HEBREWS XI. 27 449
ootlet tucked away, the little leaflet folded up, each ready to open out if the grain should be let fall into the earth. And then there is the little bag of food attached which would then go to build up the new plant, at the beginning of its life. This is the bag of food which we take to make our flour and bread. But when you have seen these things you have not seen the chief thing. The chief thing is invisible. It is neither the leaf nor the root. It is not even the little mass of food. It is the life. Put that seed under the microscope, and you will not see the life. Test it chemically, and you cannot find it. Burn it, and it neither goes up in the smoke nor remains behind in the ash. The chief thing, the most important thing, is the life, and that is invisible.
^ Let me here quote a noble sentence, which has often given me much-needed help, and served to remind me that thought is after all as real a thing as matter, when I have been tempted to feel otherwise. It was written by a very wise and tender philosopher, William James, who was never betrayed by his own severe standard of truth and reality into despising the common dreams and aspirations of simpler men. He wrote : " I find it preposterous to suppose that if there be a feeling of unseen reality, shared by numbers of the best men in their best moments, responded to by other men in their deep moments, good to live by, strength-giving — I find it preposterous, I say, to suppose that the goodness of that feeling for living purposes should be held to carry no objective significance, and especially preposterous if it combines harmoniously with an otherwise grounded philosophy of objective truth." That is a very large and tolerant utterance, both in its suspension of impatient certainties and in its beautiful sympathy with all ardent visions that cannot clearly and convincingly find logical utterance.^
2. Science and the mastery of nature progress as men are able to see the invisible beneath the surface of the visible. The natural man, or savage, sees the obvious. The civilized or scientific man sees the invisible. Science does not really invent ; it discovers. There were just as many natural forces in the garden of Eden as there are in Kensington Gardens. But in Kensington Gardens there are motor-cars. When Columbus crossed the Atlantic he had about him all the forces necessary not only to discover America, but to send wireless telegrams.
^ A. C. Benson, Joyous Gard (1913), 160. I THESS.-HEB. — 29
450 SEEING THE INVISIBLE
But we had to wait four hundred years before men learnt to send the telegrams. Never let it be said, then, that religion is an unnatural and foolish affair because it attends to the invisible, and says that God and heaven are more important than Parlia- ments and this world. The religious man seeks the invisible ; so does the scientist. The prophets and apostles say that the invisible is the most important ; so does every manufacturer who under- stands his own business.
■[j In overcast days they could tell the snowy ice-fields far ahead that they could not see, by their reflection on the clouds, and in the same way they can see wliere open water is by its dark shadow on the heavens in contrast with the white reflection of the snows.i
^ Any religion would be a calamity which quenched this sense of the great human adventure in the unknown. There is no certainty which could be other than dull, hard, and materialistic, compared with the infinite hopes and possibilities of this spiritual quest. Only stupid people sneer at the man who says " Credo quia impossibile." To have faith in the impossible is precisely the function of religion.^
■[[ Clive was in a painfully anxious situation. He could place no confidence in the sincerity or in the courage of his confederate ; and whatever confidence he might place in his own military talents, and in the valour and discipline of his troops, it was no light thing to engage an army twenty times as numerous as his own. Before him lay a river over which it was easy to advance, but over which, if things went ill, not one of his little band would ever return. On this occasion, for the first and for the last time, his dauntless spirit, during a few hours, shrank from the fearful responsibility of making a decision. He called a council of war. The majority pronounced against fighting ; and Clive declared his concurrence with the majority. Long afterwards, he said that he had never called but one council of war, and that, if he had taken the advice of that council, the British would never have been masters of Bengal. But scarcely had the meeting broken up when he was himself again. He retired alone under the shade of some trees, and passed near an hour there in thought. He came back determined to put every thing to the hazard, and gave orders that all should be in readiness for passing the river on the morrow.^
^ Captain R. F. Scott, The Voyage of the Discovei'y, i. 121. ^ J. A. Spender, The Coimnents of Bagshot. * Macaulay, Essays ffisiorical cund Critical.