// (A)typical Birthday-Story

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.

He was very much admired indeed. "He is as beautiful as a weathercock," remarked one of the Town Councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes; "only not quite so useful," he added, fearing lest people should think him unpractical, which he really was not.

"Why can't you be like the Happy Prince?" asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. "The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything."

"I am glad there is some one in the world who is quite happy," muttered a disappointed man as he gazed at the wonderful statue.

"He looks just like an angel," said the Charity Children as they came out of the cathedral in their bright scarlet cloaks and their clean white pinafores.

"How do you know?" said the Mathematical Master, "you have never seen one."

"Ah! but we have, in our dreams," answered the children; and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming.

One night there flew over the city a little Swallow. His friends had gone away to Egypt six weeks before, but he had stayed behind, for he was in love with the most beautiful Reed. He had met her early in the spring as he was flying down the river after a big yellow moth, and had been so attracted by her slender waist that he had stopped to talk to her.

"Shall I love you?" said the Swallow, who liked to come to the point at once, and the Reed made him a low bow. So he flew round and round her, touching the water with his wings, and making silver ripples. This was his courtship, and it lasted all through the summer.

"It is a ridiculous attachment," twittered the other Swallows; "she has no money, and far too many relations"; and indeed the river was quite full of Reeds. Then, when the autumn came they all flew away.

After they had gone he felt lonely, and began to tire of his lady- love. "She has no conversation," he said, "and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind." And certainly, whenever the wind blew, the Reed made the most graceful curtseys. "I admit that she is domestic," he continued, "but I love travelling, and my wife, consequently, should love travelling also."

"Will you come away with me?" he said finally to her; but the Reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home.

"You have been trifling with me," he cried. "I am off to the Pyramids. Good-bye!" and he flew away.

All day long he flew, and at night-time he arrived at the city. "Where shall I put up?" he said; "I hope the town has made preparations."

Then he saw the statue on the tall column.

"I will put up there," he cried; "it is a fine position, with plenty of fresh air." So he alighted just between the feet of the Happy Prince.

"I have a golden bedroom," he said softly to himself as he looked round, and he prepared to go to sleep; but just as he was putting his head under his wing a large drop of water fell on him. "What a curious thing!" he cried; "there is not a single cloud in the sky, the stars are quite clear and bright, and yet it is raining. The climate in the north of Europe is really dreadful. The Reed used to like the rain, but that was merely her selfishness."

Then another drop fell.

"What is the use of a statue if it cannot keep the rain off?" he said; "I must look for a good chimney-pot," and he determined to fly away.

But before he had opened his wings, a third drop fell, and he looked up, and saw - Ah! what did he see?

The eyes of the Happy Prince were filled with tears, and tears were running down his golden cheeks. His face was so beautiful in the moonlight that the little Swallow was filled with pity.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I am the Happy Prince."

"Why are you weeping then?" asked the Swallow; "you have quite drenched me."

"When I was alive and had a human heart," answered the statue, "I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans- Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful. My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot chose but weep."

"What! is he not solid gold?" said the Swallow to himself. He was too polite to make any personal remarks out loud.

"Far away," continued the statue in a low musical voice, "far away in a little street there is a poor house. One of the windows is open, and through it I can see a woman seated at a table. Her face is thin and worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked by the needle, for she is a seamstress. She is embroidering passion- flowers on a satin gown for the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of- honour to wear at the next Court-ball. In a bed in the corner of the room her little boy is lying ill. He has a fever, and is asking for oranges. His mother has nothing to give him but river water, so he is crying. Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow, will you not bring her the ruby out of my sword-hilt? My feet are fastened to this pedestal and I cannot move."

"I am waited for in Egypt," said the Swallow. "My friends are flying up and down the Nile, and talking to the large lotus- flowers. Soon they will go to sleep in the tomb of the great King. The King is there himself in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are like withered leaves."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me for one night, and be my messenger? The boy is so thirsty, and the mother so sad."

"I don't think I like boys," answered the Swallow. "Last summer, when I was staying on the river, there were two rude boys, the miller's sons, who were always throwing stones at me. They never hit me, of course; we swallows fly far too well for that, and besides, I come of a family famous for its agility; but still, it was a mark of disrespect."

But the Happy Prince looked so sad that the little Swallow was sorry. "It is very cold here," he said; "but I will stay with you for one night, and be your messenger."

"Thank you, little Swallow," said the Prince.

So the Swallow picked out the great ruby from the Prince's sword, and flew away with it in his beak over the roofs of the town.

He passed by the cathedral tower, where the white marble angels were sculptured. He passed by the palace and heard the sound of dancing. A beautiful girl came out on the balcony with her lover. "How wonderful the stars are," he said to her, "and how wonderful is the power of love!"

"I hope my dress will be ready in time for the State-ball," she answered; "I have ordered passion-flowers to be embroidered on it; but the seamstresses are so lazy."

He passed over the river, and saw the lanterns hanging to the masts of the ships. He passed over the Ghetto, and saw the old Jews bargaining with each other, and weighing out money in copper scales. At last he came to the poor house and looked in. The boy was tossing feverishly on his bed, and the mother had fallen asleep, she was so tired. In he hopped, and laid the great ruby on the table beside the woman's thimble. Then he flew gently round the bed, fanning the boy's forehead with his wings. "How cool I feel," said the boy, "I must be getting better"; and he sank into a delicious slumber.

Then the Swallow flew back to the Happy Prince, and told him what he had done. "It is curious," he remarked, "but I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold."

"That is because you have done a good action," said the Prince. And the little Swallow began to think, and then he fell asleep. Thinking always made him sleepy.

When day broke he flew down to the river and had a bath. "What a remarkable phenomenon," said the Professor of Ornithology as he was passing over the bridge. "A swallow in winter!" And he wrote a long letter about it to the local newspaper. Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.

"To-night I go to Egypt," said the Swallow, and he was in high spirits at the prospect. He visited all the public monuments, and sat a long time on top of the church steeple. Wherever he went the Sparrows chirruped, and said to each other, "What a distinguished stranger!" so he enjoyed himself very much.

When the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince. "Have you any commissions for Egypt?" he cried; "I am just starting."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"I am waited for in Egypt," answered the Swallow. "To-morrow my friends will fly up to the Second Cataract. The river-horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the cataract."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "far away across the city I see a young man in a garret. He is leaning over a desk covered with papers, and in a tumbler by his side there is a bunch of withered violets. His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes. He is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre, but he is too cold to write any more. There is no fire in the grate, and hunger has made him faint."

"I will wait with you one night longer," said the Swallow, who really had a good heart. "Shall I take him another ruby?"

"Alas! I have no ruby now," said the Prince; "my eyes are all that I have left. They are made of rare sapphires, which were brought out of India a thousand years ago. Pluck out one of them and take it to him. He will sell it to the jeweller, and buy food and firewood, and finish his play."

"Dear Prince," said the Swallow, "I cannot do that"; and he began to weep.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So the Swallow plucked out the Prince's eye, and flew away to the student's garret. It was easy enough to get in, as there was a hole in the roof. Through this he darted, and came into the room. The young man had his head buried in his hands, so he did not hear the flutter of the bird's wings, and when he looked up he found the beautiful sapphire lying on the withered violets.

"I am beginning to be appreciated," he cried; "this is from some great admirer. Now I can finish my play," and he looked quite happy.

The next day the Swallow flew down to the harbour. He sat on the mast of a large vessel and watched the sailors hauling big chests out of the hold with ropes. "Heave a-hoy!" they shouted as each chest came up. "I am going to Egypt"! cried the Swallow, but nobody minded, and when the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince.

"I am come to bid you good-bye," he cried.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"It is winter," answered the Swallow, "and the chill snow will soon be here. In Egypt the sun is warm on the green palm-trees, and the crocodiles lie in the mud and look lazily about them. My companions are building a nest in the Temple of Baalbec, and the pink and white doves are watching them, and cooing to each other. Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea."

"In the square below," said the Happy Prince, "there stands a little match-girl. She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled. Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying. She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare. Pluck out my other eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her."

"I will stay with you one night longer," said the Swallow, "but I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So he plucked out the Prince's other eye, and darted down with it. He swooped past the match-girl, and slipped the jewel into the palm of her hand. "What a lovely bit of glass," cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing.

Then the Swallow came back to the Prince. "You are blind now," he said, "so I will stay with you always."

"No, little Swallow," said the poor Prince, "you must go away to Egypt."

"I will stay with you always," said the Swallow, and he slept at the Prince's feet.

All the next day he sat on the Prince's shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.

"Dear little Swallow," said the Prince, "you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there."

So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm. "How hungry we are!" they said. "You must not lie here," shouted the Watchman, and they wandered out into the rain.

Then he flew back and told the Prince what he had seen.

"I am covered with fine gold," said the Prince, "you must take it off, leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor; the living always think that gold can make them happy."

Leaf after leaf of the fine gold the Swallow picked off, till the Happy Prince looked quite dull and grey. Leaf after leaf of the fine gold he brought to the poor, and the children's faces grew rosier, and they laughed and played games in the street. "We have bread now!" they cried.

Then the snow came, and after the snow came the frost. The streets looked as if they were made of silver, they were so bright and glistening; long icicles like crystal daggers hung down from the eaves of the houses, everybody went about in furs, and the little boys wore scarlet caps and skated on the ice.

The poor little Swallow grew colder and colder, but he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well. He picked up crumbs outside the baker's door when the baker was not looking and tried to keep himself warm by flapping his wings.

But at last he knew that he was going to die. He had just strength to fly up to the Prince's shoulder once more. "Good-bye, dear Prince!" he murmured, "will you let me kiss your hand?"

"I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow," said the Prince, "you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you."

"It is not to Egypt that I am going," said the Swallow. "I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?"

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet.

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.

Early the next morning the Mayor was walking in the square below in company with the Town Councillors. As they passed the column he looked up at the statue: "Dear me! how shabby the Happy Prince looks!" he said.

"How shabby indeed!" cried the Town Councillors, who always agreed with the Mayor; and they went up to look at it.

"The ruby has fallen out of his sword, his eyes are gone, and he is golden no longer," said the Mayor in fact, "he is litttle beter than a beggar!"

"Little better than a beggar," said the Town Councillors.

"And here is actually a dead bird at his feet!" continued the Mayor. "We must really issue a proclamation that birds are not to be allowed to die here." And the Town Clerk made a note of the suggestion.

So they pulled down the statue of the Happy Prince. "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful," said the Art Professor at the University.

Then they melted the statue in a furnace, and the Mayor held a meeting of the Corporation to decide what was to be done with the metal. "We must have another statue, of course," he said, "and it shall be a statue of myself."

"Of myself," said each of the Town Councillors, and they quarrelled. When I last heard of them they were quarrelling still.

"What a strange thing!" said the overseer of the workmen at the foundry. "This broken lead heart will not melt in the furnace. We must throw it away." So they threw it on a dust-heap where the dead Swallow was also lying.

"Bring me the two most precious things in the city," said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

"You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me."

// #32. When this World is Not (The Very Last)

"The day of the Lord will come...; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

What is there after that?

To this question there are three answers:

I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore. The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."

It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent. Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power. David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer, swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him say of his wife long since gone before:

And now I shall seek her once more,
On some Mississippi's vast tide
That flows the whole universe through,
Than earth's widest rivers more wide.

Evangeline I shall not miss
Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
On opposite sides of rivers so vast
That islands of worlds intervene.

But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not run around among them.

There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light, though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore.

Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.

In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation, too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers first.

What is light doing in space? That has greatly puzzled all philosophers. Without question there is inexpressible power. It is seen in velocity. But what is it doing? The law of conservation of force forbids the thought that it can be wasted. On the earth its power long ages ago was turned into coal. The power was reservoired in mountains ready for man. It is so great that a piece of coal that weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at sea. But what is the thousand million times more light than ever struck the earth doing in space? That is among the things we want to find out when we get there. There will be ample opportunity, space, time, and light enough.

It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is full of causes of sound. To anyone capable of turning these causes to effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into songful music. Light makes its impression of color by its different number of vibrations. So music sounds its keys. We know the number of vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet. These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid down, we may be able to hear them

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.

Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality. It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain exact quantities. An atom of bromine will combine with one of hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill all the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminishing it. Water molecules are like a mass of shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now, when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull stupidity can count in a lifetime.

We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed! It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah, delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth? Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of "scientific imagination." But all our imaginings fall far short of realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines. That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood. Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of the millionth dilution. Many people feel "in their bones" the coming of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor. Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read. It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He associated some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God.

Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements because they are stronger and more like God.

Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers, possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.

O the hour when this material
Shall have vanished like a cloud,
When amid the wide ethereal
All the invisible shall crowd.
In that sudden, strange transition,
By what new and finer sense
Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
And receive the influence?

Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes, light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life? They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. It is not disappointed.

Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid, and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in the use of a single talent.

Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them, yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon, the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.

Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

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."

(3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral natures of man. Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for their whole significance. It begins with God's walking with Adam in the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world. It includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify only to intensify the conception of the fact. Paul says, "Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him would have prevented his continuing in life. It is possible for all who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than other men's paragraphs and volumes. And he left on record for us promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through unbelief. We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight, have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God." They have wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to men. It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the power of an endless life. But what they do is chiefly valuable as evidence of what they are. It is little that men quench the violence of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again. It is great that they are able to do it. That they hold the hand that holds the world is something. But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and will to execute the best, is more. Fire may kindle again and the resurrected die, but the great personality survives.

These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation has for bodies.

Then all his being thrills with Joy. And past
The comets' sweep, the choral stars above,
With multiplying raptures drawn more swift
He flies into the very heart of love.

It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe. It is not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home among their personalities. This universe is a unity. It is not made up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll," the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the removal of things that can be shaken. For even then we may find the calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving. It says, "Lo, it is I; be not afraid."

Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home anywhere. He will ever say:

"The winds that o'er my ocean run
Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun;
Through life, through death, through faith, through time,
Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime,
Eternal trades that cannot veer,
And blowing, teach us how to steer;
And well for him whose joy, whose care,
Is but to keep before them fair.

"O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine,
Spread canvas to these airs divine.
Spread sail and let thy past life be
Forgotten in thy destiny."

// #31. Spiritual Dynamics

Will God indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon. Will God indeed work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day. Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to help out his human endeavors? Does God put special forces to open some doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and invigorate a man's own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten, because his heart is pure enough for God to work in it and through it? If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent, and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid?

First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the next highest force, cohesion. The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that gravitation cannot overcome it. But it is not by our energy. We did not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both gravitation and cohesion. Water, the result of chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its constituent elements with nothing less than a stream of lightning. We did not make the next highest force, vegetative life. That masters gravitation, and lifts up the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree's rootlets tear asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the oxygen from air and water. We did not create that force, measureless to our minds. We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater than all of them. The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not ourselves.

It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have originated themselves. It is equally so that they could maintain and continue themselves. There must be some continual upholding by a word of power.

It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan behind these forces. They are not blind Samsons grinding in a prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands.

If intelligent and planful, there must be personality. We may as well call it by the name by which it is universally known, God.

Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes? It is better to put it the other way. Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think God is on our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God's side." So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his plans?

That will depend on what he wants done. If he only wants mountains lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of strata and let them come down the other side up. If he wants mountains carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for thousands of years numberless tons. If he wants worlds held in rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation. Man is of no use; he cannot reach so far.

But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character. None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away. God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many. Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man's plans.

Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them, so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed, until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man. God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of eternal life.

Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man, making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds and hearts has commenced.

It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is not the title to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man's hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel's. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body.

Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism? What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship God? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold? Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of God? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?

But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works.

Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.

Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought.

And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who hath redeemed us unto God, and washed us in his blood.

To what extent, then, may we expect God will lend his forces to work out our plans? First, in so far as those forces have to do with the maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans. No energy will be withheld. All our plans should be such. The end in character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by success. God has to choose the poor in this world's things, rich in faith, to do his great work. And he has to make "the best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of character. He is then working with, not against, us. He would rather have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold.

But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we expect in our plans and work for others?

Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing." There must be an outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost. Over against that settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and assurance of the Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed iteration), "unto the end of the world." That has not yet come.

But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten. To what extent may we expect divine aid?

First, all these things are his purposes and plans. But since it is necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do what we can. We can plant and water, but God only can give the increase. Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help. "Get up, O lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the wheel, and whip up your horses." We may call on God to open the rock in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our teacups. It is no use to ask God for a special shower when deep plowing is all that is needed. It is no use to ask God to build churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till we have done our best.

But when we have done our best what may we expect? All things. They shall work together for good to those who love God enough to do their best for him in any plane of work. One could preach fifty sermons on the great works done by men, obviously too great for man's accomplishment. Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown, Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who, undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness. One of the great sins of our age is that men do not see God immanent in all things. We have found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. A sustainer is as necessary as a creator. There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. The next great service to be done by human philosophy is to bring back God in human thought into his own world. Since these things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the works of God by his power?

First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as included in his. All our works may be wrought in God, if we do his works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength.

Second, they must be attempted with the right motive of glorifying God. Christ is the pattern. He came not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him. And he did always the things that pleased him. In our fervid desires for the accomplishment of some great thing we should be as willing it should be accomplished by another as by ourselves. The personal pride is often a fly in the sweet-smelling savor. God would rather have a given work not done, or done by another, than to have one of his dear ones puffed up with sinful pride. Great Saul must often be removed and the work be left undone, or be done by some humble David.

"Inaudible voices call us, and we go;
Invisible hands restrain us, and we stay;
Forces, unfelt by our dull senses, sway
Our wavering wills, and hedge us in the way
We call our own, because we do not know.

"Are we, then, slaves of ignorant circumstance?
Nay, God forbid!
God holds the world, not blind, unreasoning chance!"

How shall we secure the cooperative power? There is power of every kind everywhere in plenty. All the Niagaras and Mississippis have run to waste since they began to thunder and flow. Greater power is in the wind everywhere. One can rake up enough electricity to turn all the wheels of a great city whenever he chooses to start his rake. The sky is full of Pentecosts. Power enough, but how shall we belt on? By fasting, prayer, and by willing to do the will of God. We have so much haste that we do not tarry at Jerusalem for fullness of power. Moses was forty years in the wilderness: Daniel fasted and prayed for one and twenty days. We are told to pray without ceasing, and that there are kinds of devils that go not out except at the command of those who fast and pray.

"More things are wrought by prayer than
This world dreams of."

The Bible is a record of achievements impossible to man. They are achievements of leaderships, emancipations, governments, getting money for building God's houses, making strong the weak, waxing valiant in fight, and turning the world upside down. The trouble with many of our modern saints is that they seek for purity only instead of power, ecstasy instead of excellence, self-satisfaction in a garden of spices instead of a baptism that straightens them out in a garden of agony. They are seekers of spiritual joys instead of good governments, cities well policed and sewered, with every street safe for the feet of innocence. The next revelation of new possibilities of grace that will break out of the old Word will be that of power.

How will this divine aid manifest itself? In the giving of wisdom for our plans and their execution. God will not help in any foolish plans. He wants no St. Peter's built in a village of six hundred people, no temple, except on a Moriah to which a whole nation goes up. Due proportion is a law of all his creations. The disciples planned not only to begin at Jerusalem, but to stay there. Their plans were wrong, and they had to be driven out by persecutions and martyrdoms (Acts viii, 4). But Africa, Europe, and Asia eagerly received the light which Jerusalem resisted. Some ministers to-day stay by their fine Jerusalems when the kitchens of the surrounding country wait to welcome them. The Spirit suffered not Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him to Macedonia. Had he then persisted in going to Asia his work would have been in vain.

We may expect wisdom in the choice of the human agents we select. Half a general's success lies in his choice of lieutenants. No class leader should be appointed nor steward nominated till after prayer for divine guidance. God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of. He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26). When Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than any other man.

We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted. Let Hezekiah spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings xix, 14). The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20). Let the answer to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord, strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14). Then all the heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our God" (v. l6). "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." The purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John iii, 8).

Lastly, we may expect actual help. These plans are all dear to God. He wishes them all accomplished. They have been wisely made. Opposition has been diminished. It only remains that our hearts be open to guidance and strengthening. Moses was sure I AM had sent him. Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth. Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord is your strength." God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus. The three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them from fire and lions. "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart." And the great promise of the Lord to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." And all great doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been girded for their work by the Almighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material; that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a part of his; that he may sing with new meaning,

"We for whose sakes all nature stands
And stars their courses move;"

that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified.

How shall it be done?

First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided for, and expected. We are children of God; there can be but one great end through the ages in the universe. There should be cooperation of every force. There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man. Promises of aid are abundant. Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of these words fail. We are invited to test them: "Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest, the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that God can lead and we help. Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking. When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America. Bishop Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that Christ always arrived before it came. So in regard to work to be done. The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we arrive. Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good partner. We are workers together with God. What is being done worthy of the copartnership?

// #30. The Power of Vegetable Life

I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head. They are smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little masses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds.

Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy quickly. Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven.

Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown, hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's. The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play. They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong. They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high.

How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination? That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only sequoia gigantea.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped--subulate. Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one. It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life. The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.



There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished.

The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity. It discriminates.

But how does it build itself? Myriads of rootlets search the surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf, flower, and seed. They often find what they want in other organizations or other chemical compounds. But with a power of analytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to their majestic growths. But how is material conveyed from rootlet to veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away? The great tree is more full of channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of canals, and it is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed. These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for the perpendicular elevation of the freight. The tiny boats run day and night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever landed on the way for bark or woody fiber. Freight never goes astray, nor are express packages miscarried. What starts for bark, leaf, fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else. There are hundreds of miles of canals, but every boat knows where to land its unmarked freight. Curious as is this work underground, that in the upper air is more so. The tree builds most of its solid substance from the mobile and tenuous air. Trees are largely condensed air. By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built into wood. Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need not dig for coal.

In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many other kinds of force. There is the power of cohesion. How it holds the particles of stone or iron together! You can hardly break its force with a great sledge. But the power of life in the tree, or even grass, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the disintegrating rock what it wants. So it must overcome the power of chemical affinity in water and air. The substances it wants are in other combinations, the power of which must be overcome.

Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree's vast weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad harp strings. It makes wide miles of air aromatic. Animal life feeds on the quintessence of life in its seeds. But most of all it is an object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the highest power has dominion over all other power.

The great power of vegetable life was shown under circumstances that seemed the least favorable in the following experiment:

In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Mass., a squash of the yellow Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift by its power of growth.



It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft, succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb. A good idea of the harness is given by the illustration. The squash was confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was indicated by weights on the lever over the top. There were, including seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and rootlets. These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four hours. They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed. On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds. By September 30 it lifted a ton. On October 24 it carried over two tons. The squash grew gnarled like an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany. Its inner cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual.

The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones from time to time. More weights were sought. They scurried through the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at varying distances, as shown in the cut. By the 31st of October it was carrying a weight of five thousand pounds. Then owing to defects of the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what might have been done under better conditions. Every particle of the squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous pressure. But life will assert itself.



No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." The tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out into all branches that are really vitally attached. No wonder that much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

// #29. Sea Sculpture

When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it, but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.

So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at Santa Cruz, California.

There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the rocks we will try to relate.



No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong. Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished.



When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore. At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.

No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great excavation one hundred feet back from the shore. It is one hundred and fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York, might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be carried out to sea like many another.



But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of bones within him.

In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the projecting finger. It is often done. Illustration No. 4 shows at low tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the pier stands lonely in the sea.



No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle.



Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that they may drink.



No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier, scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore. The one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and carries away arch and shore alike. At some points a careful and even admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless tooth gnaws on unceasingly.



On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience there that did not result quite so disastrously.

The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut through the rocky barrier of the shore. But in this case the trend of the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland. It terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which are not shown in the picture.



What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day. There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights, as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."

// (A)typical Birthday-Story

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.

He was very much admired indeed. "He is as beautiful as a weathercock," remarked one of the Town Councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes; "only not quite so useful," he added, fearing lest people should think him unpractical, which he really was not.

"Why can't you be like the Happy Prince?" asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. "The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything."

"I am glad there is some one in the world who is quite happy," muttered a disappointed man as he gazed at the wonderful statue.

"He looks just like an angel," said the Charity Children as they came out of the cathedral in their bright scarlet cloaks and their clean white pinafores.

"How do you know?" said the Mathematical Master, "you have never seen one."

"Ah! but we have, in our dreams," answered the children; and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming.

One night there flew over the city a little Swallow. His friends had gone away to Egypt six weeks before, but he had stayed behind, for he was in love with the most beautiful Reed. He had met her early in the spring as he was flying down the river after a big yellow moth, and had been so attracted by her slender waist that he had stopped to talk to her.

"Shall I love you?" said the Swallow, who liked to come to the point at once, and the Reed made him a low bow. So he flew round and round her, touching the water with his wings, and making silver ripples. This was his courtship, and it lasted all through the summer.

"It is a ridiculous attachment," twittered the other Swallows; "she has no money, and far too many relations"; and indeed the river was quite full of Reeds. Then, when the autumn came they all flew away.

After they had gone he felt lonely, and began to tire of his lady- love. "She has no conversation," he said, "and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind." And certainly, whenever the wind blew, the Reed made the most graceful curtseys. "I admit that she is domestic," he continued, "but I love travelling, and my wife, consequently, should love travelling also."

"Will you come away with me?" he said finally to her; but the Reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home.

"You have been trifling with me," he cried. "I am off to the Pyramids. Good-bye!" and he flew away.

All day long he flew, and at night-time he arrived at the city. "Where shall I put up?" he said; "I hope the town has made preparations."

Then he saw the statue on the tall column.

"I will put up there," he cried; "it is a fine position, with plenty of fresh air." So he alighted just between the feet of the Happy Prince.

"I have a golden bedroom," he said softly to himself as he looked round, and he prepared to go to sleep; but just as he was putting his head under his wing a large drop of water fell on him. "What a curious thing!" he cried; "there is not a single cloud in the sky, the stars are quite clear and bright, and yet it is raining. The climate in the north of Europe is really dreadful. The Reed used to like the rain, but that was merely her selfishness."

Then another drop fell.

"What is the use of a statue if it cannot keep the rain off?" he said; "I must look for a good chimney-pot," and he determined to fly away.

But before he had opened his wings, a third drop fell, and he looked up, and saw - Ah! what did he see?

The eyes of the Happy Prince were filled with tears, and tears were running down his golden cheeks. His face was so beautiful in the moonlight that the little Swallow was filled with pity.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I am the Happy Prince."

"Why are you weeping then?" asked the Swallow; "you have quite drenched me."

"When I was alive and had a human heart," answered the statue, "I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans- Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful. My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot chose but weep."

"What! is he not solid gold?" said the Swallow to himself. He was too polite to make any personal remarks out loud.

"Far away," continued the statue in a low musical voice, "far away in a little street there is a poor house. One of the windows is open, and through it I can see a woman seated at a table. Her face is thin and worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked by the needle, for she is a seamstress. She is embroidering passion- flowers on a satin gown for the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of- honour to wear at the next Court-ball. In a bed in the corner of the room her little boy is lying ill. He has a fever, and is asking for oranges. His mother has nothing to give him but river water, so he is crying. Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow, will you not bring her the ruby out of my sword-hilt? My feet are fastened to this pedestal and I cannot move."

"I am waited for in Egypt," said the Swallow. "My friends are flying up and down the Nile, and talking to the large lotus- flowers. Soon they will go to sleep in the tomb of the great King. The King is there himself in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are like withered leaves."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me for one night, and be my messenger? The boy is so thirsty, and the mother so sad."

"I don't think I like boys," answered the Swallow. "Last summer, when I was staying on the river, there were two rude boys, the miller's sons, who were always throwing stones at me. They never hit me, of course; we swallows fly far too well for that, and besides, I come of a family famous for its agility; but still, it was a mark of disrespect."

But the Happy Prince looked so sad that the little Swallow was sorry. "It is very cold here," he said; "but I will stay with you for one night, and be your messenger."

"Thank you, little Swallow," said the Prince.

So the Swallow picked out the great ruby from the Prince's sword, and flew away with it in his beak over the roofs of the town.

He passed by the cathedral tower, where the white marble angels were sculptured. He passed by the palace and heard the sound of dancing. A beautiful girl came out on the balcony with her lover. "How wonderful the stars are," he said to her, "and how wonderful is the power of love!"

"I hope my dress will be ready in time for the State-ball," she answered; "I have ordered passion-flowers to be embroidered on it; but the seamstresses are so lazy."

He passed over the river, and saw the lanterns hanging to the masts of the ships. He passed over the Ghetto, and saw the old Jews bargaining with each other, and weighing out money in copper scales. At last he came to the poor house and looked in. The boy was tossing feverishly on his bed, and the mother had fallen asleep, she was so tired. In he hopped, and laid the great ruby on the table beside the woman's thimble. Then he flew gently round the bed, fanning the boy's forehead with his wings. "How cool I feel," said the boy, "I must be getting better"; and he sank into a delicious slumber.

Then the Swallow flew back to the Happy Prince, and told him what he had done. "It is curious," he remarked, "but I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold."

"That is because you have done a good action," said the Prince. And the little Swallow began to think, and then he fell asleep. Thinking always made him sleepy.

When day broke he flew down to the river and had a bath. "What a remarkable phenomenon," said the Professor of Ornithology as he was passing over the bridge. "A swallow in winter!" And he wrote a long letter about it to the local newspaper. Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.

"To-night I go to Egypt," said the Swallow, and he was in high spirits at the prospect. He visited all the public monuments, and sat a long time on top of the church steeple. Wherever he went the Sparrows chirruped, and said to each other, "What a distinguished stranger!" so he enjoyed himself very much.

When the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince. "Have you any commissions for Egypt?" he cried; "I am just starting."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"I am waited for in Egypt," answered the Swallow. "To-morrow my friends will fly up to the Second Cataract. The river-horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the cataract."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "far away across the city I see a young man in a garret. He is leaning over a desk covered with papers, and in a tumbler by his side there is a bunch of withered violets. His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes. He is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre, but he is too cold to write any more. There is no fire in the grate, and hunger has made him faint."

"I will wait with you one night longer," said the Swallow, who really had a good heart. "Shall I take him another ruby?"

"Alas! I have no ruby now," said the Prince; "my eyes are all that I have left. They are made of rare sapphires, which were brought out of India a thousand years ago. Pluck out one of them and take it to him. He will sell it to the jeweller, and buy food and firewood, and finish his play."

"Dear Prince," said the Swallow, "I cannot do that"; and he began to weep.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So the Swallow plucked out the Prince's eye, and flew away to the student's garret. It was easy enough to get in, as there was a hole in the roof. Through this he darted, and came into the room. The young man had his head buried in his hands, so he did not hear the flutter of the bird's wings, and when he looked up he found the beautiful sapphire lying on the withered violets.

"I am beginning to be appreciated," he cried; "this is from some great admirer. Now I can finish my play," and he looked quite happy.

The next day the Swallow flew down to the harbour. He sat on the mast of a large vessel and watched the sailors hauling big chests out of the hold with ropes. "Heave a-hoy!" they shouted as each chest came up. "I am going to Egypt"! cried the Swallow, but nobody minded, and when the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince.

"I am come to bid you good-bye," he cried.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"It is winter," answered the Swallow, "and the chill snow will soon be here. In Egypt the sun is warm on the green palm-trees, and the crocodiles lie in the mud and look lazily about them. My companions are building a nest in the Temple of Baalbec, and the pink and white doves are watching them, and cooing to each other. Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea."

"In the square below," said the Happy Prince, "there stands a little match-girl. She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled. Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying. She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare. Pluck out my other eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her."

"I will stay with you one night longer," said the Swallow, "but I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So he plucked out the Prince's other eye, and darted down with it. He swooped past the match-girl, and slipped the jewel into the palm of her hand. "What a lovely bit of glass," cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing.

Then the Swallow came back to the Prince. "You are blind now," he said, "so I will stay with you always."

"No, little Swallow," said the poor Prince, "you must go away to Egypt."

"I will stay with you always," said the Swallow, and he slept at the Prince's feet.

All the next day he sat on the Prince's shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.

"Dear little Swallow," said the Prince, "you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there."

So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm. "How hungry we are!" they said. "You must not lie here," shouted the Watchman, and they wandered out into the rain.

Then he flew back and told the Prince what he had seen.

"I am covered with fine gold," said the Prince, "you must take it off, leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor; the living always think that gold can make them happy."

Leaf after leaf of the fine gold the Swallow picked off, till the Happy Prince looked quite dull and grey. Leaf after leaf of the fine gold he brought to the poor, and the children's faces grew rosier, and they laughed and played games in the street. "We have bread now!" they cried.

Then the snow came, and after the snow came the frost. The streets looked as if they were made of silver, they were so bright and glistening; long icicles like crystal daggers hung down from the eaves of the houses, everybody went about in furs, and the little boys wore scarlet caps and skated on the ice.

The poor little Swallow grew colder and colder, but he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well. He picked up crumbs outside the baker's door when the baker was not looking and tried to keep himself warm by flapping his wings.

But at last he knew that he was going to die. He had just strength to fly up to the Prince's shoulder once more. "Good-bye, dear Prince!" he murmured, "will you let me kiss your hand?"

"I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow," said the Prince, "you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you."

"It is not to Egypt that I am going," said the Swallow. "I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?"

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet.

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.

Early the next morning the Mayor was walking in the square below in company with the Town Councillors. As they passed the column he looked up at the statue: "Dear me! how shabby the Happy Prince looks!" he said.

"How shabby indeed!" cried the Town Councillors, who always agreed with the Mayor; and they went up to look at it.

"The ruby has fallen out of his sword, his eyes are gone, and he is golden no longer," said the Mayor in fact, "he is litttle beter than a beggar!"

"Little better than a beggar," said the Town Councillors.

"And here is actually a dead bird at his feet!" continued the Mayor. "We must really issue a proclamation that birds are not to be allowed to die here." And the Town Clerk made a note of the suggestion.

So they pulled down the statue of the Happy Prince. "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful," said the Art Professor at the University.

Then they melted the statue in a furnace, and the Mayor held a meeting of the Corporation to decide what was to be done with the metal. "We must have another statue, of course," he said, "and it shall be a statue of myself."

"Of myself," said each of the Town Councillors, and they quarrelled. When I last heard of them they were quarrelling still.

"What a strange thing!" said the overseer of the workmen at the foundry. "This broken lead heart will not melt in the furnace. We must throw it away." So they threw it on a dust-heap where the dead Swallow was also lying.

"Bring me the two most precious things in the city," said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

"You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me."

// #32. When this World is Not (The Very Last)

"The day of the Lord will come...; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

What is there after that?

To this question there are three answers:

I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore. The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."

It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent. Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power. David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer, swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him say of his wife long since gone before:

And now I shall seek her once more,
On some Mississippi's vast tide
That flows the whole universe through,
Than earth's widest rivers more wide.

Evangeline I shall not miss
Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
On opposite sides of rivers so vast
That islands of worlds intervene.

But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not run around among them.

There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light, though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore.

Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.

In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation, too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers first.

What is light doing in space? That has greatly puzzled all philosophers. Without question there is inexpressible power. It is seen in velocity. But what is it doing? The law of conservation of force forbids the thought that it can be wasted. On the earth its power long ages ago was turned into coal. The power was reservoired in mountains ready for man. It is so great that a piece of coal that weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at sea. But what is the thousand million times more light than ever struck the earth doing in space? That is among the things we want to find out when we get there. There will be ample opportunity, space, time, and light enough.

It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is full of causes of sound. To anyone capable of turning these causes to effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into songful music. Light makes its impression of color by its different number of vibrations. So music sounds its keys. We know the number of vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet. These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid down, we may be able to hear them

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.

Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality. It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain exact quantities. An atom of bromine will combine with one of hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill all the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminishing it. Water molecules are like a mass of shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now, when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull stupidity can count in a lifetime.

We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed! It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah, delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth? Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of "scientific imagination." But all our imaginings fall far short of realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines. That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood. Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of the millionth dilution. Many people feel "in their bones" the coming of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor. Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read. It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He associated some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God.

Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements because they are stronger and more like God.

Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers, possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.

O the hour when this material
Shall have vanished like a cloud,
When amid the wide ethereal
All the invisible shall crowd.
In that sudden, strange transition,
By what new and finer sense
Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
And receive the influence?

Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes, light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life? They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. It is not disappointed.

Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid, and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in the use of a single talent.

Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them, yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon, the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.

Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

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."

(3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral natures of man. Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for their whole significance. It begins with God's walking with Adam in the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world. It includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify only to intensify the conception of the fact. Paul says, "Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him would have prevented his continuing in life. It is possible for all who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than other men's paragraphs and volumes. And he left on record for us promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through unbelief. We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight, have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God." They have wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to men. It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the power of an endless life. But what they do is chiefly valuable as evidence of what they are. It is little that men quench the violence of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again. It is great that they are able to do it. That they hold the hand that holds the world is something. But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and will to execute the best, is more. Fire may kindle again and the resurrected die, but the great personality survives.

These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation has for bodies.

Then all his being thrills with Joy. And past
The comets' sweep, the choral stars above,
With multiplying raptures drawn more swift
He flies into the very heart of love.

It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe. It is not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home among their personalities. This universe is a unity. It is not made up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll," the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the removal of things that can be shaken. For even then we may find the calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving. It says, "Lo, it is I; be not afraid."

Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home anywhere. He will ever say:

"The winds that o'er my ocean run
Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun;
Through life, through death, through faith, through time,
Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime,
Eternal trades that cannot veer,
And blowing, teach us how to steer;
And well for him whose joy, whose care,
Is but to keep before them fair.

"O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine,
Spread canvas to these airs divine.
Spread sail and let thy past life be
Forgotten in thy destiny."

// #31. Spiritual Dynamics

Will God indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon. Will God indeed work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day. Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to help out his human endeavors? Does God put special forces to open some doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and invigorate a man's own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten, because his heart is pure enough for God to work in it and through it? If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent, and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid?

First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the next highest force, cohesion. The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that gravitation cannot overcome it. But it is not by our energy. We did not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both gravitation and cohesion. Water, the result of chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its constituent elements with nothing less than a stream of lightning. We did not make the next highest force, vegetative life. That masters gravitation, and lifts up the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree's rootlets tear asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the oxygen from air and water. We did not create that force, measureless to our minds. We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater than all of them. The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not ourselves.

It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have originated themselves. It is equally so that they could maintain and continue themselves. There must be some continual upholding by a word of power.

It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan behind these forces. They are not blind Samsons grinding in a prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands.

If intelligent and planful, there must be personality. We may as well call it by the name by which it is universally known, God.

Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes? It is better to put it the other way. Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think God is on our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God's side." So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his plans?

That will depend on what he wants done. If he only wants mountains lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of strata and let them come down the other side up. If he wants mountains carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for thousands of years numberless tons. If he wants worlds held in rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation. Man is of no use; he cannot reach so far.

But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character. None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away. God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many. Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man's plans.

Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them, so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed, until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man. God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of eternal life.

Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man, making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds and hearts has commenced.

It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is not the title to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man's hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel's. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body.

Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism? What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship God? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold? Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of God? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?

But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works.

Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.

Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought.

And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who hath redeemed us unto God, and washed us in his blood.

To what extent, then, may we expect God will lend his forces to work out our plans? First, in so far as those forces have to do with the maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans. No energy will be withheld. All our plans should be such. The end in character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by success. God has to choose the poor in this world's things, rich in faith, to do his great work. And he has to make "the best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of character. He is then working with, not against, us. He would rather have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold.

But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we expect in our plans and work for others?

Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing." There must be an outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost. Over against that settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and assurance of the Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed iteration), "unto the end of the world." That has not yet come.

But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten. To what extent may we expect divine aid?

First, all these things are his purposes and plans. But since it is necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do what we can. We can plant and water, but God only can give the increase. Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help. "Get up, O lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the wheel, and whip up your horses." We may call on God to open the rock in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our teacups. It is no use to ask God for a special shower when deep plowing is all that is needed. It is no use to ask God to build churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till we have done our best.

But when we have done our best what may we expect? All things. They shall work together for good to those who love God enough to do their best for him in any plane of work. One could preach fifty sermons on the great works done by men, obviously too great for man's accomplishment. Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown, Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who, undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness. One of the great sins of our age is that men do not see God immanent in all things. We have found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. A sustainer is as necessary as a creator. There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. The next great service to be done by human philosophy is to bring back God in human thought into his own world. Since these things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the works of God by his power?

First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as included in his. All our works may be wrought in God, if we do his works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength.

Second, they must be attempted with the right motive of glorifying God. Christ is the pattern. He came not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him. And he did always the things that pleased him. In our fervid desires for the accomplishment of some great thing we should be as willing it should be accomplished by another as by ourselves. The personal pride is often a fly in the sweet-smelling savor. God would rather have a given work not done, or done by another, than to have one of his dear ones puffed up with sinful pride. Great Saul must often be removed and the work be left undone, or be done by some humble David.

"Inaudible voices call us, and we go;
Invisible hands restrain us, and we stay;
Forces, unfelt by our dull senses, sway
Our wavering wills, and hedge us in the way
We call our own, because we do not know.

"Are we, then, slaves of ignorant circumstance?
Nay, God forbid!
God holds the world, not blind, unreasoning chance!"

How shall we secure the cooperative power? There is power of every kind everywhere in plenty. All the Niagaras and Mississippis have run to waste since they began to thunder and flow. Greater power is in the wind everywhere. One can rake up enough electricity to turn all the wheels of a great city whenever he chooses to start his rake. The sky is full of Pentecosts. Power enough, but how shall we belt on? By fasting, prayer, and by willing to do the will of God. We have so much haste that we do not tarry at Jerusalem for fullness of power. Moses was forty years in the wilderness: Daniel fasted and prayed for one and twenty days. We are told to pray without ceasing, and that there are kinds of devils that go not out except at the command of those who fast and pray.

"More things are wrought by prayer than
This world dreams of."

The Bible is a record of achievements impossible to man. They are achievements of leaderships, emancipations, governments, getting money for building God's houses, making strong the weak, waxing valiant in fight, and turning the world upside down. The trouble with many of our modern saints is that they seek for purity only instead of power, ecstasy instead of excellence, self-satisfaction in a garden of spices instead of a baptism that straightens them out in a garden of agony. They are seekers of spiritual joys instead of good governments, cities well policed and sewered, with every street safe for the feet of innocence. The next revelation of new possibilities of grace that will break out of the old Word will be that of power.

How will this divine aid manifest itself? In the giving of wisdom for our plans and their execution. God will not help in any foolish plans. He wants no St. Peter's built in a village of six hundred people, no temple, except on a Moriah to which a whole nation goes up. Due proportion is a law of all his creations. The disciples planned not only to begin at Jerusalem, but to stay there. Their plans were wrong, and they had to be driven out by persecutions and martyrdoms (Acts viii, 4). But Africa, Europe, and Asia eagerly received the light which Jerusalem resisted. Some ministers to-day stay by their fine Jerusalems when the kitchens of the surrounding country wait to welcome them. The Spirit suffered not Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him to Macedonia. Had he then persisted in going to Asia his work would have been in vain.

We may expect wisdom in the choice of the human agents we select. Half a general's success lies in his choice of lieutenants. No class leader should be appointed nor steward nominated till after prayer for divine guidance. God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of. He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26). When Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than any other man.

We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted. Let Hezekiah spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings xix, 14). The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20). Let the answer to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord, strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14). Then all the heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our God" (v. l6). "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." The purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John iii, 8).

Lastly, we may expect actual help. These plans are all dear to God. He wishes them all accomplished. They have been wisely made. Opposition has been diminished. It only remains that our hearts be open to guidance and strengthening. Moses was sure I AM had sent him. Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth. Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord is your strength." God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus. The three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them from fire and lions. "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart." And the great promise of the Lord to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." And all great doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been girded for their work by the Almighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material; that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a part of his; that he may sing with new meaning,

"We for whose sakes all nature stands
And stars their courses move;"

that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified.

How shall it be done?

First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided for, and expected. We are children of God; there can be but one great end through the ages in the universe. There should be cooperation of every force. There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man. Promises of aid are abundant. Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of these words fail. We are invited to test them: "Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest, the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that God can lead and we help. Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking. When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America. Bishop Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that Christ always arrived before it came. So in regard to work to be done. The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we arrive. Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good partner. We are workers together with God. What is being done worthy of the copartnership?

// #30. The Power of Vegetable Life

I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head. They are smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little masses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds.

Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy quickly. Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven.

Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown, hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's. The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play. They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong. They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high.

How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination? That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only sequoia gigantea.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped--subulate. Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one. It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life. The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.



There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished.

The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity. It discriminates.

But how does it build itself? Myriads of rootlets search the surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf, flower, and seed. They often find what they want in other organizations or other chemical compounds. But with a power of analytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to their majestic growths. But how is material conveyed from rootlet to veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away? The great tree is more full of channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of canals, and it is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed. These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for the perpendicular elevation of the freight. The tiny boats run day and night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever landed on the way for bark or woody fiber. Freight never goes astray, nor are express packages miscarried. What starts for bark, leaf, fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else. There are hundreds of miles of canals, but every boat knows where to land its unmarked freight. Curious as is this work underground, that in the upper air is more so. The tree builds most of its solid substance from the mobile and tenuous air. Trees are largely condensed air. By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built into wood. Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need not dig for coal.

In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many other kinds of force. There is the power of cohesion. How it holds the particles of stone or iron together! You can hardly break its force with a great sledge. But the power of life in the tree, or even grass, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the disintegrating rock what it wants. So it must overcome the power of chemical affinity in water and air. The substances it wants are in other combinations, the power of which must be overcome.

Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree's vast weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad harp strings. It makes wide miles of air aromatic. Animal life feeds on the quintessence of life in its seeds. But most of all it is an object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the highest power has dominion over all other power.

The great power of vegetable life was shown under circumstances that seemed the least favorable in the following experiment:

In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Mass., a squash of the yellow Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift by its power of growth.



It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft, succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb. A good idea of the harness is given by the illustration. The squash was confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was indicated by weights on the lever over the top. There were, including seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and rootlets. These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four hours. They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed. On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds. By September 30 it lifted a ton. On October 24 it carried over two tons. The squash grew gnarled like an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany. Its inner cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual.

The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones from time to time. More weights were sought. They scurried through the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at varying distances, as shown in the cut. By the 31st of October it was carrying a weight of five thousand pounds. Then owing to defects of the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what might have been done under better conditions. Every particle of the squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous pressure. But life will assert itself.



No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." The tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out into all branches that are really vitally attached. No wonder that much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

// #29. Sea Sculpture

When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it, but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.

So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at Santa Cruz, California.

There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the rocks we will try to relate.



No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong. Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished.



When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore. At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.

No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great excavation one hundred feet back from the shore. It is one hundred and fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York, might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be carried out to sea like many another.



But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of bones within him.

In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the projecting finger. It is often done. Illustration No. 4 shows at low tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the pier stands lonely in the sea.



No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle.



Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that they may drink.



No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier, scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore. The one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and carries away arch and shore alike. At some points a careful and even admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless tooth gnaws on unceasingly.



On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience there that did not result quite so disastrously.

The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut through the rocky barrier of the shore. But in this case the trend of the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland. It terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which are not shown in the picture.



What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day. There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights, as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."