ce more
that the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto this and to that?

PART II.

The Law of Continuity having been referred to already as a prominent
factor in this inquiry, it may not be out of place to sustain the plea
for Natural Law in the Spiritual Sphere by a brief statement and
application of this great principle. The Law of Continuity furnishes an
_a priori_ argument for the position we are attempting to establish of
the most convincing kind--of such a kind, indeed, as to seem to our mind
final. Briefly indicated, the ground taken up is this, that if Nature be
a harmony, Man in all his relations--physical, mental, moral, and
spiritual--falls to be included within its circle. It is altogether
unlikely that man spiritual should be violently separated in all the
conditions of growth, development, and life, from man physical. It is
indeed difficult to conceive that one set of principles should guide the
natural life, and these at a certain period--the very point where they
are needed--suddenly give place to another set of principles altogether
new and unrelated. Nature has never taught us to expect such a
catastrophe. She has nowhere prepared us for it. And Man cannot in the
nature of things, in the nature of thought, in the nature of language,
be separated into two such incoherent halves.

The spiritual man, it is true, is to be studied in a different
department of science from the natural man. But the harmony established
by science is not a harmony within specific departments. It is the
universe that is the harmony, the universe of which these are but parts.
And the harmonies of the parts depend for all their weight and interest
on the harmony of the whole. While, therefore, there are many
harmonies, there is but one harmony. The breaking up of the phenomena of
the universe into carefully guarded groups, and the allocation of
certain prominent Laws to each, it must never be forgotten, and however
much Nature lends herself to it, are artificial. We find an evolution in
Botany, another in Geology, and another in Astronomy, and the effect is
to lead one insensibly to look upon these as three distinct evolutions.
But these sciences, of course, are mere departments created by ourselves
to facilitate knowledge--reductions of Nature to the scale of our own
intelligence. And we must beware of breaking up Nature except for this
purpose. Science has so dissected everything, that it becomes a mental
difficulty to put the pu