Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Sermons Prayers volume 2.djvu/231

Rh mechanic is not in his work; he wakes it and then with- draws. God is in His work,—

All nature works from within; the force that animates it is in every part. It was objected to Sir Isaac Newton's philosophy, that it makes the world all mechanism, which goes without external help, and so is a universe without a God; men thinking that He could not work at all in the world-machine, unless they saw the Great Hand on the crank now and then, or felt the jar of miraculous interposition when some comet swept along the sky. The objection was not just, for the manifold action of the universe is only the Infinite God's mode of operation. Newton merely showed the mode of operation,—that it was constant and wonderful, not changing and miraculous; and so described a higher mode of operation than those men could fathom, or even reverence.

These things being so, all material things that are must needs be in communion with God; their creation was their first passive act of communion; their existence, a continual act of communion. As God is infinite, nothing can be without Him, nothing without communion with Him. The stone I sit on is in communion with God ; the pencil I write with; the gray field-fly reposing in the sun- shine at my foot. Let God withdraw from the space occupied by the stone, the pencil, and fly, they cease to be. Let Him withdraw any quality of his nature therefrom, and they must cease to be. All must partake of Him, immanent in each and yet transcending all.

In this communion these and all things receive after their kind, according to their degree of being and the mode thereof. The mineral, the vegetable, and the animal represent three modes of being, three degrees of existence ; and hence so many modes and degrees of dependence on God and of communion with Him. They are, they grow, they move and live, in Him, and by means of Him, and only so. But none of these are conscious of this communion. In that threefold form of being there is no consciousness of God ; they know nothing of their dependence and their communion. The water-fowl, in the long