the fact that space and time are mere accidents as viewed in relation to the QUI EST. They are, so to speak, divinely-constituted conventionalities, through which the Divinity touches upon our human condition, but which in no way affect the Divine Essence as it is in Itself. On the contrary, in the broken-up developments and evolutions which you believe you trace, and which you want to make into a blind law which shall supersede a Divine Creator, I see only the pulsations of time breaking up to me the perpetually instantaneous and eternal act of God, just as I see the pulsations of light in the one unbroken ray. The act of God passes through the medium of time before it reaches our ken; and the ray of light passes through the medium of air before it strikes our senses; but both are continuous and instantaneous. If we have in any degree succeeded in establishing this to our satisfaction, it will become easier for us to estimate the acts of God as they come to us through the pulsations of time; because we shall be able to bear in mind that they must be in a measure interpreted to us by the time through the medium of which they reach us. They were modified by the time in which they were revealed, much as the ray is modified by the substance through which it forces its way to us. Now we arrive at the causes of the different impressions we receive of the nature and characteristics of the Divine Being. They are a consequence of the different epochs in which we contemplate Him. They are the pulsations appropriate to that epoch. Other pulsations belong to our portion of. time, and to our consequent view of the Divine Being; and so on and on, till time shall be swallowed up in Eternity, and the Beatific Vision burst upon us. CHAPTER II. THE PULSATIONS OF TIME. THE deduction we arrive at from the argument which we have laid down is that the history of the world is a consistent one, and not a series of loose incidents strung together. It is as much this morally, it is as truly the evolution and unwinding of a high moral law and of a great spiritual truth, as the life of the plant from the seed to the ripe fruit is the development of a natural growth. This last is governed by laws with which we are only partially acquainted; whereas the moral law and the spiritual truth are revealed to us by the Divine scheme of creation and redemption. There is nothing existing, either in the natural or in the spiritual law, and especially in this last, which is not more or less, in one way or in another, by assertion or by negation, a revelation of the Divine Being. He reveals Himself directly by His volitions and indirectly by His permissions. And we can only be one with Him when we have learnt to accept both and submit to both; not in the spirit of quietism or fatalism, but as actively entering into His intentions, receiving what He wills, and bearing what He permits. There is no harmony possible between the soul and God until we have arrived at this; and the history of the world is the history of man's acquiescence in or resistance to the supreme will of God. The first disruption of the will of man from the will of God, in the fall of man, wove a dark woof into the web of time; and every act of ours which is not according to the will of God weaves the same into our own lives, because it is a rupture of the law of harmony which God has constituted between Himself as Creator and us as creatures. Were that harmony unbroken man would rest in God as in his centre; for being finite he has no sufficiency in himself, but for ever seeks some good extrinsic to himself. The same applies to all creation, whose ultimate end and highest good must always be some object beyond and above itself; and that object is none other than God, "quod ignorantes colitis,"*—the finite striving after the Infinite. Thus the whole Divine government of the world is *Acts xvii. 23. way" The promise a gradual unfolding of the Divine Will, according as we are able to receive it. And the degree of receptivity in mankind, at various periods of the world's history, and in different localities, accounts for the variety in the Divine dispensations, and for the imperfection of some as compared with others. The "yet more excellent "* could not be received by all at all times. was given to Abraham. But four hundred and thirty years elapsed before its fulfilment, for the express purpose of being occupied and spent in the economy of the law as a less perfect dispensation, and which was given because of transgressions" propter transgressiones posita est "† -thus showing the adaptive government of God: the gradual building up of the city of the Lord, whose stones are the living souls of men, which are hewed and made ready," but so that there shall be "neither hammer, nor axe, nor tool of iron heard" while it is building. For God does not force His creature. He pours not new wine into old bottles," but waits in patience for their growth, and for the leavening of the great mass. when God walked with man 66 * I Corinthians xii. 31. slow and gradual A time had been "at the afternoon + Galatians iii. 19. |