Life.

Thames Star, Volume XIII, Issue 4260, 26 August 1882, Page 1 (Supplement)

Life.

Abstract of the first of a series of lectures on the above subject being de lirered by the Rev. S. J. Neill :— We speak, to-night, of the profoundest subject known to philosophy or religion. Open the Bible, and you will find in eTery chapter and verse this subject presented under some of its manifold aspects. Study God's volume of nature, and there, too, you will find life in every page. There is no place where life is not present in some form; there never a time when life was not. If we examine the earth, aud read the marvellous history deep-printed on I the massive leaves, we shall find life to be i the ever-varying theme of the world's wondrous story. Chemistry takes us by the hand, and leads us through a realm of marvels stranger than ever Alchemist dreamed of, or thaumatu'rgists imagined; not a dead world, but a world as full of sympathies and antipathies as the world of men. The microscope reveals life in | tbe unseen world at our feet, teeming life I everywhere. Life comes to us in the ray of sunshine, in the moving air, with the perfume which ppeaks to us of flowers as ! memory does of distant friends. " There is no death," said Longfellow, an.l his words are true in a wider sense than that, perhaps, to which he applied them—there is no death. "Nothing will die," says Tennyson. Whither, O Life 1 shall we flee from thy spirit ? Thou art in the smallest conceirable portion of matter, so that it lives evermore, and cannot be annihilated ; thou art in what we call magnetism or electricity, so that though the force may change its position or mode of manifestation, it is not lost; thou art in all the higher forms of life, so that they change but do not die ; thou art most glorious in the spirit of man which is able to contemplate all other forms of life. Nowhere does the contemplation of life become so widened as when we, like the Psalmist,

lift our eyes to the heavens, framed for us too, as well as for the sweet singer of Judah, in all their shining constellation, by the finger of God. We gaze into the starry depths, and beyond these the telescope reveals starry depths profounder still, system on system on system, vast, glorious, dazzling—but life ia everywhere. In the language of Job, we " stand still and consider the wonderful works of God," and feel the truth of the words uttered by one of our Christian philosophers, "An undevout astronomer is mad."

First consider that there is neither up nor down ia space ; we use the words on the earth, but they have no meaning outside of the earth. Therefore those who speak of God being erect, and making man in his own image because erect, cannot be truly said to have begun to think. What are the steps of that mental stairway by which we may climb to view the universe? First, we plant our foot on the vast globe, nearly 8000 miles ia diameter, on which we live. Then we take our second step!from the sun, so far distant that light, which travels 195,000 miles in a second, takes eight minutes in coming from the sun to the earth. What a vast globe the sun is; so vast that if it were a hollow globe, our world might be placed in the centre with the moon revolving round the earth, and yet there would be room for a second moon twice the distance of the present one from the earth before we should reach the rim of the sun. We cannot well imagine such a vast body, yet such is the magnitude of the sun. Our next step will be the solar system itself, the most distant planet of which, now known to us, is more than 30 times the distance from the sun that we are. [ But our next step is a vaster one still, for I I we find that the solar system is removed by immense distances from the nearest stars ; just as a little boat in the midst of the great Pacific Ocean, far distant from any land, so our sun and its attendant planets, are but a speck in the vast sedereal ocean. Our sun itself that seems to be far distant from the milky way appears, says Prof. Ball, to be itself one of the vast host of stars that form that luminous band in the heavens. The star known as 1830 Groombridge is one of those distant stars which we observe with a large proper motion. But this star is not less than 200 billions of miles distant from us, and though it is supposed to move at 200 miles a second, it would be 250 years moving over a portion of the heavens equal to what our moon seems to the naked eye. And this vast sun is probably moving round some still vaster sun in deeps of space, across which even imagination drops her weary wing. The whole sidereal heavens known to us may be pictured as spread out like the milky way, and then it is calculated that a ray of light would be 30,000 years travelling from the one side to the other of this vast expanse, we grow giddy at the thought, and the brain reels. Yet what is all this that we know but a mere speck in the vast infinite ? " What are we after all," asks an astrsnomer, "but in the centre of a sphere whose circumference is 35,000 times as far from us as Sirius, and beyond whose circuit boundless infinity stretches unfathomed as ever?" The whole firmamental creation may be only a corner of some mightier scheme— a mere nebula itself. Coleridge says, "It is not impossible that to an infinitely superior Being the whole universe may be as one plain—the distance between planet and planet being only as the pores in a grain of sand, and the spaces between system and system no greater than the intervals between one grain of sand and the grain adjacent." We may even imagine that as there are beings so much below us that to them a drop of water would seem an ocean, and a leaf a globe, so there may be beings less far than the Infinite God, beings who could traverse space. Strictly speaking, every atom of the constituent matter of the globe is alive. Inanimate matter, dead matter, often vaguely spoken of, matter waiting for the breath of Deity to give it life, does not exist. Matter is not a hearth existing anteriorly to life, and independently of life, and upon which the flame of life is some' times kindled. In its very simplest and crudest forms it is a sign that the flame is already burning. We use the term life when we speak of animals eating, drink* ing, moving; we also say the tree lives, though it does not possess some of the characteristics of life which the animal does. The stomach of the animal corresponds in some respects to and the roots of the tree, and the leaves may perform the functions of lungs, but the tree cannot move about, for its assimilating organs are fixed in the ground, whereas the animal can move, for an animal is like a tree whose roots are inside itself. And even here we may see, I may even say here we may feel, that we are soul or spirit, for whereas the body is sustained by material things, and has but a very limited range of movement, the spirit does not live upon such food, but upon the bread of love, and the water of truth, and its range of action is very wide. Light, we are told, though moving at such a vast speed, would require 30,000 years to move across the sidereal heavens, but in less than a second my thought can traverse heavens of heavens, can soar in some sense to God, and can in some degree know Him. Even now we feel that as to our spiritual nature vre have no relation to time or space, such as our bodies have. Memory and hope are the budding forth of infinite nature, of God's nature in us, for as to God there is neither past or future, so by i memory and hope the past and the future both live to us now.

But we must not (just now) speak of the main characteristics of spiritual life— we must first speak of life in general. There is an underlying something mnni fested in animals—manifested in the vegetable world—manifested in the mineral world which we name Life. We even speak of the world having a life—the anima mundi,—&n& this may teach more truth than we imagine. Why should not each thing in its kind have its own inner principle of life. Electricity, or magnet* ism, may be the anima mnndi. This may take the form of a globe in the centre of the earth. You can see something of this if you take a straight magnet and scatter filings of iron over it, for Ihe filings will group themselves at each end of the magnet, leaving the centre bare; and, as Faraday conjectured, there may be something, yet unknown to science, of which electricity, heat, and magnetism are only some of it? qualities or manifestations. Life, then, we should say, is no part of God's works, no created and finite substance ; neither is it in any case detached from God, or independent of Him Genuine philosophy knows of no life in the Universe but what is momentarily sustained by connection with its source, with Him who "alone hath life in Himself; " Him in whom we live and move and have our being. In one sense, then,

it may be said truly nothing lives, that is to say, has an independent existence. So Tennyson writes, not only that death is not in the absolute sense, he also writes that we are in ceaseleas change, that all things will die. It is this seeming death which the Bible, true to the poetry of nature, so frequently speaks about, which furnishes the nonimmortality folks with so many texts that appear to them to teach that man has no pre-eminence over a beast. Just the very same truth of which we speak when we say that there is no independent life out* side of God. But then it is just equally time that there is individual life in Him, and that of every man, every animal, every world it is true, because God lives they also live. (Jncreate and infinite, it must be \ evident that of the precise, or inmost | nature of this grand all sustaining principle which we name life, man must be content to remain for ever uninformed. We may and should strive to know more and more of the ways of its appearance, and the modes of its working, but of the thing in itself it seems impossible that created beings should know anything. We talk of " vital force," but nowhere do we find the power itself, but only the continent, or receptacle of the power. No force that we know is initial, there is always an anterior force, so that in philosophy as in trouble, or at death, willing or unwilling we must go to God at last.

Logically we are carried back to the absolute, the Infinite. With, the waves of human thought as with the waves of the ocean, there is a limit, and we cannot pass into the Infinite, who by searching can find out God—the Almighty—to perfection P

But with that thought there comes this other thought like an ebbing ware. God is the sole Being, how came existence forth from the Dirine Esse ? There is in the order of the thought this sequence, but again we cannot conceire that in the Infinite past and absolute one who lives in loring and creating, was abiding in perfect blankness and nothingness. To suppose the Divine Being as starting into creative activity at any given time would, it seems to me, be blasphemy; it would be un deifying him. As he ever will exist in loving, go we are bound to conclude that he ever did exist in loving, in creating. Haying then tried to lift our eyes to that light which is the life of men and all things, but which in itself no created eye has seen nor can behold, we may be hopeful as we should be humble, feeling that we cannot step beyond the limits of the power and watchful care of Him with whom we have to do. Who is as really cognisant of the falling tear as of the dazzling splendor of systems of suns careful of the mote that dances in the sttmbeam, careful of all things, for in Him and by Him are all things, from whom we have life and breath and all things.