ken, to
which all the highest poetry, which is also the deepest vision of the
human mind, bears witness. We may distinguish natural law and moral law
as sharply as we please, and it is as necessary sometimes as it is easy
to make these sharp and absolute distinctions; but there is a unity in
experience which makes itself felt deeper than all the antitheses of
logic, and in that unity nature and spirit are no more defined by
contrast with each other: on the contrary, they interpenetrate and
support each other: they are aspects of the same whole. When we read in
the prophet Amos, 'Lo, He that formeth the mountains, and createth the
wind, and declareth unto man what is his thought, that maketh the morning
darkness and treadeth upon the high places of the earth, the Lord, the
God of hosts, is His name,' this is the truth which is expressed. The
power which reveals itself in conscience--telling us all things that ever
we did, declaring unto us what is our thought--is the same which reveals
itself in nature, establishing the everlasting hills, creating the winds
which sweep over them, turning the shadow of death into the morning and
making the day dark with night, calling for the waters of the sea, and
pouring them out on the face of the earth. Conscience speaks in a still
small voice, but it is no impotent voice; it can summon the thunder to
give it resonance; the power which we sometimes speak of as if it were
purely spiritual is a power which clothes itself spontaneously and of
right in all the majesty and omnipotence of nature. It is the same
truth, again, in another aspect of it, which is expressed in Wordsworth's
sublime lines to Duty:

'Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong,
And the most ancient Heavens through Thee are fresh and strong.'

When the mind sees deepest, it is conscious that it needs more than
physical astronomy, more than spectrum analysis, to tell us everything
even about the stars. There is a moral constitution, it assures us, even
of the physical world; and though it is impossible for us to work it out
in detail, the assumption of it is the only assumption on which we can
understand the life of a being related as man is related both to the
natural and the spiritual. I do not pretend to prove that there is
articulate or conscious reflection on this in either the Old Testament or
the New; I take it for granted, as self-evident, that this sense of the
ultimate unity of the natural and the sp