And to aid in considering which alternative is the likelier, let it be remembered that Revelation teaches that this is a fallen world; that experience proves that this world is not managed upon any system of optimism; that in this creation things are constantly going wrong; and especially, that all history gives no account of any mere creature whose will was free to do either good or ill; and yet who did not do ill frequently.  Is it likely that to all this there is one entire exception; one thing, and that so large a thing as all inanimate nature, perfectly obedient, perfectly holy, perfectly right-and all by its own free will?  I grant there is something touching in the author’s eloquent words:—­

Because she is right, Nature is ours:  more truly ours than we ourselves.  We turn from the inward ruin to the outward glory, and marvel at the contrast.  But we need not marvel:  it is the difference of life and death:  piercing the dimness even of man’s darkened sense, jarring upon his fond illusion like waking realities upon a dream.  Without is living holiness, within is deathly wrong.

Let the reader, ever remembering that in such cases analogy is not argument but illustration—­that it makes a doctrine clearer, but does not in any degree confirm it—­read the chapter entitled ’Of the illustration from Astronomy.’  It will tend to make the great doctrine of Man and his Dwelling-Place comprehensible; you will see exactly what it is, although you may not think it true.  As astronomy has transferred the apparent movements of the planets from them to ourselves, so, says our author, has science transferred the seeming inertness of Nature from it to us.  The phenomenon of Nature is physical and inert:  the being is spiritual and active and holy.  And if we now seem to have an insuperable conviction that Man is not inert and that Nature is inert, it is not stronger than our apparent consciousness that the earth is unmoving.  Man lives under illusion as to himself and as to the universe.  Reason, indeed, furnishes him with the means of correcting that illusion; but in that illusion is his want of life.

Strong in his conviction of the grand principle which he has established, as he conceives, in his first book, the author, in his second book, goes crashing through all systems of philosophy.  His great doctrine makes havock of them all.  All are wrong; though each may have some grain of truth in it.  The Idealists are right in so far as that there is no such thing as Matter.  Matter is the vain imagination of man through his wrong idea of Nature’s inertness.  But the Idealists are wrong if they fancy that because there is no Matter, there is nothing but Mind, and ideas in Mind.  Nature, though spiritual, has a most real and separate existence.  Then the sceptics are right in so far as they doubt what our author thinks wrong; but they are wrong in so far as they doubt what our author thinks right.  Positivism is right in so far as it teaches that we see all things relatively to ourselves, and so wrongly; but it is wrong in teaching that what things are in themselves is no concern of ours, and that we should live on as though things were what they seem.