taken into account, which, though it will appear more clearly afterward,
may be stated here at once. The position we have been led to take up is
not that the Spiritual Laws are analogous to the Natural Laws, but that
_they are the same Laws_. It is not a question of analogy but of
_Identity_. The Natural Laws are not the shadows or images of the
Spiritual in the same sense as autumn is emblematical of Decay, or the
falling leaf of Death. The Natural Laws, as the Law of Continuity might
well warn us, do not stop with the visible and then give place to a new
set of Laws bearing a strong similitude to them. The Laws of the
invisible are the same Laws, projections of the natural not
supernatural. Analogous Phenomena are not the fruit of parallel Laws,
but of the same Laws--Laws which at one end, as it were, may be dealing
with Matter, at the other end with Spirit. As there will be some
inconvenience, however, in dispensing with the word analogy, we shall
continue occasionally to employ it. Those who apprehend the real
relation will mentally substitute the larger term.

Let us now look for a moment at the present state of the question. Can
it be said that the Laws of the Spiritual World are in any sense
considered even to have analogies with the Natural World? Here and there
certainly one finds an attempt, and a successful attempt, to exhibit on
a rational basis one or two of the great Moral Principles of the
Spiritual World. But the Physical World has not been appealed to. Its
magnificent system of Laws remains outside, and its contribution
meanwhile is either silently ignored or purposely set aside. The
Physical, it is said, is too remote from the Spiritual. The Moral World
may afford a basis for religious truth, but even this is often the
baldest concession; while the appeal to the Physical universe is
everywhere dismissed as, on the face of it, irrelevant and unfruitful.
From the scientific side, again, nothing has been done to court a closer
fellowship. Science has taken theology at its own estimate. It is a
thing apart. The Spiritual World is not only a different world, but a
different kind of world, a world arranged on a totally different
principle, under a different governmental scheme.

The Reign of Law has gradually crept into every department of Nature,
transforming knowledge everywhere into Science. The process goes on, and
Nature slowly appears to us as one great unity, until the borders of the
Spiritual World