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Page 38
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.
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