Page:The kernel and the husk (Abbott, 1886).djvu/121

Letter 10] them we need not at this time concern ourselves, as there are probably none who now entertain that belief. Those then who believe in a God, Maker of heaven and earth, will not deny that God partially reveals Himself to men by the things He has made. Now by which of all His creatures does God reveal Himself most clearly? You will say perhaps—indeed I have heard you say it—"By the stars and their movements." I do not believe it. I say, "By the life of the human family first and by the stars of heaven, second." But I will assume that your answer is correct, and that God reveals Himself mainly by the movements of the stars of heaven; and I will try to shew you that in this revelation God leads men to truth through illusion. Then I think it must seem reasonable to you that, if God does not dispense with illusion in that intellectual revelation of Himself which most closely approaches to a direct spiritual revelation, illusion may also have been intended or permitted by Him to play an ordained part in spiritual revelation itself.

Where, then, I ask, in all the teaching of Nature's school, has there been more of illusion than in her lessons of astronomy? When I was a boy, I remember, in the midst of a hateful sum of long division that would not come out right, devoting my attention to the sun moving through the branches of certain trees, and announcing to my tutor that "The sun moves." "No, you are mistaken." "But I cannot be mistaken, for I saw it." I rivalled—I exceeded—the obstinacy of Galileo; I was ready to be punished rather than consent to say what seemed to me a manifest falsehood, that the sun did not move. Surely this boyish experience represents the experience of mankind, except that the tutor who has corrected their astronomical illusions, has been their own long, very long experience. Does it not seem sometimes as if God Himself had said, when He made the heavens to declare