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in the things that right on an imperfect basis brings, the more holy, necessary, and utterly beyond profanation he feels them, so much the more potent on his soul is the demand God makes for him to let them go: the greater and deeper the change that must accompany the loosing of his grasp upon them.

And what the power is by which this change is to be wrought we need not ask, for it is shown us. How sacred must the Jews have thought resting on the Sabbath day, when they would let men suffer, die perchance, rather than it be broken? But there was one thing more sacred. The power that God sends against the rights that a false condition of the soul imposes, is the needs of our fellow-men. By these He teaches us what the service is that He demands; how deep it goes into the desires; exacting from the soul nothing less than such a turning of its thought to others that its service has no need of rigid forms in which to clothe itself, but is free to follow wheresoever, by human want, His will is revealed. For, in the moral life, the falsity in the starting-point is that others are not present from the first in our regard, so that our very goodness, our very worship, centre about ourselves. This makes our righteousness self-righteousness, our virtue a selfvirtue; binds us to deeds for goodness' sake that are not one with service to our fellows.

It were an infinite joy if this law were true of our life. For there are two characters that belong of necessity to a correction of the starting-point. One is, that as soon as it is understood, the task is already done. The difficulty lies not in making the correction, but in the discovery that it is needed; the task and labour are in working out the false rights; the substitution for them of the more right beginning is, not labour, but deliverance. By its very nature, the truer right, the corrected premiss, is always the easier thing; it is at once more and easier, a better achievement and less toil. It is an entering into rest; the want that imposed the toil having been supplied. Other men labour, and those to whose eyes it is given to see that what they need is a truer beginning, reap the fruits.

And there is an infinite joy again in this, that though the working out of the correction of a premiss is a process of darkness, a very mystery of evil, compelling strife, and making peace impossible in spite of all desire; yet when once its meaning is understood all is changed a new light breaks over the past, a new spirit descends into the present. The strife ceases; a meaning and end become visible in every part; an assured victory is made manifest in each defeat.

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN

THE ORGANIC AND INORGANIC WORLDS.

51

ON THE RELATION BETWEEN THE ORGANIC AND INORGANIC WORLDS.

IN the first paper it has been rather assumed than argued, that the marked differences we perceive between the organic and inorganic worlds arise not from unlikeness in the things themselves, but from the different mode in which they are presented to us. It was with this view that the history of man's thought in respect to motion was adduced.

Motion is one thing in Nature; but when the Greek thought of it, he divided it into two kinds, and contrasted them sharply; when we think of it, we think of it as one; though to us, as much as to him, there are only unending motions in the heavens, only ending motions on the earth. Now the interest of this change of thought lies in this: that we see in it, first, the tacit, unsuspecting assumption of an absolute difference between two parts of Nature, as if it were obvious beyond question; and secondly, the awakening of the mind to perceive that the difference was

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