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Page 70
[Page 247]
XII.
THE ULTIMATE FORCE.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things
became by him, and without him was not anything made that was made
* * * and by him all things stand together."
[Page 248]
"O thou eternal one; whose presence blight
All space doth occupy--all motion guide--
Thou from primeval nothingness didst call
First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee
Eternity had its foundation: all
Sprung forth from thee--of light, joy, harmony,
Sole origin: all life, all beauty thine.
Thy word created all, and doth create;
Thy splendor fills all space with rays divine;
Thou art and wert, and shalt be glorious, great;
Life-giving, life-sustaining Potentate,
Thy chains the unmeasured universe surround--
Upheld by thee, by thee inspired with breath."
DERZHAVIN.
[Page 249]
XII.
_THE ULTIMATE FORCE._
The universe is God's name writ large. Thought goes up the shining
suns as golden stairs, and reads the consecutive syllables--all
might, and wisdom, and beauty; and if the heart be fine enough and
pure enough, it also reads everywhere the mystic name of love. Let
us learn to read the hieroglyphics, and then turn to the blazonry
of the infinite page. That is the key-note; the heavens and the earth
declaring the glory of God, and men with souls attuned listening.
To what voices shall we listen first? Stand on the shore of a lake
set like an azure gem among the bosses of green hills. The patter
of rain means an annual fall of four cubic feet of water on every
square foot of it. It weighs two hundred and forty pounds to the
cubic foot, one hundred million tons on the surface of a little
sheet of water twenty miles long by three wide. Now, all that weight
of falling rain had to be lifted, a work compared to which taking
up mountains and casting them into the sea is pastime. All that
water had to be taken up before it could be cast down, and carried
hundreds of miles before it could be there. You have heard Niagara's
thunder; have stood beneath the falling immensity; seen it ceaselessly
poured from an infinite hand; felt that you would be ground to atoms
if you fell into that resistless flood. Well, all that infinity of
[Page 250] water had to be lifted by main force, had to be taken up
out of the far Pacific, brought over the Rocky Mountains; and the
Mississippi keeps bearing its wide miles of water to the Gulf, and
Niagara keeps thundering age after age, because there is power
somewhere to carry the immeasurable floods all the time the other
way in the upper air.
But this is only the Alpha of power. Professor Clark, of Amherst,
Massachusetts, found that such a soft and pulpy thing as a squash
had so great a power of growth that it lifted three thousand pounds,
and held it day and night for months. It toiled and grew under the
growing weight, compacting its substance like oak to do the work.
All over the earth this tremendous power and push of life goes
on--in the little star-eyed flowers that look up to God only on
the Alpine heights, in every tuft of grass, in every acre of wheat,
in every mile of prairie, and in every lofty tree that wrestles
with the tempests of one hundred winters. But this is only the B
in the alphabet of power.
Rise above the earth, and you find the worlds tossed like playthings,
and hurled seventy times as fast as a rifle-ball, never an inch
out of place or a second out of time. But this is only the C in
the alphabet of power.
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