does not impress one, because it is usually
enveloped in vapors. His day's work is done and he goes to his rest
veiled and subdued. He is new in the morning and old at his going down.
His gilding of the clouds at sunset is a token of a fair day on the
morrow; his touching them with fire in the morning is a token of wind or
storm. So much we make of these things, yet the sun knows them not. They
are local and only earth phenomena, yet the benefaction of the sun is as
if it shone for us alone. It is as great as if this were the case, and
yet the fraction of his light and heat that actually falls upon this
mote of a world adrift in sidereal space is so infinitely small that it
could hardly be computed by numbers. In our religion we appropriate God
to ourselves in the same way, but he knows us not in this private and
particular way, though we are all sharers in the Universal Beneficence.

II. NATURE'S METHODS

Nature baffles us by methods so unlike our own. Man improves upon his
inventions, he makes them better and better and discards the old. The
first airplane flew a few miles with its pilot; now the airplane flies
hundreds of miles and carries tons of weight. Nature has progressed
steadily from lower to higher forms, but she keeps all her lower forms;
her first rude sketches are as precious to her as the perfected models.
There is no vacancy at the bottom of her series, as there is in the case
of man. I am aware that we falsify her methods in contrasting them with
those of man in any respect. She has no method in our sense of the term.
She is action, and not thought, growth and not construction, is internal
and not external. To try to explain her in terms of our own methods is
like trying to describe the sphere in terms of angles and right lines.

The origin of species is as dark a problem as is the origin of the
secondary rocks. What factors or forces entered into the production of
the vast variety of stratified rocks, differing as widely from the
original Adam rock, the granite, as the races of men differ from one
another? There is just as much room for natural selection to work in one
case as in the other. We find where two kinds of rock touch, one
overlying the other, and absolute difference in texture and color, and
no union between them. How account for their juxtaposition? Rock begat
rock, undoubtedly, and the aerial forces played the chief part, but the
origin of each kind is hidden in the abyss of geologic ti