Chapter 15 - Page 2

out, have been made in the same way as our earth has been made, and that these same laws must have been going on, making worlds after worlds, for hundreds of thousands of years, and ages beyond counting, and will, in all probability, go on for countless ages more. Then common sense will tell us, the same God has made all worlds, past, present, and to come. There is but one God, the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever.

So we should learn something of how all things were made; and then would come a second question, why all things were made? Why did God make the worlds?

Let us begin with a very simple example. Simple things will often teach us most. You see a flower growing, not in a garden, but wild in a field or wood. You admire its beautiful colours, or if it is fragrant, its sweet scent. Now, why was that flower put there? You may answer, "to please me." My dear friends, I should be the last person to deny that. I can never see a child picking a nosegay, much less a little London child, born and bred and shut up among bricks and mortar, when it gets for the first time into a green field, and throws itself instinctively upon the buttercups and daisies, as if they were precious jewels and gold;--I never can see that sight, I say, without feeling that there are such things as final causes--I mean that the great Father in heaven put those flowers into that field on purpose to give pleasure to His human children. But then comes the question, Of all the flowers in a single field, is one in ten thousand ever looked at by child or by men? And yet they are just as beautiful as the rest; and God has, so to speak, taken just as much pains with the many beautiful things which men will never see, as with the few, very few, which men may see. And when one thinks further about this--when one thinks of the vast forests in other lands which the foot of man has seldom or never trod, and which, when they are entered, are found to be full of trees, flowers, birds, butterflies, so beautiful and glorious, that anything which we see in these islands is poor and plain in comparison with them; and when we remember that these beautiful creatures have been going on generation after generation, age after age, unseen and unenjoyed by any human eyes, one must ask, Why has God been creating all that beauty? simply to let it all, as it were, run to waste, till after thousands of years one traveller comes, and has a hasty glimpse of it? Impossible. Or again--and this is an example still more strange, and yet it is true. We used to think till within a very few years past, that at the bottom of the deep sea there were no living things--that miles below the surface of the ocean, in total darkness, and under such a weight of water as would crush us to a jelly, there could be nothing, except stones, and sand, and mud. But now it is found out that the bottom of the deepest seas, and the utter darkness into which no ray of light can ever pierce, are