Our planet, true to her everlasting record, has put forth her potent
reorganizing power to celebrate the ushering in of the new era.
Not less marvelous are the signs and indications of great changes
taking place upon the visible planes of the lives of men. Hand in hand
march the visible and the imponderable forces of this earthly life.
Ignorance and vapid superstitions can no longer block the doorway of
the living Christ.
God wills to know, and be known of his own, and to hold his love a free
gift to all races of men.
The trump of recollection and of recognition has sounded. The dead
have already risen, all along the lines, and no power can hale them
back to their dreams.
Onward, ever upward points the finger of progress. Long hoarded wisdom
and knowledge of the forces of nature are pouring into the minds of
seers, and of wizards of science; and these long separated and divorced
streams are evoluting to the unison of material and occult sciences,
which is destined to bring in the reign of peace and prosperity to all
the peoples of the earth, and to bring to light the relics of past
ages, cunningly hidden away in the vast womb of nature that they might
be preserved and brought forth to our knowledge in these later days.
By the undeniable record yielded up from buried cities and storied
crypts, and in the skeletons of mummies of both animals and men of
those most ancient times, she is showing us where she began the present
cycle, now closing in about the race, with great clattering of forces
and profound portents in earth and sky.
The equilibrium of the universe is maintained by the transition of its
forces. Atlantis, matured and ripened, sinks beneath the sea, and her
accumulated wealth of wisdom and knowledge is transferred to other
continents to arise at the appointed time to enrich and bless the land
of their adoption; and all art and science is but shining today in the
reflected, reawakened light of past ages.
In view of the revelations being made on all sides, we may well
reiterate Solomon's wise saying: "There is nothing new under the sun."
There can be nothing absolutely new. There is only endless iteration
and readjustment of powers and forces to fit the need of the day and
generation.
Nature buffets her children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human
life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect
and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an
overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in
inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and
determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them. But this
world was given to man to conquer and own and make much of; and the
glitter of a speck of useful metal in a stray boulder in the lonely
cañon; or the chance outcropping of rock which to the practised eye
denotes the nearness of the deposit of oil--these, or any of the
thousand and one signs, she hangs out along the path in which man is
destined to march on his way to absolute sovereignty, set his forces of
intellect and will in motion, and he will never rest from his labors
until he stands upon the pinnacles of the gods, the crowned monarch of
all nature's forces on this planet.
All phenomena are negative, and are only the external garniture of the
world of man, the spirit, the child of the Eternal, of the father and
mother Creators of him. Thus man is, by absolute inheritance, the
king, and the ruler over all nature. But not without effort can he
enter and possess and maintain his power over his own. Ice and frosts,
and searing sun, and lonely wilds, and trackless wastes, and countless
waters, and evil beasts, and horrible reptiles--all, all he must
encounter and set at naught in his trackless journey. Carefully must
he force the wilderness to bloom, and by his wise efforts "make glad
the waste places" of the earth. Wherever the foot of man has been set,
there is it "hallowed ground." Whatever may have been his intent or
whatever his fate, in his wake shall surely follow the manifest purpose
of that ever-ruling Power which led him. Everywhere along the way,
Nature trails her loose ends, well baited, with which to catch the
unwary, and the whitening bones of the lonely emigrant family lost on
the plains, and the snowy hair of the dead mountaineer bleaching on
high summits or woven in the nests of birds, or the bodies of dead
mariners, or the lonely corpse of the treacherously slain, pulsing with
the tide on foreign shores, or the miners in their pits, forced by the
deadly "damps" from all visible connection with human life, or the
child of a superior race held captive by savages, or the beautiful
white girl sold into the harem of a barbarous sultan, or any or all
other of such expressions of destiny in the isolated lives of men are
but pioneering the way of the race to complete homogeneousness and
unquestioned ownership of the whole wide earth.