*Reprinted from the _Methodist Review_.
"The day of the Lord will come . . .; in which the heavens shall pass
away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat,
the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."
What is there after that?
To this question there are three answers:
I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there
were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The
sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore.
The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a
temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When
that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The
time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the
removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made,
that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have
a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are
temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."
It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an
empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent.
Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but
all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power.
David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first
word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And
the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer,
swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in
distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What
God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true
seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering
the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing
each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him
say of his wife long since gone before:
And now I shall seek her once more,
On some Mississippi's vast tide
That flows the whole universe through,
Than earth's widest rivers more wide.
Evangeline I shall not miss
Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
On opposite sides of rivers so vast
That islands of worlds intervene.
But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of
gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed
in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an
apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl
it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of
the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the
whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the
head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in
diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles
long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the
tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the
earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel
wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of
gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not
run around among them.
There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light,
though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It
lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast.
Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in
towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be
habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and
deposit of sewage along the shore.
Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This
force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a
no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter
that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference
to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation
does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to
assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still
ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.
In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred
and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on
which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet.
We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the
play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of
millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second.
Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile
of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power.
Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power
of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that
a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of
a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation,
too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers
first.
What is light doing in space? That has greatly puzzled all
philosophers. Without question there is inexpressible power. It is
seen in velocity. But what is it doing? The law of conservation of
force forbids the thought that it can be wasted. On the earth its
power long ages ago was turned into coal. The power was reservoired in
mountains ready for man. It is so great that a piece of coal that
weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at
sea. But what is the thousand million times more light than ever
struck the earth doing in space? That is among the things we want to
find out when we get there. There will be ample opportunity, space,
time, and light enough.
It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is
full of causes of sound. To anyone capable of turning these causes to
effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into
songful music. Light makes its impression of color by its different
number of vibrations. So music sounds its keys. We know the number of
vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the
number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of
vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet.
These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light
to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do
sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid
down, we may be able to hear them
Singing as they shine,
"The hand that made us is divine."
There are places where this music is so fine that the soft and
soul-like sounds of a zephyr in the pines would be like a storm in
comparison, and places where the fierce intensity of light in a
congeries of suns would make it seem as if all the stops of being from
piccolo to sub-bass had been drawn. No angel flying interstellar
spaces, no soul fallen overboard and left behind by a swift-sailing
world, need fear being left in awful silences.
There seems to be good evidence that electrical disturbances in the sun
are almost instantly reported and effective on the earth. It is
evident that the destructive force in cyclones is not wind, but
electricity. It is altogether likely that it is generated in the sun,
and that all the space between it and us thrills with this unknown
power.[1] All astronomers except Faye admit the connection between sun
spots and the condition of the earth's magnetic elements. The
parallelism between auroral and sun-spot frequency is almost perfect.
That between sun spots and cyclones is as confidently asserted, but not
quite so demonstrable. Enough proof exists to make this clear, that
space may be full of higher Andes and Alps, rivers broader than Gulf
Streams, skies brighter than the Milky Way, more beautiful than the
rainbow. Occasionally some scoffer who thinks he is smart and does not
know that he is mistaken asks with an air of a Socrates putting his
last question: "You say that 'heaven is above us.' But if one dies at
noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other
toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian
toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole. Where is
your heaven anyhow?" O sapient, sapient questioner! Heaven is above
us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a
little world as this is no more than a bee's leaving different sides of
a bruised pear exuding honey. Up or down he is in the same fragrant
garden, warm, light, redolent of roses, tremulous with bird song, amid
a thousand caves of honeysuckles, "illuminate seclusions swung in air"
to which his open sesame gives entrance at will.
II. But there will be in space what the world has become. It is
nowhere intimated that matter had been annihilated. Worlds shall
perish as worlds. They shall wax old as doth a garment. They will be
folded up as a vesture, and they "shall be changed." The motto with
which this article began says heavens pass away, elements melt, earth
and its works are burned up. But always after the heaven and earth
pass away we are to look for "new heavens and a new earth." On all
that God has made he has stamped the great principle of progress,
refinement, development--rock to soil, soil to vegetable life, to
insect, bird, and man. Each dies as to what it is, that it may have
resurrection or may feed something higher. So, in the light of
revelation, earth is not lost. Science comes, after ages of creeping,
up to the same position. It, too, asserts that matter is
indestructible. Burn a candle in a great jar hermetically sealed. The
weight of the jar and contents is just the same after the burning as
before. A burned-up candle as big as the world will not be
annihilated. It will be "changed."
It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean
metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a
vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great
deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless
minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and
so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water. Now, to
get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in
the smoke. The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that
heavy stuff out of the smoke again. It is changed, volatilized, and it
likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to
come back to heaviness again.
Take a great mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated
invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by
particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The
ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make
limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain
rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize
upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber
to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But,
whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the
seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle
and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de
Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes
between lovers, it is still the same matter. It may be diffused as gas
or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter.
Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy
is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean
individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality.
It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain
exact quantities. An atom of bromine will combine with one of
hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with
three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They
marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity
is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen
make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the
ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill
all the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of
other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its
bulk, some actually diminishing it. Water molecules are like a mass of
shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart
by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a
larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is
still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of
oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than
one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of
England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the
distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme
rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some
comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now,
when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations
will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material
with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that
these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our
purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull
stupidity can count in a lifetime.
We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce
common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the
sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by
the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one
millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by
vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the
tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in
freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds
to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an
incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides
splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam
its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a
thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject
to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned,
to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary
kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is
burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed!
It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our
houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend
miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the
telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah,
delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up
the solid body.
The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on
spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a
substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart
disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much
rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as
ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end
to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the
sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner
vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out
when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of
clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves
a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was
observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how
easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no
Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how
easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only
to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize
her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even
provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on
the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass
nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary
notes.
Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff
that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations.
Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred
pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be
valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability.
We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have
delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth?
Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility
of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it
solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold
the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its
billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and
roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone
wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the
voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the
rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may
know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that
the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not
this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of
heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as
a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and
rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of
"scientific imagination." But all our imaginings fall far short of
realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks
to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper
fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men
have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines.
That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling
tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood.
Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So
we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious
sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged
rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in
us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward
a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if
we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this
finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our
deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world
are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more
sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we
think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a
window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific
whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of
the millionth dilution. Many people feel "in their bones" the coming
of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with
delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no
more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an
insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the
third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South
you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless
blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor.
Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had
violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and
something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences
which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping
infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read.
It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives
were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest
flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped
by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the
vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings
over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was
meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability
has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer
faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising
them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He associated
some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of
the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the
apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God.
Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to
the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole
desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know
there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of
the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education
and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a
dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably
mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices
itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than
the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the
martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements
because they are stronger and more like God.
Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual
aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had
two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined,
peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any
one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next
life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes
of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new
surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior
companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for
love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of
nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so
he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so
he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers,
possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.
O the hour when this material
Shall have vanished like a cloud,
When amid the wide ethereal
All the invisible shall crowd.
In that sudden, strange transition,
By what new and finer sense
Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
And receive the influence?
Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in
the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit
intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its
first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the
second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes,
light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and
hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life?
They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet
realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings
for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything
tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water
fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost,
straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest
among the rushes. It is not disappointed.
Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He
weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip
on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand
that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of
power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid,
and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there
are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its
harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America
did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in
the use of a single talent.
Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months
is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly
desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them,
yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning
that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a
twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon,
the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the
temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he
must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift
as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world
has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.
Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the
present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A
thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to
others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know
even as he is known by perfect intelligence.
Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails
of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.
Husbands and fathers are ever crying:
Immortal? I feel it and know it.
Who doubts of such as she?
But that's the pang's very essence,
Immortal away from me.
But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships
up to be sundered no more forever.
Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God. Job, in
his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and
desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I
might find him." David cries out while his tears are flowing day and
night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when
shall I come and appear before God?" Moses, in the broadest of
visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy
glory." And common men have always turned the high places of earth to
altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their
sacrifices. But the means of knowing God are to be increased. The
very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ
whom he has sent. Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to
dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better
results, shall be taken there. Every reader of the Apocalypse notices
with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven
seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open,
nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous
panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully
explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we
observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto
unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the
sound of these many waters in a storm. Above all these superior
manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall _see_ God.
III. But there is in space what there was before the world began.
Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in
which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the
First Great Cause by creation, not by development. This conception is
full of difficulties to thought. We cannot even agree whether creation
was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is
rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and
that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. Indeed,
when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one
two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range
of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many
prefer to consider an atom as a center of force and not as a material
entity at all. But, amid uncertainties, this is certain, that the
forces of the visible worlds are extraneous. They come out of the
invisible. They are all also returning to the invisible; that is what
light is doing in space, previously referred to. This incredibly
high-class energy is not banking up coal in the celestial ether as it
did on the earth, but is returning to the quick, mobile forces of the
invisible worlds. One thing more is certain, that the origin of all
the forces of the invisible is in personality; for the atom, it is
agreed, bears all the marks of being a manufactured article.
Different-sized shot could not have greater uniformity of structure and
constitution. And their whole behavior shows that they are controlled
by an admirable wisdom past finding out.
That these forces exist and are necessarily active there are three
proofs. Worlds have been made, not of things and forces that do
appear. They were abundantly displayed in the physical miracles of
Christ and others; and these forces, independently of the physical
miracles at various times, have continuously helped men.
(1) Concerning the first fact--that worlds have been made--nothing need
be said except that these forces, being personal, cannot be supposed to
be exhausted, and hence creations can go on continuously. We are
assured that they do. And the personal element more and more relates
itself to personalities. "I go to prepare a place for you," to fit up
a mansion according to tastes, needs, and enjoyments of the future
occupant.
(2) This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world
has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does
not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed.
Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they
harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as
fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces
are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm
of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's
sudden appearance, disappear. Who knows how frequently they come? We,
for whose sake all nature stands "and stars their courses move," may
need more frequent motherly attentions than the infant knows of. They
will not be lacking, even if not sufficiently evident to the infant to
be cried for. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things."
(3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible
seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral
natures of man. Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for
their whole significance. It begins with God's walking with Adam in
the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by
the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world. It
includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify
only to intensify the conception of the fact. Paul says, "Having
therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when
otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him
would have prevented his continuing in life. It is possible for all
who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of
God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in
the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a
machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The
great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the
invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing
better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than
other men's paragraphs and volumes. And he left on record for us
promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through
unbelief. We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of
things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight,
have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God." They have
wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to
men. It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the
power of an endless life. But what they do is chiefly valuable as
evidence of what they are. It is little that men quench the violence
of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again. It is great that
they are able to do it. That they hold the hand that holds the world
is something. But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and
will to execute the best, is more. Fire may kindle again and the
resurrected die, but the great personality survives.
These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary
world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the
permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body.
Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to
its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in
unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But
there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw
all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation
has for bodies.
Then all his being thrills with Joy. And past
The comets' sweep, the choral stars above,
With multiplying raptures drawn more swift
He flies into the very heart of love.
It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen
our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe. It is
not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as
a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a
glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to
the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We
belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance
whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a
new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home
among their personalities. This universe is a unity. It is not made
up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the
sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though
the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the
midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll,"
the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it
is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the
removal of things that can be shaken. For even then we may find the
calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting
to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving. It says, "Lo,
it is I; be not afraid."
Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call
the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in
which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home
anywhere. He will ever say:
"The winds that o'er my ocean run
Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun;
Through life, through death, through faith, through time,
Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime,
Eternal trades that cannot veer,
And blowing, teach us how to steer;
And well for him whose joy, whose care,
Is but to keep before them fair.
"O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine,
Spread canvas to these airs divine.
Spread sail and let thy past life be
Forgotten in thy destiny."
[1]The action that drives off the material of a comet's tail proves
that other forces besides gravitation are operative in the
interplanetary space.--_The Sun_, C. A. Young, p. 156.
[2]See _Recreations in Astronomy_, p. 357.