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Page 71
Rise to the sun. It is a quenchless reservoir of high-class energy.
Our tornadoes move sixty miles an hour, those of the sun twenty
thousand miles an hour. A forest on fire sends its spires of flame
one hundred feet in air, the sun sends its spires of flame two
hundred thousand miles. All our fires exhaust the fuel and burn
out. If the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five thousand
years; and yet this sea of unquenchable [Page 251] flame seethes and
burns, and rolls and vivifies a dozen worlds, and flashes life along
the starry spaces for a million years without any apparent
diminution. It sends out its power to every planet, in the vast
circle in which it lies. It fills with light not merely a whole
circle, but a dome; not merely a dome above, but one below, and on
every side. At our distance of ninety-two and a half millions of
miles, the great earth feels that power in gravitation, tides,
rains, winds, and all possible life--every part is full of power.
Fill the earth's orbit with a circle of such receptive
worlds--seventy thousand instead of one--everyone would be as fully
supplied with power from this central source. More. Fill the whole
dome, the entire extent of the surrounding sphere, bottom, sides,
top, a sphere one hundred and eighty-five million miles in diameter,
and everyone of these uncountable worlds would be touched with the
same power as one; each would thrill with life. This is only the D
of the alphabet of power. And glancing up to the other suns, one
hundred, five hundred, twelve hundred times as large, double,
triple, septuple, multiple suns, we shall find power enough to go
through the whole alphabet in geometrical ratio; and then in the
clustered suns, galaxies, and nebul�, power enough still
unrepresented by single letters to require all combinations of the
alphabet of power. What is the significance of this single element
of power? The answer of science to-day is "correlation," the
constant evolution of one force from another. Heat is a mode of
motion, motion a result of heat. So far so good. But are we mere
reasoners in a circle? Then we would be lost men, treading our round
of death in a limitless forest. What is the ultimate? Reason [Page
252] out in a straight line. No definition of matter allows it to
originate force; only mind can do that. Hence the ultimate force is
always mind. Carry your correlation as far as you please--through
planets, suns, nebul�, concretionary vortices, and revolving
fire-mist--there must always be mind and will beyond. Some of that
willpower that works without exhaustion must take its own force and
render it static, apparent. It may do this in such correlated
relation that that force shall go on year after year to a thousand
changing forms; but that force must originate in mind.
Go out in the falling rain, stand under the thunderous Niagara,
feel the immeasurable rush of life, see the hanging worlds, and
trace all this--the carried rain, the terrific thunder with God's bow
of peace upon it, and the unfailing planets hung upon nothing--trace
all this to the orb of day blazing in perpetual strength, but stop
not there. Who _made_ the sun? Contrivance fills all thought. _Who_
made the sun? Nature says there is a mind, and that mind is Almighty.
Then you have read the first syllables, viz., being and power.
What is the continuous relation of the universe to the mind from
which it derived its power? Some say that it is the relation of
a wound-up watch to the winder. It was dowered with sufficient
power to revolve its ceaseless changes, and its maker is henceforth
an absentee God. Is it? Let us have courage to see. For twenty
years one devotes ten seconds every night to putting a little force
into a watch. It is so arranged that it distributes that force
over twenty-four hours. In that twenty years more power has been
put into that watch than a horse could exert at once. But suppose
[Page 253] one had tried to put all that force into the watch at
once: it would have pulverized it to atoms. But supposing the
universe had been dowered with power at first to run its enormous
rounds for twenty millions of years. It is inconceivable; steel
would be as friable as sand, and strengthless as smoke, in such
strain.
We have discovered some of the laws of the force we call gravitation.
But what do we know of its essence? How it appears to act we know a
little, what it is we are profoundly ignorant. Few men ever discuss
this question. All theories are sublimely ridiculous, and fail to
pass the most primary tests. How matter can act where it is not,
and on that with which it has no connection, is inconceivable.
Newton said that anyone who has in philosophical matters a competent
faculty of thinking, could not admit for a moment the possibility
of a sun reaching through millions of miles, and exercising there
an attractive power. A watch may run if wound up, but how the
watch-spring in one pocket can run the watch in another is hard
to see. A watch is a contrivance for distributing a force outside
of itself, and if the universe runs at all on that principle, it
distributes some force outside of itself.
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