which the savage feels.  But she replaces that, in the minds of many, by a moral terror which is far more overwhelming.  Am I—­a man is driven to ask—­am I, and all I love, the victims of an organised tyranny, from which there can be no escape—­for there is not even a tyrant from whom I may perhaps beg mercy?  Are we only helpless particles, at best separate parts of the wheels of a vast machine, which will use us till it has worn us away, and ground us to powder?  Are our bodies—­and if so, why not our souls?—­the puppets, yea, the creatures of necessary circumstances, and all our strivings and sorrows only vain beatings against the wires of our cage, cries of ‘Why hast thou made me, then?’ which are addressed to nothing?  Tell us not that the world is governed by universal law; the news is not comfortable, but simply horrible, unless you can tell us, or allow others to tell us, that there is a loving giver, and a just administrator of that law.

Horrible, I say, and increasingly horrible, not merely to the sentimentalist, but to the man of sound reason and of sound conscience, must the scientific aspect of nature become, if a mere abstraction called law is to be the sole ruler of the universe; if—­ to quote the famous words of the German sage—­’If, instead of the Divine Eye, there must glare on us an empty, black, bottomless eye-socket;’ and the stars and galaxies of heaven, in spite of all their present seeming regularity, are but an ’everlasting storm which no man guides.’

It was but a few days ago that we, and this little planet on which we live, caught a strange and startling glimpse of that everlasting storm which—­shall I say it?—­no one guides.

We were swept helpless, astronomers tell us, through a cloud of fiery stones, to which all the cunning bolts which man invents to slay his fellow-man, are but slow and weak engines of destruction.

We were free from the superstitious terror with which that meteor-shower would have been regarded in old times.  We could comfort ourselves, too, with the fact that heaven’s artillery was not known as yet to have killed any one; and with the scientific explanation of that fact, namely, that most of the bolts were small enough to be melted and dissipated by their rush through our atmosphere.

But did the thought occur to none of us, how morally ghastly, in spite of all its physical beauty, was that grand sight, unless we were sure that behind it all, there was a living God?  Unless we believed that not one of those bolts fell, or did not fall to the ground without our Father?  That He had appointed the path, and the time, and the destiny, and the use of every atom of that matter, of which science could only tell us that it was rushing without a purpose, for ever through the homeless void?