of man.  When it wants to prove a pet theory of its own, it will strain at any gnat, and swallow any camel.’

But again—­if a philosopher of more reasonable mood had said to him—­as he very likely would say—­’This is a grand conception of God:  but what proof have you of it?  How do you know that God does interfere, by special Providences, in the world around us; not only, as you say, perpetually:  but even now and then, and at all?’

Then the Psalmist, like all true Jews, would have gone back to a certain old story which is to me the most precious story, save one, that ever was written on earth; and have taken his stand on that.  He would have gone back—­as the Scripture always goes back—­to the story of Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, and have said—­’Whatever I know or do not know about the Laws of nature, this I know—­That God can use them as He chooses, to punish the wicked, and to help the miserable.  For He did so by my forefathers.  When we Jews were a poor, small, despised tribe of slaves in Egypt, The God who made heaven and earth shewed Himself at once the God of nature, and the God of grace.  For He took the powers of nature; and fought with them against proud Pharaoh and all his hosts; and shewed