We have perverted our language because thought, of which language is the clothing, is perverted. We dare not handle questions that in themselves are pure, because we have allowed necessary words to represent unnecessary indelicacy. No word that expresses a necessary fact is in itself evil; but woe to the imagination which makes it so! Purity is always dignified. But if you take the white roses of innocence to crown a wanton, white roses will fall into disrepute; and this is what we have done with language. Words no longer only mean the thing they represent. They have been made to insinuate the foul underflow of evil fancy that corruption has poured forth. How shall we cleanse the source, that we may once more use language of strength and purity? How shall
we again become manly and brave, and yet avoid the charge of being coarse and too outspoken? Only by going back to the noble candor of the great thinkers of old, and by trying to see things as they are in the mind of God, and not as they are in fallen man; by looking at the laws of creation as they came from the hands of the Creator, before man had written his running commentary of evil and sin, and thus defiled the glorious page. There are two forms of purity. The one is the purity of ignorance. The intellect that knows nothing of the species cannot predicate the accidents; and no doubt blank ignorance is better than an evil imagination. But there is another and a higher purity; it is the purity of an informed mind which, from the sublime heights of science, or, better far, from the depths of union with God in the all-pervading sense of his presence, has acquired that faculty of viewing subject-matter in the abstract which leaves no association of imagination or fancy to drag it down into the lower nature and so defile it. The more truly scientific a mind becomes, the more will it inhabit those cool, serene heights of passionless intellect. But the first, the truest, the absolutely sure science of theology is the one royal road to the habit of mind which can, as it were, stand outside its lower nature and contemplate facts and truths in their essential nature, divested of human contact or defilement; or, where both must be recognized, can eliminate the law from its abuse, and trace back the former to the bosom of the Creator; for “to the pure all things are pure.” This seems to be the faculty which is more and more dying out amongst us.
It is probable that some of the
hurry and absence of precision and of tenacious research which characterize the modern form of mind may be the natural result of the sudden rush of new discoveries which have taken us, as it were, by surprise and carried us off our feet. By degrees it is probable we shall, as a race, accept the changes in our condition, and shall become gradually adapted to the varied forms of life imposed upon us by the vast and multiplied combinations which every day are extending our power over the external world and opening new paths for activity and enterprise. Doubtless this power will increase rather than diminish, and at the same time take less hold upon us in a revolutionary way, and we shall lose some of that flurry and excitement which now characterize us—much in the way that the young colt of a week old starts no more than does the old mare when the engine rushes down the railway that skirts the field; and yet when railways first began both were alike alarmed.
But for the present we have lost much of our original moral and intellectual dignity. Upon such questions as interest us we are excited and flurried. Those which we do not affect to understand we cannot seriously listen to; and between the bustling activity of the first and the listless frivolity of the last it is not an easy task to bring forward old truths with new faces, old facts with a fresh moral, lest those who listen should persist in viewing the question from the wrong side, and in taking scandal where no scandal was meant.
We have set ourselves the task of investigating the chief attributes of God’s government of creation and its uniformity of design in complexity of action. To do this we
must condescend to the primary and natural law which he imposed on our world when he called it out of chaos; and we must endeavor to explain what were the special characteristics of that law, and what light it throws upon the attributes of Him who gave it.
The three chief characteristics which we discover in the government of creation are abundance, patience or longanimity, and progression. The first command which the Creator uttered over the first recorded living and moving creatures of his hand was, “Increase and multiply.” This was the initial law of all that we see and know in the external world; and as no temporal law or material condition exists in God’s creation without its spiritual intention and inner meaning, this law is typical of what is beyond sight and belongs to the domain of faith. In attempting to define that command we find it conveys an impression, wider than the heavens and more diffused than the ambient air, of generosity, benevolence, and paternity. It is the law of “our Father who is heaven.” It beams upon us like the genial warmth of the noontide sun. It shadows us like the stretching boughs of a large forest perfumed with the dews of earth. It was spoken first to the products of the water and the denizens of the air; and again it was spoken over the two first beings created “after His own image and likeness.”
Wherever there is life, even life in its lowest form—and so low that science hesitates to pronounce upon it as being life, and stands uncertain how to designate evident growth without equally evident life, like the unintelligent but absolutely accurate formation of crystals—there too the law reigns of “increase and multiply.”
Attraction and affinity declare the law, and carry it on, while repulsion is but the inverse of the same; and though, for aught we know, and judging by induction, there is not one molecule added on our earth to the original chaotic matter, and all reproductions are composed of the same elements passing through varied forms and phases, nevertheless the same impulse governs all living things and everywhere represents the large, lavish benevolence of the God of life.