asur'd motion draw
After the heavenly tune....

If the sceptical mind object to the word _law_ as begging the
question and postulating a governing intelligence with a
governing will--if it tell me that when revolted Lucifer uprose
in starlight--

and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look'd, and sank.
Around the ancient track march'd, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law--

he was merely witnessing a series of predictable or invariable
recurrences, I answer that he may be right, it suffices for my
argument that they _are_ recurrent, are invariable, can be
predicted. Anyhow the Universe is not Chaos (if it were, by the
way, we should be unable to reason about it at all). It stands
and is renewed upon a harmony: and what Plato called 'Necessity'
is the Duty--compulsory or free as you or I can conceive it--the
Duty of all created things to obey that harmony, the Duty of
which Wordsworth tells in his noble Ode.

Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong:
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and
strong.

III

Now the other and second great belief is, that the Universe, the
macrocosm, cannot be apprehended at all except as its rays
converge upon the eye, brain, soul of Man, the microcosm: on you,
on me, on the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense
cosmic circle focuses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass--and
he is not shrivelled up! Other creatures, he notes, share in his
sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not in his percipience
--or not in any degree worth measuring. So far as he can discover,
he is not only a bewildered actor in the great pageant but 'the
ring enclosing all,' the sole intelligent spectator. Wonder of
wonders, it is all meant for _him_!

I doubt if, among men of our nation, this truth was ever more
clearly grasped than by the Cambridge Platonists who taught your
forerunners of the 17th century. But I will quote you here two
short passages from the work of a sort of poor relation of
theirs, a humble Welsh parson of that time, Thomas Traherne--
unknown until the day before yesterday--from whom I gave you one
sentence in my first lecture. He is speaking of the fields and
streets that were the scene of his childhood:

Those pure and virgin apprehensions I had from the
womb, and that divine light wherewith I was born are the
best unto this day, wherein I can see the Universe.... The
corn was orient and immortal wh