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Abram found himself, when he had migrated into Canaan, in no barbarous country, but plunged at once into the midst of an organised and compact civilisation, that walled its cities, and had the comforts and conveniences and regularities of a settled order; and in the midst of it all, what did he do? He elected to live in a tent.
If an American is an infidel, he knows it; but an Englishman is often so without suspecting it, being kept from that knowledge by this formality of family prayer, and his other regularities of external worship. . . . .
He wore red and yellow livery and shining buttons, and we thought he was likely the official butler or door boy. He seemed to have eaten too much, as a rule, and looked sleepy and in a bad temper. "Boy" says Flannagan, striding up to him, "where's the misbegotten and corrupt official of Disthressionary Regularities? Do we wait here till the explosion of doom? Spheak, ye lump of butther!" he says.
Therefore he is not satisfied with complex regularities, but analyzes them until he can bring them down to simple physical connections, and these physical connections finally to mechanical processes, which realize for us logical necessities. That matter lasts and cannot disappear is such a presupposition, which comes to us with the necessity of logical thinking.
This standard is supplied by those objective, that is to say, commonly experienced regularities of succession which constitute the natural and artificial divisions of the years, seasons, months, weeks, etc. The habit of recurring to these fixed divisional points of the past renders a return of imagination to any one of them more and more easy.
Unfortunately his mind conceived for most of what he saw around him a hostility which drove him to express it in satirical phrase. A church-warden, whose name of Joseph Thomas would not have survived but for Chatterton's verses, was made immortal for the changes made by him while intent upon destroying ancient monuments, interfering with his own ideas of churchyard regularities.
And similarly went it with my poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings, and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's 'Home, an Epic. So, as in the case of 'Nero, and haply of other subjects, had it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another.
The regularities of nature, it is thought, leave no room for miracle. There is no divine Will that can work down upon nature in unique acts, such as incarnation and resurrection. A pantheistic Force is the only ruler, and whatever is, is right. Goethe led the way in this pagan philosophy, and German universities have been full of it ever since.
If an American is an infidel, he knows it; but an Englishman is often so without suspecting it, being kept from that knowledge by this formality of family prayer, and his other regularities of external worship. . . .
Begin with this knowledge, and to the obedient spirit the physical world seems ablaze with evidences of wisdom and love; the regularities of nature are recognized as God's methods of ordinary operation; evolution is only his usual plan of growth and progress; in other words, God's transcendence is manifest as well as his immanence, his personality as well as his revelation in the forces of the universe.
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