Our atom is not found yet. Many are the ways of searching for it which we cannot stop to consider. We will pass in review the properties with which materialists preposterously endow it. It is impenetrable and indivisible, though some atoms are a hundred times larger than others. Each has definite shape; some one shape, and some another. They differ in weight, in quantity of combining power, in quality of combining power. They combine with different substances, in certain exact assignable quantities. Thus one atom of hydrogen combines with eighty of bromine, one hundred and sixty of mercury, two hundred and forty of boron, three hundred and twenty of silicon, etc. Hence our atom of hydrogen must have power to count, or at least to measure, or be cognizant of bulk. Again, atoms are of different sorts, as positive or negative to electric currents. They have power to take different shapes with different atoms in crystallization; that is, there is a power in them, conscious or otherwise, that the same bricks shall make themselves into stables or palaces, sewers or pavements, according as the mortar varies. "No, no," you cry out; "it is only according as the builder varies his plan." There is no need to rehearse these powers much further; though not one-tenth of the supposed innate properties of this infinitesimal infinite have been recited—properties which are expressed by the words atomicity, quantivilence, monad, dryad, univalent, perissad, quadrivalent, and twenty other terms, each expressing some endowment of power in this in visible atom. Refer to one more presumed ability, an ability to keep themselves in exact relation of distance and power to each other, without touching.
It is well known that water does not fill the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of different substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminishing it. A philosopher has said that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England, one man to four hundred square miles.
The atoms of the luminiferous ether are infinitely more diffused, and yet its interactive atoms can give four hundred millions of light-waves a second. And now, more preposterous than all, each atom has an attractive power for every other atom of the universe. The little mote, visible only in a sunbeam streaming through a dark room, and the atom, infinitely smaller, has a grasp upon the whole world, the far-off sun, and the stars that people infinite space. The Sage of Concord advises you to hitch your wagon to a star. But this is hitching all stars to an infinitesimal part of a wagon. Such an atom, so dowered, so infinite, so conscious, is an impossible conception.
But if matter could be so dowered as to produce such results by mechanism, could it be dowered to produce the results of intelligence? Could it be dowered with power of choice without becoming mind? If oxygen and hydrogen could be made able to combine into water, could the same unformed matter produce in one case a plant, in another a bird, in a third a man; and in each of these put bone, brain, blood, and nerve in proper relations? Matter must be mind, or subject to a present working mind, to do this. There must be a present intelligence directing the process, laying the dead bricks, marble, and wood in an intelligent order for a living temple. If we do put God behind a single veil in dead matter, in all living things he must be apparent and at work. If, then, such a thing as an infinite atom is impossible, shall we not best understand matter by saying it is a visible representation of God's personal will and power, of his personal force, and perhaps knowledge, set aside a little from himself, still possessed somewhat of his personal attributes, still responsive to his will. What we call matter may be best understood as God's force, will, knowledge, rendered apparent, static, and unweariably operative. Unless matter is eternal, which is unthinkable, there was nothing out of which the world could be made, but God himself; and, reverently be it said, matter seems to retain fit capabilities for such source. Is not this the teaching of the Bible? I come to the old Book. I come to that man who was taken up into the arcana of the third heaven, the holy of holies, and heard things impossible to word. I find he makes a clear, unequivocal statement of this truth as God's revelation to him. "By faith," says the author of Hebrews, "we understand the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear." In Corinthians, Paul says—But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom [as a source] are all things; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom [as a creative worker] are all things. So in Romans he says—"For out of him, and through him, and to him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen."
God's intimate relation to matter is explained. No wonder the forces respond to his will; no wonder pantheism—the idea that matter is God—has had such a hold upon the minds of men. Matter, derived from him, bears marks of its parentage, is sustained by him, and when the Divine will shall draw it nearer to himself the new power and capabilities of a new creation shall appear. Let us pay a higher respect to the attractions and affinities; to the plan and power of growth; to the wisdom of the ant; the geometry of the bee; the migrating instinct that rises and stretches its wings toward a provided South—for it is all God's present wisdom and power. Let us come to that true insight of the old prophets, who are fittingly called seers; whose eyes pierced the veil of matter, and saw God clothing the grass of the field, feeding the sparrows, giving snow like wool and scattering hoar-frost like ashes, and ever standing on the bow of our wide-sailing world, and ever saying to all tumultuous forces, "Peace, be still." Let us, with more reverent step, walk the leafy solitudes, and say:
"Father, thy hand
Hath reared these venerable columns: Thou
Did'st weave this verdant roof. Thou did'st look down
Upon the naked earth, and forthwise rose
All these fair ranks of trees. They in Thy sun
Budded, and shook their green leaves in Thy breeze.
"That delicate forest flower,
With scented breath and looks so like a smile,
Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling life,
A visible token of the unfolding love
That are the soul of this wide universe."—BRYANT.
Philosophy has seen the vast machine of the universe, wheel within wheel, in countless numbers and hopeless intricacy. But it has not had the spiritual insight of Ezekiel to see that they were everyone of them full of eyes—God's own emblem of the omniscient supervision.
What if there are some sounds that do not seem to be musically rhythmic. I have seen where an avalanche broke from the mountain side and buried a hapless city; have seen the face of a cliff shattered to fragments by the weight of its superincumbent mass, or pierced by the fingers of the frost and torn away. All these thunder down the valley and are pulverized to sand. Is this music? No, but it is a tuning of instruments. The rootlets seize the sand and turn it to soil, to woody fibre, leafy verdure, blooming flowers, and delicious fruit. This asks life to come, partake, and be made strong. The grass gives itself to all flesh, the insect grows to feed the bird, the bird to nourish the animal, the animal to develop the man.
Notwithstanding the tendency of all high-class energy to deteriorate, to find equilibrium, and so be strengthless and dead, there is, somehow, in nature a tremendous push upward. Ask any philosopher, and he will tell you that the tendency of all endowed forces is to find their equilibrium and be at rest—that is, dead. He draws a dismal picture of the time when the sun shall be burned out, and the world float like a charnel ship through the dark, cold voids of space—the sun a burned-out char, a dead cinder, and the world one dismal silence, cold beyond measure, and dead beyond consciousness. The philosopher has wailed a dirge without hope, a requiem without grandeur, over the world's future. But nature herself, to all ears attuned, sings pæans, and shouts to men that the highest energy, that of life, does not deteriorate.