Should the engineer undertake to get the engine from the table without
reference to the lines upon which it was intended to run, we know very
well what the consequences would be. He would not go far, and even
the little distance he should manage to make would be attended with
tremendous bumping and friction. All movement would be in the direction
of chaos and confusion. However great the expenditure of energy, no
point would be reached, and the end of the undertaking would be waste
and failure. If, on the other hand, we should imagine an engine on such
a revolving plane, capable of making fifty miles an hour, with no tracks
leaving it, we know it could not go anywhere, and besides there would be
no reason for its being. It would be without meaning. Before the distance
between one point and another can be passed by a train, two things are
necessary, an engine and a railroad. The one may be called subjective,
the other objective. The one implies the other. They are the necessary
elements of transportation. As long as the train keeps to the iron rails
laid for it, it moves without friction. It is only when the subjective
element jumps the track and essays to determine its own objective
direction, that trouble comes. Then it is that cars are ditched and
people killed or crippled. The laws of God run to and fro throughout the
whole earth. They cross and recross every realm. They pass through every
domain, physical, mental, and moral. They go straight through matter
and straight through mind. They lead under the sea and over the sea and
through the sea. Down through the earth and up through the air they may
be noted, embracing with their invisible tracks every square inch of soil
and sky. They insure the order of the universe, visible and invisible,
tangible and intangible. They reach from globe to globe and make possible
the commerce of the spheres. They run out into the infinitely great and
back into the infinitely small, and bind in unity the atoms and the stars.
When man, by the aid of his reason, discovers the truth of things, which
is the provision for his intellect, these laws appear as provision for
his will.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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