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To this, fallen and arraigned man, using his best jargon, responds that “the answer is in the negative. I never pretended to do these things, only to guess, in my small way, how they are done.”

Nor is there any real irreverence in answering thus: for of course it is not the Almighty who puts the questions, but someone audaciously personating Him. And some of us find this pretension irritating; as Douglas Jerrold meeting a pompous stranger on the pavement was moved to accost him with, “I beg your pardon, Sir, but would you mind informing me–Are you anybody in particular?”

Again, in the sixth chapter of the Second Book of Esdras, someone usurping the voice of the Almighty and using (be it said to his credit) excellent prose, declares:

“In the beginning, when the earth was made, before the waters of the world stood, or ever the wind blew,

Before it thundered or lightened, or ever the foundations of paradise were laid,

Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever the moveable powers were established; before the innumerable multitude of angels were gathered together,

Or ever the heights of the air were lifted up, before the measures of the firmament were named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were hot.

Then did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me alone, and through none other: by Me also they shall be ended, and by none other.”

It is all very beautiful: but (for aught that appears) no one was denying it. It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the “affable Archangel” in the later books of Paradise Lost that argument by its nature admits of being answered: and the fatal fallacy of putting human speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that it invites retort.

A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades: but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal harmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render it a more perfect obedience. “Let me know,” he craves, “that I may accept my fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule of Necessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead,

Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The claim (as Man must think) is a just one–for why was he given intelligence if not to use it? And even though disallowed as presumptuous, it is an instinctive one. Man is, after all, a part of the Universe, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus: and moreover he feels in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest. His heart beats to a rhythm: his blood pulses through steady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his days of gestation obey the moon and can be reckoned by her; in the sweat of his body he tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated. But above all he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass–and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle! Other creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not his intelligence–or, if at all, in no degree worth measuring. So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent spectator. As a poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of his childhood:–

The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars; and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it….