Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the ShoreKingsley, Charles
History
Glaucus; Or, The Wonders of the Shore
Kingsley, Charles
Natural history -- Juvenile literature; Seashore biology -- Juvenile literature
I speak, of course, under correction; for this conclusion is emphatically
matter of induction, and must be verified or modified by ever-fresh
facts: but I meet with many a Christian passage in scientific books,
which seems to me to go, not too far, but rather not far enough, in
asserting the God of the Bible, as Saint Paul says, “not to have left
Himself without witness,” in nature itself, that He is the God of grace.
Why speak of the God of nature and the God of grace as two antithetical
terms? The Bible never, in a single instance, makes the distinction; and
surely, if God be (as He is) the Eternal and Unchangeable One, and if (as
we all confess) the universe bears the impress of His signet, we have no
right, in the present infantile state of science, to put arbitrary limits
of our own to the revelation which He may have thought good to make of
Himself in nature. Nay, rather, let us believe that, if our eyes were
opened, we should fulfil the requirement of Genius, to “see the universal
in the particular,” by seeing God’s whole likeness, His whole glory,
reflected as in a mirror even in the meanest flower; and that nothing but
the dulness of our own souls prevents them from seeing day and night in
all things, however small or trivial to human eclecticism, the Lord Jesus
Christ Himself fulfilling His own saying, “My Father worketh hitherto,
and I work.”
To me it seems (to sum up, in a few words, what I have tried to say) that
such development and progress as have as yet been actually discovered in
nature, bear every trace of having been produced by successive acts of
thought and will in some personal mind; which, however boundlessly rich
and powerful, is still the Archetype of the human mind; and therefore
(for to this I confess I have been all along tending) probably capable,
without violence to its properties, of becoming, like the human mind,
incarnate.
But to descend from these perhaps too daring speculations, there is
another, and more human, source of interest about the animal who is
writhing feebly in the glass jar of salt water; for he is one of the many
curiosities which have been added to our fauna by that humble hero Mr.
Charles Peach, the self-taught naturalist, of whom, as we walk on toward
the rocks, something should be said, or rather read; for Mr. Chambers, in
an often-quoted passage from his Edinburgh Journal, which I must have the
pleasure of quoting once again, has told the story better than we can
tell it:—
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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