On the chalk downs of Wiltshire, in sight of the town of
Westbury, there appears a great white horse, which presumably
marks the sight of one of the battles between Alfred the Great
and the Danes. As you look at that white horse upon the hill
from the road approaching it it is perfectly drawn--it is so
accurate that I doubt if any painter of a horse could improve
upon it; but some time ago when I was in that neighborhood, I
went up to the white horse to see it on the spot. There I found
that this cutting in the green turf which revealed the chalk
below was so extensive that if I walked round the outline, I
could cover about a mile, and the shape as it lay along the
slope of the hill had no resemblance to a horse whatever. Like
the long shadows cast by the setting sun, its sprawling limbs
went down the hill, and were so much greater than the width of
the body that you could not have told in walking over it that
the artist--for an artist he was--who designed it could possibly
intend to be drawing a horse; that perfect horse upon the
hillside, to the traveler approaching from Westbury, appeared
to have no existence at all--it was a great perspective drawing
upon the hill, which, when seen close at hand, did not even
suggest a horse’s form. Taking that as an illustration, does it
not often strike you how the whole pageant of earth and sky,
which delights our eye, is just as unreal as the scenery of the
stage? Those clouds that drape the setting sun, and form lofty
mountains and shimmering seas, making a landscape in the sky so
beautiful that no painter on earth could reproduce it; those
clouds that charm us with their beauty, if we were in the midst
of them, would be merely like the drenching rain of an April
day, without beauty, without charm. And those starry heavens
which are to us all of the earth a subject of endless delight
because of their beauty and their incomparable grandeur, are
not in the least what they appear.--ROBERT F. HORTON,
_Christian World Pulpit_.
(1511)
* * * * *
The other day I came across the letter which Galileo wrote to
Kepler, when he was afraid to publish the discoveries which had
been made by the first telescope, and he uses this extraordinary
language: “Fearing the fate of our master Copernicus, who, altho
he has earned immortal fame among a few, yet, by an infinite
number, so only can the number of fools be measured, is hissed
and derided.” It was a peril in the seventeenth century even
to say what those starry heavens are. They have no relation
at all to the objects that we see. That little group of the
Pleiades, which look like fireflies hung in a net in the sky,
in which a very keen eye can perceive seven distinct stars, is
really a group of between 400 and 500 suns, many of them larger
than our own. And that genial sun himself, whose light we love,
which gives to our planet its life, its warmth and its joy--if
we could approach it would terrify us the more we approached
it--a mighty mass of incandescent matter so awful that the
imagination dare hardly entertain the reality of what it is. It
may be said, however, that while these distant objects of the
universe possibly mislead us, our eyes at any rate can trust the
things which are close at hand. But that is quite a delusion,
too. The matter which is close at hand, and which our fathers
thirty years ago treated as the one certainty in the world, is
a complete illusion. I took up in my hand some time ago a few
grains of dried mud from a river-bed. To all appearance they
were like grains of gunpowder, but they were put under the
microscope, and there to my amazement every one of these tiny
grains was a shell, as beautiful and as perfect in form as a
nautilus sailing upon the sea. Not only does the matter we see
delude us, but the delusion is greater from the fact of what we
do not see. Now, the physicist seriously tells us he is using
the strict language of science, and not the language of a fairy
tale, when he says that all the matter we touch, including our
own bodies, is made up of molecules, and the molecule is made
up of atoms, an atom far too minute for the eye to see; and yet
that atom, of which all matter is built up, is itself composed
of electrons, so minute that they dart with inconceivable
velocity from end to end of that tiny atom like a mouse in a
great cathedral--such is the proportion of the electron to
the atom.--ROBERT F. HORTON, _The Christian World
Pulpit_.
(1512)