{34} But the world which is the dwelling of that something "far more deeply interfused" of which Wordsworth sings, does not consist exclusively of the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky. . . --it contains also dismal, fever-breeding swamps, dreadful deserts, dreary wastes of eternal ice, plunged into darkness half the year; are we going simply to ignore these realities when we speak of the Divine indwelling in the world? And, once more, shall we assert this doctrine when we remember the cold cunning of the spider, or the delight in torture displayed by the domestic cat? It depends, we answer, what we mean by "this doctrine"; if we construe immanence to signify "allness," we may as well admit first as last that there is no way of escape from the difficulties which these queries suggest. In that case it is not for us to pick and choose--to say that God is the beauty of the beautiful, but not the ugliness of the ugly; the compassion of the compassionate, but not the cruelty of the cruel: if He is _all_, He is _both_, and for that very reason is _neither_. That is the real inwardness of a conception of the Deity which represents Him, with Omar Khayyam, as One-- Whose secret Presence, through Creation's veins Running, Quicksilver-like eludes your pains; Taking all forms from Mah to Mahi; and They change and perish all--but He remains. {35} Such a doctrine can only mean that the Divine Substance, under a myriad-fold variety of appearances, is equally diffused through all creation, like the universal ether of science; and such a conception of the Eternal, whatever else it may be, ceases _ipso facto_ to be religiously helpful. The counterpart of the theoretical allness would be the practical nothingness of God.[2] But having quite definitely declined to place such a construction upon immanence, we are preserved from the absurdities which flow from it. We may and do hold that all the works of the Lord manifest Him in some manner and in some measure; but, as we already stated in our introductory chapter, not all do so in the same manner or the same measure, and not any of them nor all of them are He. To the specific inquiry, What, if not part of God, is this stone?--we can, indeed, only answer in the words of Tennyson that if we knew what the least object was in itself, we "should know what God and man is." But, dealing with the question more generally, we may say that what inorganic nature shows forth of the indwelling God is His prevailing Power and abiding Law; looking upon the works of Him who "stretcheth out the north over empty space, and hangeth the earth upon {36} nothing," we can but feel that awed admiration of His wisdom and might which is expressed over and over again in the Book of Job. And this impression deepens when we pass upward from the inorganic to the organic creation; for not only do we behold the entire vast spectacle