care more about our near and dear ones than the whole splendid array of stars and planets. See how, in our third quotation, religion illuminates the question of what God feels towards man by the simple words you have so often heard: "God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son." It is not a matter of being "driven across unimaginable gulfs of space." Space does not exist to God, it is our way of looking at the universe not His, to whom everything is at all times present. It is not a matter of being compelled to do anything at all. It is through love that He willingly enters into our earthly conditions of life and death, so that we who would be held apart from Him by the grandeur and immensity of the Natural Order as science shows it to us, should learn that in the Spiritual Order, vastness, magnificence, inconceivable splendour are as dust in the balance compared to love and the self-sacrifice through which love expresses itself.

At the same time, that vastness and grandeur help us to realize the supreme Majesty of Him who brought into existence "the suns of fire and light, and the inconceivable gulfs of space through which they spin on their marvellous journeyings, and who also brought into being

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on our puny earth the puny creatures who yet, because they can think, aspire, achieve and love, are even, according to human measure, of infinitely more worth than the inanimate creation, stupendously wonderful as it is. Man, as the great French thinker Pascal said, is but a reed, a drop of water may suffice to kill him, yet because he is a thinking reed, he is greater than the whole material universe, for even though it should crush him, he would still rise above it, he would know that it was destroying him, whereas the universe itself would know nothing.

The inconceivably great is, however, only part of that with which science concerns itself. There is also the inconceivably small, in its way quite as wonderful, quite as daunting to our imagination.

One of the writers whom I have already quoted thus picturesquely and quite correctly describes the infinitely small: "On earth there are forms of life so minute that millions of them exist in a drop of water. There are microscopic creatures more beautiful and more highly finished than any gem [the lovely vorticella is one of these, a delicate translucent bell on a clear stem], and more complex and effective than the costliest machine of

human contrivance. In 'The Story of Creation,' Mr Edward Clodd tells us that one cubic inch of rotten stone contains forty-one thousand million vegetable skeletons of diatoms.' It is as difficult to attach any clear idea to such minuteness as this, as it is to the vastness of the stellar spaces, and the orbs whirling through them. Yet each of these tiny lives is complete in itself, distinct from all others, able to reproduce itself "after its kind," having its invisible place to fill, its iota of work to perform. Nor are even these microscopic creatures the smallest things which enter into the scientific view of nature. According to the atomic theory "we believe, we must believe in this day, that everything in God's universe of world and stars is made of atoms [ultramicroscopic entities which never have been and never will be seen] . . . Men and women, mice and elephants, the red belts of Jupiter and the rings of Saturn are one and all but ever shifting, ever varying swarms of atoms. Every mechanical work of earth, air, fire, and water, every criminal act, every human deed of love or valour : what is it all [according to science] but the relation of one swarm of atoms, to another? Here, for example, is a swarm of atoms, vibrating, scintillating,

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martial-they call it a soldier-and anon
some thousand of miles away upon the South
African veldt, that swarm dissolves-dissolves
because of another little swarm-they call it
lead. What a phantasmagoric dance it is,
this dance of atoms!...
of atoms!... For mark the
mutabilities of things. These same atoms
maybe, or others like them, come together
again, vibrating, clustering, interlocking,
combining, and there results a woman, a
flower, a blackbird, or a locust, as the case
may be. But to-morrow again the dance is
ended and the atoms are far away; some of
them are in the fever germs that broke up
the dance . . . others are blown about the
Antipodes or the winds of the ocean. . . one
thing after another

"Like snow upon the desert's dusty face
Lighting a little hour or two-is gone,'

and the age-long, ever-changing dance goes

on.

"Now, whether we call the atoms God's little servants [or not], one thing is sure that every action of everything, living or dead, within this bourne of time and space, is the action of one swarm of atoms on another, for without them there is but empty void."1 1 The New Knowledge, pp. 15-16.

K

There could be nothing else, because all things living and non-living, the largest sun and the smallest diatom, are made up of them.

You will acknowledge, I think, that the "accurate and orderly knowledge of natural things" produces at this point a most bewildering impression. We sadly need something or another to bring order and comprehensiveness into the chaos which meets our eyes. To science, it is the law of gravitation which does this, the fact that every particle in the universe attracts every other particle with a force inversely proportionate to the square of the distance between them. The mazy dance of the atoms follows this rule without a shadow of variation, and consequently it is an absolutely orderly dance which we human beings can, at any rate to some extent, follow, describe, and understand.

But this thought only satisfies, our intelligence, not our heart, not that in us which needs something to rest on, to trust in, to love. Here, therefore, religion once more steps in to help us, and says: this dance of the atoms, this rule which it follows, is true within the "bourne of time and space"; but something else is true within and without it too, the Providence of God, His care and