sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation
to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought
into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off
of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some
slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he
is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still.
But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to
Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to
Sheerness. The very speed and ecstasy of his life would have the
stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every
morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my
inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true
that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His
routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The
thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some
game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs
rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have
abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free,
therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do
it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly
dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony.
But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible
that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every
evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity
that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He
has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old,
and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a
mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical _encore_. Heaven may _encore_
the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth
a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin,
the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life
or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that
they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every
human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition
may go on