t than 'Beecham's
Pills.'

'Give us a definition of life,' I asked a certain famous scientist and
philosopher whom I am privileged to call my friend.

'Nothing easier!' he gaily replied. 'Life is a product of solar energy,
falling upon the carbon compounds, on the outer crust of a particular
planet, in a particular corner of the solar system.'

'And that,' I said, 'really satisfies you as a definition of life--of
all the wistful wonder of the world!' And as I spoke I thought of Moses
with mystically shining face upon the Mount of the Law, of Ezekiel rapt
in his divine fancies, of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock, of
Christ's agony in the garden; the golden faces of the great of the world
passed as in a dream before me,--soldiers, saints, poets, and lovers. I
thought of Horatius on the bridge, of the holy and gentle soul of St.
Francis, of Chatterton in his splendid despair, and in fancy I went with
the awestruck citizens of Verona to reverently gaze at the bodies of two
young lovers who had counted the world well lost if they might only
leave it together.

The carbon compounds!

I took down _Romeo and Juliet_, listened to its passionate spheral
music, and the carbon compounds have never troubled me again.

Love laughs at the carbon compounds, and a great book, a noble act, a
beautiful face, make nonsense of such cheap formula for the mystery of
human life.

Yet this parable of the carbon compounds is a fair sample of all that
science can tell us when we come to ultimates. We go away from its
oracles with a mouthful of sounding words, which may seem very
impressive till we examine their emptiness. What, for example, is all
this rigmarole about solar energy and the carbon compounds but a more
pompous way of putting the old scriptural statement that man was made of
the dust of the ground? To say that God took a handful of dust and
breathed upon it and it became man, is no harder to realise than that
solar rays falling upon that dust should produce humanity and all the
various phantasmagoria of life. If anything, it is more explanatory. It
leaves us with an inspiring mystery for explanation.

In saying this, I do not forget our debt to science. It has done much
in clearing our minds of cant, in popularising more systematic thinking,
and in instituting sounder methods of observation. In some directions it
has deepened our sense of wonder. It has broadened our conception of the
universe, though I fear it has bee