This Present, thou, forsooth, wouldst fain arrest:
Machinery just meant
To give thy soul its bent,
Try thee and turn thee forth, sufficiently impressed.
Thou, heaven's consummate cup, what need'st thou with earth's wheel?
All the well-worn passages crowd into our memories.
And it was precisely this relation of Eternity to our probation in the fast-fleeting Present which gave to Butler his constructive power in his own day. The vastness of astronomical times and spaces had bewildered men's sense of proportion, as, for the first time, they apprehended the pettiness of earth over against that immensity of the heavens. The whole scale of knowledge had been widened; and the immediate effect had been to lower the value of anything connected with the discreditable story worked out by humanity 'in an obscure corner of one of the meanest of the planets'. We all know that sudden panic; that dismal shrinkage; that shiver of scorn. Butler encountered it by expanding our human significance. He met the vastness of the physical scheme by disclosing the vastness of the plan of our Redemption. If it requires centuries to unroll the material development, it requires Eternity to complete our spiritual destiny. The Redemptive hope of man is a process, a progress, a growth, extending into the infinite future, far beyond the widest horizons that this surprising science ventures to unveil. And this tiny life here, that seemed to crumple up into nothing under the marvel of those appalling stars, after all, holds in it the secret of endless and immeasurable possibilities, transcending time. Here, in it, lies our probation. Here, in this dim corner, under the discipline of these brief moments, we can be tested for our fitness in a Hereafter which we cannot limit or define.
So he enlarged the religious values of life, to meet the heightened demands. He brought our spiritual story up to a level at which it could, courageously and with a
