Page:Logic Taught by Love.djvu/22

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Logic Taught by Love

inference, for the religious teachers who converted the Cornish from their early idolatry left behind them another trace besides the legend of the people who would not keep Sabbath. In contrast with these evil stones, there are others held sacred by the peasants almost to our own day; the so-called "logan-stones." A logan-stone is one so delicately poised, that a child's touch can make it sway to and fro; yet it presently returns to a position of equilibrium by virtue of its natural equipoise. The name "Logan" is derived from a word in use in Cornwall, to "log" i.e. to sway, rock, vibrate. We need not ask what was the philosophy of teachers who held sacred the logan-stone.

Perhaps the most impressive of all Natural Symbols of progress by Pulsation is the one referred to by Jesus—the Law of the circular Storm, which might be suggested to any true lover of Nature by observing the wheeling dust. The Spirit which guides man is like the whirling wind; it blows backward in one place while it is blowing forward in another; so that you cannot tell in what direction it is going as a whole, merely from feeling how it blows on you.

In connection with this subject I may mention a remark that has occurred to me in reading works of piety. All sorts of religious writers agree in describing the troubles of life as "stormy seas." The instinct of some leads them to speak of taking refuge from the storm in an Ark (which sways with the heaving sea, and yields to its every motion); while others, on the contrary, prefer to think of clinging for safety to a fixed stone or cross, or other immovable object. The writers of "clinging" symbolism are of the properly orthodox