animated by one
Spirit.

We call the octogenarian one person with the embryo of a few days old
from which he has developed. An oak or yew tree may be two thousand
years old, but we call it one plant with the seed from which it has
grown. Millions of individual buds have come and gone, to the yearly
wasting and repairing of its substance; but the tree still lives and
thrives, and the dead leaves have life therein. So the Tree of Life
still lives and thrives as a single person, no matter how many new
features it has acquired during its development, nor, again, how many
of its individual leaves fall yellow to the ground daily. The spirit or
soul of this person is the Spirit of God, and its body-for we know of no
soul or spirit without a body, nor of any living body without a spirit
or soul, and if there is a God at all there must be a body of God-is
the many-membered outgrowth of protoplasm, the ensemble of animal and
vegetable life.

To repeat. The Theologian of to-day tells us that there is a God, but is
horrified at the idea of that God having a body. We say that we believe
in God, but that our minds refuse to realise [sic] an intelligent Being
who has no bodily person. "Where then," says the Theologian, "is the
body of your God?" We have answered, "In the living forms upon the
earth, which, though they look many, are, when we regard them by the
light of their history and of true analogies, one person only." The
spiritual connection between them is a more real bond of union than the
visible discontinuity of material parts is ground for separating them in
our thoughts.

Let the reader look at a case of moths in the shop-window of a
naturalist, and note the unspeakable delicacy, beauty, and yet
serviceableness of their wings; or let him look at a case of
humming-birds, and remember how infinitely small a part of Nature is
the whole group of the animals he may be considering, and how infinitely
small a part of that group is the case that he is looking at. Let him
bear in mind that he is looking on the dead husks only of what was
inconceivably more marvellous [sic] when the moths or humming-birds were
alive. Let him think of the vastness of the earth, and of the activity
by day and night through countless ages of such countless forms of
animal and vegetable life as that no human mind can form the faintest
approach to anything that can be called a conception of their multitude,
and let him remember that all these forms h