body it animated was not an immovable part of the earth itself; to obtain fixed notions of distance, of color, light, and heat; to learn the properties and uses of plants, herbs, and fruits; even to see the sun sink out of sight with the sure faith that it would rise again.  It was gifted with no instinct, to decide these questions instantly and mechanically.  They had all to pass through the varied processes of reason.  The first bird that sang in Eden, built its first nest as perfectly as its last.  But, thought by thought, the first human mind worked out conclusions which the dullest beast or bird reached instantly without reason.  What wonderful co-working of internal and external influences was provided to keep thought in sleepless action; to open, one by one, the myriad petals of the mind!  Nature, with all its shifting sceneries, filled every new scope of vision with objects that hourly set thought at play in a new line of reflection.  Then, out of man’s physical being came a thousand still small voices daily, whispering, Think! think!  The first-born necessities, few and simple, cried, “Think! for we want bread, we want drink, we want shelter and raiment against the cold.”  The finer senses cried continually, “Give! give thought to this, to that.”  The Eye, the Ear, the Palate and every other organ that could receive and diffuse delight, worked the mental faculties by day and night, up to the last sunset of the antediluvian world; and all the intellectual result of this working Noah took with him into the ark, and gave to his sons to hand over to succeeding ages.  Flowers that Eve stuck in the hair of the infant Abel are just now opening the last casket of their beauty to the favored children of our time.  This, in itself, is a marvellous instance of the law we are noticing.  But what is this to the processes of thought and observation through which the mind of man has reached its present expansion; through which it has developed all these sciences, arts, industries and tastes, the literature and the intellectual life of these bright days of humanity!  The figure is weak, and every figure would be weak when applied to the ratio or the result of this progression; but, at what future age of time, or of the existence beyond time, will the mind, that has thus wrought on earth, open its last petal, put forth no new breathing, unfold no new beauty under the eye of the Infinite, who breathed it, as an immortal atom of His own essence, into the being of man?

Follow the radius up into the next concentric circle, and we see this law working to finer and sublimer issues in man’s moral nature.  We have glanced at what the mind has done for and through his physical faculties and being; how that being has re-acted upon the mind, and kept all its capacities at work in procuring new delight to the eye, ear, palate, and all the senses that yearned for enjoyment.  We have noticed how the inside and outside world acted upon his reasoning