Science and religion are not two separate departments, they are not even two phases of the same truth. Science has a broader realm in the unseen than in the seen, in the source of power than in the outcomes of power, in the sublime laws of spirit than in the laws of matter; and religion sheds its beautiful light over all stages of life, till, whether we eat or whether we drink, or whatsoever we do, we may do all for the glory of God. Science and religion make common confession that the great object of life is to learn and to grow. Both will come to see the best possible means, for the attainment of this end is a personal relation to a teacher who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
XII.
THE ULTIMATE FORCE.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things became by him, and without him was not anything made that was made * * * and by him all things stand together."
"O thou eternal one; whose presence blight
All space doth occupy—all motion guide—
Thou from primeval nothingness didst call
First chaos, then existence. Lord, on thee
Eternity had its foundation: all
Sprung forth from thee—of light, joy, harmony,
Sole origin: all life, all beauty thine.
Thy word created all, and doth create;
Thy splendor fills all space with rays divine;
Thou art and wert, and shalt be glorious, great;
Life-giving, life-sustaining Potentate,
Thy chains the unmeasured universe surround—
Upheld by thee, by thee inspired with breath."
DERZHAVIN.
THE ULTIMATE FORCE.
The universe is God's name writ large. Thought goes up the shining suns as golden stairs, and reads the consecutive syllables—all might, and wisdom, and beauty; and if the heart be fine enough and pure enough, it also reads everywhere the mystic name of love. Let us learn to read the hieroglyphics, and then turn to the blazonry of the infinite page. That is the key-note; the heavens and the earth declaring the glory of God, and men with souls attuned listening.
To what voices shall we listen first? Stand on the shore of a lake set like an azure gem among the bosses of green hills. The patter of rain means an annual fall of four cubic feet of water on every square foot of it. It weighs two hundred and forty pounds to the cubic foot, one hundred million tons on the surface of a little sheet of water twenty miles long by three wide. Now, all that weight of falling rain had to be lifted, a work compared to which taking up mountains and casting them into the sea is pastime. All that water had to be taken up before it could be cast down, and carried hundreds of miles before it could be there. You have heard Niagara's thunder; have stood beneath the falling immensity; seen it ceaselessly poured from an infinite hand; felt that you would be ground to atoms if you fell into that resistless flood. Well, all that infinity of water had to be lifted by main force, had to be taken up out of the far Pacific, brought over the Rocky Mountains; and the Mississippi keeps bearing its wide miles of water to the Gulf, and Niagara keeps thundering age after age, because there is power somewhere to carry the immeasurable floods all the time the other way in the upper air.
But this is only the Alpha of power. Professor Clark, of Amherst, Massachusetts, found that such a soft and pulpy thing as a squash had so great a power of growth that it lifted three thousand pounds, and held it day and night for months. It toiled and grew under the growing weight, compacting its substance like oak to do the work. All over the earth this tremendous power and push of life goes on—in the little star-eyed flowers that look up to God only on the Alpine heights, in every tuft of grass, in every acre of wheat, in every mile of prairie, and in every lofty tree that wrestles with the tempests of one hundred winters. But this is only the B in the alphabet of power.