the human mind can employ itself, but still a lofty and profound one—the laws of material existences. Those laws he investigated with a keen eye, tracing them patiently, sagaciously, and with a tenacious grasp of thought, through their windings and intricacies, and taking a comprehensive view of all their connections and relations; following every principle to the farthest bounds of the present and the real,—and then, when the whole world was mastered, not, like Alexander, staying to weep, but at once launching forth, on the strong wings of his mathematics, into the obscure abyss of the possible, he defined and measured, as it were, with chain and compass the limits of that shadowy realm, stopping only at the infinite.
Now who gave this man his mind? who endowed him with such penetration and grasp of intellect? who furnished him with that eagle eye and wing, thus to soar on high among coursing worlds,—now, calculating the strength of the invisible cord that holds the moon to the earth,—now, weighing the planets and ascertaining their gravity,—and then, again, alighting, as it were, on a comet and accompanying it to the bounds of the universe and back again! Is there not here manifest the presence and power of Him who "measures the waters in the hollow of His Hand, and metes out heaven with a span," who "weigheth the mountains in scales and the hills in a balance, and taketh up the isles as a very little thing?" "God geometrizes," said Plato. If it be the glory of geometry, that it is able to measure the earth and the various orbs of the creation, and to tell their distances, sizes, and forms, and if, at some new discovery of the beautiful accuracy and mathematical perfectness of proportion which pervades
