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Page 41
Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails
of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.
Husbands and fathers are ever crying:
Immortal? I feel it and know it.
Who doubts of such as she?
But that's the pang's very essence,
Immortal away from me.
But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships
up to be sundered no more forever.
Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God. Job, in
his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and
desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I
might find him." David cries out while his tears are flowing day and
night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when
shall I come and appear before God?" Moses, in the broadest of
visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy
glory." And common men have always turned the high places of earth to
altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their
sacrifices. But the means of knowing God are to be increased. The
very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ
whom he has sent. Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to
dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better
results, shall be taken there. Every reader of the Apocalypse notices
with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven
seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open,
nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous
panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully
explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we
observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto
unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the
sound of these many waters in a storm. Above all these superior
manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall _see_ God.
III. But there is in space what there was before the world began.
Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in
which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the
First Great Cause by creation, not by development. This conception is
full of difficulties to thought. We cannot even agree whether creation
was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is
rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and
that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. Indeed,
when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one
two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range
of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many
prefer to consider an atom as a center of force and not as a material
entity at all. But, amid uncertainties, this is certain, that the
forces of the visible worlds are extraneous. They come out of the
invisible. They are all also returning to the invisible; that is what
light is doing in space, previously referred to. This incredibly
high-class energy is not banking up coal in the celestial ether as it
did on the earth, but is returning to the quick, mobile forces of the
invisible worlds. One thing more is certain, that the origin of all
the forces of the invisible is in personality; for the atom, it is
agreed, bears all the marks of being a manufactured article.
Different-sized shot could not have greater uniformity of structure and
constitution. And their whole behavior shows that they are controlled
by an admirable wisdom past finding out.
That these forces exist and are necessarily active there are three
proofs. Worlds have been made, not of things and forces that do
appear. They were abundantly displayed in the physical miracles of
Christ and others; and these forces, independently of the physical
miracles at various times, have continuously helped men.
(1) Concerning the first fact--that worlds have been made--nothing need
be said except that these forces, being personal, cannot be supposed to
be exhausted, and hence creations can go on continuously. We are
assured that they do. And the personal element more and more relates
itself to personalities. "I go to prepare a place for you," to fit up
a mansion according to tastes, needs, and enjoyments of the future
occupant.
(2) This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world
has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does
not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed.
Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they
harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as
fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces
are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm
of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's
sudden appearance, disappear. Who knows how frequently they come? We,
for whose sake all nature stands "and stars their courses move," may
need more frequent motherly attentions than the infant knows of. They
will not be lacking, even if not sufficiently evident to the infant to
be cried for. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things."
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