Recreations in Astronomy / With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work

by Henry White Warren

When God made matter, so far as our thought permits us to know, he simply made force stationary and unconscious. Thereafter he moves through it with his own will. He can at any time change these forces, making air solid, water and rock gaseous, a world a cloud, or a fire-mist a stone. He may at some time restore all force to consciousness again, and make every part of the universe thrill with responsive joy. "Then shall the mountains and the hills break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field clap their hands." One of these changes is to come to the earth. Amidst great noise the heaven shall flee, the earth be burned up, and all their forces be changed to new forms. Perhaps it will not then be visible to mortal eyes. Perhaps force will then be made conscious, and the flowers thereafter return our love as much as lower creatures do now. A river and tree of life may be consciously alive, as well as give life. Poets that are nearest to God are constantly hearing the sweet voices of responsive feeling in nature.

"For his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness and a smile,
And eloquence of beauty; and she glides
Into his darker musings with a mild
And gentle sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness ere he is aware."

Prophets who utter God's voice of truth say, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for holy men, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing."

Distinguish clearly between certainty and surmise. The certainty is that the world will pass through catastrophic changes to a perfect world. The grave of uniformitarianism is already covered with grass. He that creates promises to complete. The invisible, imponderable, inaudible ether is beyond our apprehension; it transmits impressions 186,000 miles a second; it is millions of times more capable and energetic than air. What may be the bounds of its possibility none can imagine, for law is not abrogated nor designs disregarded as we ascend into higher realms. Law works out more beautiful designs with more absolute certainty. Why should there not be a finer universe than this, and disconnected from this world altogether—a fit home for immortal souls? It is a necessity.

God filleth all in all, is everywhere omnipotent and wise. Why should there be great vacuities, barren of power and its creative outgoings? God has fixed the stars as proofs of his agency at some points in space. But is it in points only? Science is proud of its discovery that what men once thought to be empty space is more intensely active than the coarser forms of matter can be. But in the long times which are past Job glanced at earth, seas, clouds, pillars of heaven, stars, day, night, all visible things, and then added: "Lo! these are only the outlying borders of his works. What a whisper of a word we hear of Him! The thunder of his power who can comprehend?"

Science discovers that man is adapted for mastery in this world. He is of the highest order of visible creatures. Neither is it possible to imagine an order of beings generically higher to be connected with the conditions of the material world. This whole secret was known to the author of the oldest writing. "And God blessed them, and God said unto them: Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." The idea is never lost sight of in the sacred writings. And while every man knows he must fail in one great contest, and yield himself to death, the later portions of the divine Word offer him victory even here. The typical man is commissioned to destroy even death, and make man a sharer in the victory. Science babbles at this great truth of man's position like a little child; Scripture treats it with a breadth of perfect wisdom we are only beginning to grasp.

Science tells us that each type is prophetic of a higher one. The whale has bones prophetic of a human hand. Has man reached perfection? Is there no prophecy in him? Not in his body, perhaps; but how his whole soul yearns for greater beauty. As soon as he has found food, the savage begins to carve his paddle, and make himself gorgeous with feathers. How man yearns for strength, subduing animal and cosmic forces to his will! How he fights against darkness and death, and strives for perfection and holiness! These prophecies compel us to believe there is a world where powers like those of electricity and luminiferous ether are ever at hand; where its waters are rivers of life, and its trees full of perfect healing, and from which all unholiness is forever kept. What we infer, Scripture affirms.

Science tells us there has been a survival of the fittest. Doubtless this is so. So in the future there will be a survival of the fittest. What is it? Wisdom, gentleness, meekness, brotherly kindness, and charity. Over those who have these traits death hath no permanent power. The caterpillar has no fear as he weaves his own shroud; for there is life within fit to survive, and ere long it spreads its gorgeous wings, and flies in the air above where once it crawled. Man has had two states of being already. One confined, dark, peculiarly nourished, slightly conscious; then he was born into another—wide, differently nourished, and intensely conscious. He knows he may be born again into a life wider yet, differently nourished, and even yet more intensely conscious. Science has no hint how a long ascending series of developments crowned by man may advance another step, and make man ισαγγελοσ—equal to angels. But the simplest teaching of Scripture points out a way so clear that a child need not miss the glorious consummation.

When Uranus hastened in one part of its orbit, and then retarded, and swung too wide, men said there must be another attracting world beyond; and, looking there, Neptune was found. So, when individual men are so strong that nations or armies cannot break down their wills; so brave, that lions have no terrors; so holy, that temptation cannot lure nor sin defile them; so grand in thought, that men cannot follow; so pure in walk, that God walks with them—let us infer an attracting world, high and pure and strong as heaven. The eleventh chapter of Hebrews is a roll-call of heroes of whom this world was not worthy. They were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that they might obtain a better resurrection. The world to come influenced, as it were, the orbits of their souls, and when their bodies fell off, earth having no hold on them, they sped on to their celestial home. The tendency of such souls necessitates such a world.

The worlds and the Word speak but one language, teach but one set of truths. How was it possible that the writers of the earlier Scriptures described physical phenomena with wonderful sublimity, and with such penetrative truth? They gazed upon the same heaven that those men saw who ages afterward led the world in knowledge. These latter were near-sighted, and absorbed in the pictures on the first veil of matter; the former were far-sighted, and penetrated a hundred strata of thickest material, and saw the immaterial power behind. The one class studied the present, and made the gravest mistakes; the other pierced the uncounted ages of the past, and uttered the profoundest wisdom. There is but one explanation. He that planned and made the worlds inspired the Word.