Here at the roaring loom of time I ply
And weave for God the garment thou seest Him by;
and when Tennyson asks —
The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and the plains — Are not these, 0 soul, the Vision of Him who reigns ?
they are only putting into poetic form that which is a distinct truth of revelation. And if the material universe is thus a manifestation of God, science has made it abundantly evident that the fire which burns but does not consume, is the aptest possible symbol by which its nature, and the nature of the God who made it, can be set forth to man.^
^) Amid the play of the forces that are in the world. — Almost the most important truth which science has demonstrated is that which is known as the Conservation of Energy; it establishes the fact that force, like matter, is indestructible, and that it is a fixed quantity in the universe. To the uninstructed mind it seems that energy is always being not only dissipated but destroyed; but this is just as impossible as that matter should be destroyed. When the blacksmith strikes his anvil till his arm grows weary, the force expended is not lost ; it has simply changed its form from animal energy to heat, as is proved by the anvil growing hot. The energy residing in the steam which drives our locomotives and our machinery existed in the shape
« A. M. Mackay.
EXODUS III. i 271
of heat in the glowing fires which created the eteam ; and before that it lay for centuries latent or hidden in the coal, which was dug out of the bowels of the earth ; and earlier still, long, long ages ago, it manifested itself in vegetable energy, for what is now coal was once living forest ; and earlier still it was manifested in the heat of the sun, which was taken up into the growing trees : so that in one sense the light and heat which our fires give forth are just the sunbeams which have been for ages imprisoned and hoarded up for the use of man. And while we can thus trace backward the force which drives the engine, we can follow it after it has done its work. It is neither lost nor destroyed. It is dissipated into the atmosphere in the form of heat, and perhaps will next manifest itself in an electrical form, in the tempest which rends the air and wraps the heavens in flame. All this is not mere conjecture. Just as it can be shown by delicate experiment that the candle which has burnt to its socket is still in existence in its every atom, so it is shown by the dynamometer that force never is and never can be lost. There is always the appearance of the annihilation of energy; there is never the reality. Force also resembles the bush which Moses saw; it is ever burning, yet it is never consumed. And when we remember that all energy, as all matter, comes from God and is a manifestation of God, we perceive how truly the vision which Moses saw was a symbol of the nature and the mode of operation of the Great " I AM " who creates and sustains all things.
^ There is unity amid all diversity, persistence amid all the ebb and flow of the visible universe. Let us once truly grasp this truth, and we shall no longer be moved to melancholy by the reflection that " change and decay in all around we see." We shall be able believingly to say to God —
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be,
And Thou wert left alone, v.
Every existence would exist in Thee:
There is not room for Death,
Nor atom his might could render void;
Thou, Thou art Being and Breath,
And what Thou art may never be destroyed.
272 THE BURNING BUSH
(3) In the sphere of life. — Life, we know, comes from God. His is the Spirit which animates all living things; in Him we live and move and have our being. In fact, He is the Life: it is only when He letteth His breath go forth that the face of the earth is renewed, and men and the lower creatures are created. And of life we may make exactly the same statement as we have made of matter and of force : it is indestructible. It may change its form and its mode of manifestation : but it cannot be annihilated or destroyed. Life in the universe — ^like matter and like force — seems to the uninstructed mind to burn to the socket and to go out ; there seems to be such a thing as death : but in sober reality we may well accept the poet's dictum that " There is no death ; what seems so is transition." Nature herself gives us a hint of this. In autumn there seems to be a final decay and dissolution, but it is only life disguising herself and going into hiding ; spring shows that there has been no real diminution of the vital forces in our world, but probably rather an increase.
1 Nature gives us no such unassailable proof of the indestructi- bility of life as she does of the indestructibility of force and of matter. Eather, at first glance, she would seem to show us that the individual life can be destroyed, for we cannot trace it as we can the individual atom of matter and of force ; its place in this world knows it no more. But this only points us to the fact that there is an invisible, a spirit world, which we cannot reach by our material senses. For the analogy of Nature will not let us for one moment suppose that life can really be annihilated. If science teaches one thing more clearly than another it is this, that there is Unity in Nature. If matter cannot be destroyed, if force cannot be destroyed, we may feel certain that neither can life. If it be objected that we cannot see what has become of the soul after death, it is a sufficient reply to say that neither could men in Moses' time have known what became of material substances when they were burned with fire and disappeared from all human cognizance.