Not long ago I came across the mental experience of a working geologist
which well illustrates this. "Once in early boyhood," says Mr. James E.
Mills, "I left a lumberman's camp at night to go to the brook for water.
It was a clear, cold, moonlight night and very still, except the distant
murmuring of the Penobscot at some falls. A sense of the grandeur of the
forest and rivers, the hills, and sky, and stars came over the boy, and
he stood and looked around. An owl hooted, and the hooting was not a
cheerful sound. The men were all asleep, and the conditions were lonely
enough. But there was no feeling of loneliness; for with the sense of
the grandeur of creation, came the sense, very real and strong, of the
Creator's presence. In boyish imagination, I could see His almighty hand
shaping the hills and scooping out the valleys, spreading the sky
overhead, and making trees, animals, and men. Thirty years later I
camped alone in the open air on the bank of the Gila. It was a clear,
cold, moonlight night. The camp-fire was low, for the Apaches were on
the warpath. An owl again hooted; but again all loneliness was dispelled
by a sense of the Creator's presence, and the night of long ago by the
Penobscot came into my mind, and with it the question: What is the
difference to my mind between the Creator's presence now and then? To
the heart, it was very like, but to the mind very different. Now, no
great hand was shaping things from without. But God was everywhere,
reaching down through long lines of forces, and shaping and sustaining
things from within. I had been travelling all day by mountains of lava
which had cooled long ages ago, and over grounds which the sea, now far
off, had left on its beaches; and with the geologist's habit recalled
the lava still glowing and flowing, and the sea still rolling its
pebbles on the beaches. But now I knew it was by forces within the earth
that the lava was poured out, and that the waves which rolled the
pebbles were driven by the wind and the wind by the sun's heat. And the
forces within the earth and the heat within the sun come from still
further within. Inward, always inward, the search for the original
energy and law carried my mind, for He whose will is the source of all
force, and whose thought is the source of all law is on the inside of
the universe. The kingdom of God is within you."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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