It is manifest that the attempt is being made to restore the worship of the old _Chronos_, to whom the ancients had erected temples. Let us look the idol in the face. Time appears at first to our imagination as the great destroyer. He is armed with a scythe, and passes gaunt and bald over the ruins of all that has lived. When he lifts up his great voice and cries-- Mighty nations famed in story Into darkness I have hurled,-- Gone their myriads and their glory (Lo! ye follow) from the world: My dark shade for ever covers Stars I quenched as on they rolled:-- the beautiful, and frightened girl in the song is not singular as she exclaims in her terror: Ah! we're young, and we are lovers, Spare us, Reaper gaunt and old![128] Such is the first impression which time makes upon us. But birth succeeds to death. From an inexhaustible spring, nature sends gushing forth new products and new developments. Youth full of hope trips lightly over the ground, without a thought that the ground it treads on is the vast cemetery of all past generations. If we fix our thoughts on the permanence of life and the manifestations of progress, time appears to us as the great producer. Destroyer of all that is, producer of all that is to be, time has thus a double form. It is a mysterious tide, ever rising and ever receding; it is the power of death, and it is the power of life. All this, Gentlemen, is for the imagination. In the view of a calm reason, time is the simply negative condition of all development, as space is the negative condition of all motion. Just as without bodies and forces infinite space could not produce any motion; so, without the action of causes, ages heaped on ages could neither produce nor destroy a single atom of matter, or a single element of intelligence. Time is the scene of life and of death; it neither causes to be born, nor to die.