In reality, we cannot ever enjoy or always suffer. To gain either paradise or hell an enormous change must take place in us; without either place, the masses can conceive no idea of God at all.
Is not the idea of motion stamped on the systems of worlds, sufficient to prove God to us? We busy ourselves very little about the pretended nothingness which precedes birth while we fumble in and ransack the dark gulf that awaits us, that is, we make God responsible for our future and we demand from him, no record of the past. To get out of this difficulty the soul has been invented, but it is repugnant to our feelings to render God obligated for human baseness, our disillusions, our decline and fall. How can we admit in ourselves a divine principle over which a potent liquor can get the advantage?
Can we imagine immaterial faculties which matter may utterly subjugate whose exercise a grain of opium can prevent? Is not the communication of motion to matter an unexplored abyss whose difficulties have been rather displaced than resolved by Newton’s system? Motion is a great soul whose alliance with matter is quite as difficult to explain as is the production of thought in man.—Balzac, Louis Lambert. (Translated by Harriett Green Courtis.)
THE HUMAN CELL.
BY ARTHUR A. BEALE, M. B.
“To demonstrate that Brotherhood is a fact in Nature; to investigate the laws of Nature and the divine powers in Man.”
When we fall away from the path of duty, when torn by the storms of passion we forget that there reposes within the complexities of our nature a divine spark—much more, perhaps, that we ourselves are a universe, nay, a universe of Universes, a Great Eternal God, controlling, energizing and creating worlds that live and have their day and cease to be. But it is so. Hour by hour worlds are falling away and with them ebb the vital forces of our being. Take a flake of scurf from the head and put it under the microscope,—a new vista is opened up. And yet, this is only a type of millions of like or dissimilar entities, which are so bound together as to compose the mighty universe of man’s body,—the least important of his constitution. These little lives take different shapes to suit different necessities, but they agree in certain essential features which we learn to call the cell. And looking lower still this cell is of the same type as those found in the animals and again in the plants. How very little difference, too, between these and the monads of the mineral kingdom!
But keeping to man, these cells form themselves into societies, which we call tissues, these into others we call organs, and the organs form together a corporate organization, the body, which in a healthy state is subservient to the synthesizing forces emanating from the Heart, where lives the source of life, the divine Ruler. So the organs work together in harmony. If any organ begins to absorb more attention and life than is due to it, not only does it suffer itself, but brings discord into the whole.
But as long as it observes its own duty and fulfils its place, so does it maintain its own status, and receive its own benefits; for thus, and thus alone, can it participate in the higher impulse, that comes from that sacred centre.
As of the organs so of the cells of which each is composed, they must act in accordance with the unified impulse of the organ, but so must each cell be true to the heart of its own tiny body—whence, as I shall try to show, comes the true impulse, by which it evolves,—that centre where are played the divine harmonies and where stands the God directing his forces in the building of “the temple not made with hands.”
This is a Universal Activity. It is the same process going on through all the kingdoms of the Universe, from the tiny crystals to plants, from plants to animals, and animals to man.