Why, I ask again, are we to cry down man for the sake of crying up nature?  Why are we to depreciate the dweller that we may magnify the dwelling-place?  Is not, man (to say the least) one of the works of God?  Did not God make, both man and nature?  And does not Revelation (which our author holds in so deep reverence) teach that man was the last and noblest of the handiworks of the Creator?  And thus it is that I do not hesitate to answer such a question as that which follows, and to answer it contrariwise to what the author expects.  It is from the human soul that glory and meaning are projected upon inanimate nature.  To Newton, and to Newton’s dog, the outward creation was physically the same; to the apprehension of Newton and of Newton’s dog, how different!  Hear the author:—­

To this clear issue the case is brought:  Man does introduce into nature something from himself:  either the inertness, the negative qualily, the defect, or the beauty, the meaning, the glory.  Either that whereby the world is noble comes from ourselves, or that whereby it is mean; that which it has, or that which it wants.  Can it be doubtful which it is?

Not in the least!  Give me the rational and immortal man, made in God’s image, rather than the grandest oak which the June sunbeams will be warming when you read this, my friend—­rather than the most majestic mountain which by and bye will be purple with the heather.  Reason, immortality, love, and faith, are things liker God than ever so many cubic feet of granite, than ever so many loads of timber.  ‘Behold,’ says Archer Butler, ’we stand alone in the universe!  Earth, air, and ocean can show us nothing so awful as we!’

You fancy, says our author, that Nature is inert, because it goes on in so constant and unvarying a course.  You know, says he, what conscious exertion it costs you to produce physical changes; you can trace no such exertion in Nature.  You would believe, says he, that Nature is active, but for the fact that her doings are all conformed to laws that you can trace.  But invariableness, he maintains, is no proof of inaction.  Right action is invariable; right action is absolutely conformed to law.  Why, therefore, should not the secret of nature’s invariableness be, not passiveness, but rightness?’ The unchanging uniformity of Nature’s course proves her holiness—­her willing, unvarying obedience to the Divine law.  ’The invariableness of Nature bespeaks Holiness as its cause.’

May we not think upon all this (not dogmatically) in some such fashion as this?

Which is likelier: 

1.  That Nature has it in her power to vary from the well-known laws of Nature; that she could disobey God if she pleased; but that she is so holy that she could not think of such a thing, and so through all ages has never swerved once.  Or,

2.  That Nature is bound by laws which she has not the power to disobey; that she is what she looks, an inanimate, passive, inert thing, actuated, as her soul and will, by the will of the Creator?