Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Charles Franks and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
[1846.]
FORCES, which are illimitable in their compass of effect, are often,for the same reason, obscure and untraceable in the steps of theirmovement. Growth, for instance, animal or vegetable, what eye canarrest its eternal increments? The hour-hand of a watch, who candetect the separate fluxions of its advance? Judging by the past,and the change which is registered between that and the present, weknow that it must be awake; judging by the immediate appearances,we should say that it was always asleep. Gravitation, again, thatworks without holiday for ever, and searches every corner of theuniverse, what intellect can follow it to its fountains? And yet,shyer than gravitation, less to be counted than the fluxions ofsun-dials, stealthier than the growth of a forest, are the footstepsof Christianity amongst the political workings of man. Nothing,that the heart of man values, is so secret; nothing is so potent.
It is because Christianity works so secretly, that it worksso potently; it is because Christianity burrows and hidesitself, that it towers above the clouds; and hence partly it isthat its working comes to be misapprehended, or even lost out ofsight. It is dark to eyes touched with the films of human frailty:but it is 'dark with excessive bright.'[Footnote: 'Dark withexcessive bright.' Paradise Lost. Book III.] Hence it hashappened sometimes that minds of the highest order have enteredinto enmity with the Christian faith, have arraigned it as a curseto man, and have fought against it even upon Christian impulses,(impulses of benignity that could not have had a birth except inChristianity.) All comes from the labyrinthine intricacy in whichthe social action of Christianity involves itself to theeye of a contemporary. Simplicity the most absolute is reconcilablewith intricacy the most elaborate. The weather—how simple wouldappear the laws of its oscillations, if we stood at their centre!and yet, because we do not, to this hour the weather is amystery. Human health—how transparent is its economy under ordinarycircumstances! abstinence and cleanliness, labor and rest, thesesimple laws, observed in just proportions, laws that may be engrossedupon a finger nail, are sufficient, on the whole, to maintain theequilibrium of pleasurable existence. Yet, if once that equilibriumis disturbed, where is the science oftentimes deep enough to rectifythe unfathomable watch-work? Even the simplicities of planetarymotions do not escape distortion: nor is it easy to be convincedthat the distortion is in the eye which beholds, not in the objectbeheld. Let a planet be wheeling with heavenly science, upon archesof divine geometry: suddenly, to us, it shall appear unaccountablyretrograde; flying when none pursues; an