Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/270

 God. The more confidently he rests in the certain working of moral as well as of physical laws, the more does he manifest that which, in our minds, is equivalent to trust in the Lord. Under any form of religion, and under no form of professed religion, then, the exhortation of the text, 'Trust in the Lord and do good,' may be carried out, and its creed asserted." In a word, Mr. Picton's charity induces him to ascribe religion to the professedly irreligious. He compels them to come in.

Discussing the problem of the immortality of the soul, he says, "We should not repine if the larger life beyond death remains a hope too grand for any earthly form. I live,—this I know; and all around me is a Power, immeasurable, inscrutable, of which I can only think that it lives more grandly and mightily than I, folding me in its embrace, and making a reverent feeling of my own nothingness the supreme bliss. Whence I came I know not; whither I go I cannot tell: but every moment of true communion with the Infinite opens out eternity. Whatever tenfold complicated change has happened or may come, however strangely the bounds which now limit my personal life may be broken through, however unimaginably my consciousness of God may be enlarged, it is impossible that the more real can be merged in the less real; and, while material phenomena are but phantoms, God himself only is more real than I."

The above quotations give but a faint impression of this remarkable work, "The Mystery of Matter," which, along with an earlier volume, "New Theories and the Old Faith," goes further towards revivifying true religion, by rendering it credible, than all the