Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/230

214 Follow the eye of the great space-penetrating telescope at Cambridge into the vast halls of creation, to the furthest nebulous spot seen in Orion's belt,—a spot whose bigness no natural mind can adequately conceive,—and God is there. Follow the eye of the great sharply denning microscope at Berlin into some corner of creation, to that little dot, one of many millions that people an inch of stone, once animate with swarming life, a spot too small for mortal mind adequately to conceive,—and God is there.

Get you a metaphysic microscope of time to divide a second into its billionth part; God is in that. Get you a metaphysic telescope of time, to go back in millenniums as the glass in miles, and multiply the duration of a solar system by itself to get an immensity of time,—still God is there, in each elapsing second of that millennial stream of centuries; His Here conterminous with the all of space, His Now coeval with the all of time.

Through all this space, in all this time, His Being extends, "spreads undivided, operates unspent;" God in all His infinity, — perfectly powerful, perfectly wise, perfectly just, perfectly loving and holy. His being is an infinite activity, a creating, and so a giving of Himself to the world. The world's being is a becoming, a being created and continued. This is so in the nebula of Orion's belt, and in the seed-sporule of the smallest moss. It is so now, and was the same millions of millenniums ago.

All this is philosophy, the unavoidable conclusion of the human mind. It is not the opinion of Coleridge and Kant, but their science; not what they guess, but what they know.

In virtue of this immanence of God in matter, we say the world is a revelation of God ; its existence a show of His. Some good books picture to us the shows of things, and report in print the whisper of God which men have heard in the material world. They say that God is a good optician,—for the eye is a telescope and a miscroscope, the two in one; that He is a good chemist also, ordering all things "by measure and number and weight ; M that He is a good mechanic,—for the machinery of the world, old as it is, is yet "constructed after the most approved principles of modern science." All that is true, but the finite