"There are several kinds of emanations from radium. Photographs similar to those produced by the Roentgen ray tube and induction coil can be got by means of the emanations from a small quantity of radium. I took a screen made of zincblende, which will phosphoresce when the emanations of radium fall upon it. I then painted upon it, in a solution of radium, the word 'Radium.' In the dark this screen (about three inches by four inches) gives off sufficient light to read by. But the most striking way of showing the emanations is by the little contrivance I call a Spinthariscope. In this a zinc sulphide screen is fitted at the end of a short brass tube, with a speck of radium about a millimeter away from it. Looking in the dark through the lens at the other end one sees a regular bombardment of the screen by the emanations. The phenomena of radium require us to recast many of our ideas of matter, electricity, and energy, and its discovery promises to realize what for the last hundred years have been but day-dreams of philosophy.
"Although the fact of emission of heat by radium is in itself sufficiently remarkable, this heat is probably only a small portion of the energy radium is constantly sending into space. It is at the same time hurling off material particles which reveal their impact on a screen by luminous scintillations. Stop these by a glass or mica screen, and torrents of Roentgen rays still pour out from a few milligrams of radium salt in quantity to exhibit to a company all the phenomena of Roentgen rays, and with energy enough to produce a nasty blister on the flesh, if kept near it for an hour."
It is hardly possible to contemplate this remarkable element in the world of nature without recognizing its correspondence in the world of spirit. If an element radiates perpetual light, heat, and power with no loss of its own inherent energy, so the spirit can radiate love, sympathy, sweetness, and inspiration with no diminution of its own quality. Science may be unable to recognize the medium from which radium is fed; but religion recognizes the medium from which the spirit draws its sustenance in the power of God. The human will merged in the divine will is invincible. There is no ideal of life which it may not realize, and this realization is in the line of the inevitable and is experienced with the unerring certainty of a mathematical demonstration.
Yet, when one comes to examine the actual average attitude of humanity toward this subject of the divine will, one finds it is largely that of a mere gloomy and enforced resignation, even at its best, and, at its worst, of distrust and rebellion to the will of God. It seems to be held as the last resort of desperation and despair, rather than as the one abounding source of all joy and success and achievement.
The average individual holds a traditional belief that he ought, perhaps, to be able sincerely to wish that God's will be done, but as a matter of fact he far prefers his own. The petition is, in his mind, invariably associated with seasons of great sorrow, disaster, and calamity, when, having apparently nothing else to hope for, a prayer is offered for the will of God! It is somewhat vaguely held to be the appropriate expression for the last emergency, and that it implies resigning one's self to the most serious and irreferable calamity. There is also a nebulous feeling that while the will of God may be entirely appropriate to the conditions and circumstances of the aged, the poor, the unfortunate, and the defective classes, it is the last thing in the world to be invoked for the young, the gifted, the strong, and the brilliant orders of society. It is tacitly relegated to a place in some last hopeless emergency, and not to a place in the creative energy of the most brilliant achievement.
Now, as a matter of profoundest truth, this attitude is as remote from the clear realization of what is involved in the will of God as would be the conviction that the flying express train or the swift electric motor cars might be suitable enough for the aged, and the weary, and the invalid, and the people whose time was of little consequence, but that the young, the radiant, the eager, the gifted, the people to whom time was valuable, must go by their own conveyances of horse or foot under their immediate personal control. This fallacy is no more remote from truth than is the fallacy that the will of God is something to be accepted with what decorum of resignation one may, only when he cannot help it! On the contrary, the will of God is the infinitely great motor of human life. Its power is as incalculably greater over the soul than that of radium over other elements, as it is higher in the scale of being; as spirit rather than substance; and the Life Radiant is really entered upon when one has come absolutely to merge all his longing and desire into the divine purposes. It is like availing one's self of the great laws of attraction and gravitation in nature. With the human will identified with the divine will, every day's experience becomes invested with the keenest zest and interest. The events that may arise at any moment enlist the energy and fascinate the imagination. The consciousness of union with God produces an exquisite confidence in the wise and sweet enchantment of life; the constant receptivity of the soul to the influence and the guiding of the Holy Spirit make an atmosphere ecstatic, even under the most commonplace or outwardly depressing circumstances. Celestial harmonies thrill the air. In this divine atmosphere—the soul's native air—every energy is quickened. The divine realm is as truly the habitat of the spiritual man—who, temporarily inhabiting a physical body that he may thus come into relations with a physical world, is essentially a spiritual rather than a physical being—as the air is the habitat of the bird, or the water of the fish. When the divine statement is made, "Without Me ye can do nothing," it is simply that of a literal fact. The gloom, the depression, the irritation that so often prevail and persist in mental conditions, do not arise, primarily, from any outward trial or perplexity; they are the result—the inevitable result—of the soul's lack of union with God; the lack of that rapport between the spirit of man and the divine spirit in which alone is exhilaration and joy. When this union is forged, when the human will rests perfectly in the divine will, one then absolutely knows, with the most positive and literal conviction, that "all things work together for good to them that love God." The assurance is felt with the unchallenged force of a mathematical demonstration. Not merely that the pleasant and agreeable things work together for good, but all things—pain, loss, sorrow, injustice, misapprehension. Then one realizes in his own experience the significance of the words, "We glory in tribulation, also." One has heard all one's life, perhaps, of "the ministry of sorrow," and similar phrases, and he has become a trifle impatient of them as a sort of incantation with which he has little sympathy. At the best, he relegates this order of ministry to the rank and file of humanity; to those whose lives are (to his vision) somewhat prosy and dull; and for himself he proposes to live in a world beautiful, where stars and sunsets and flames and fragrances enchant the hours, where, with his feet shod with silver bells, he is perpetually conscious of being
"Born and nourished in miracles."
He is perfectly confident that every life can be happy, if it will; and he regards sorrow as a wholly stupid and negative state which no one need fall into if only he have sufficient energy to generate a perpetual enchantment. Thus he dances down the years like the daffodils on the morning breeze, singing always his hymn to the radiant goddess:
"The Fairest enchants me,
The Mighty commands me,"
pledging his faith at the Altar of Perpetual Adoration that one has only but to believe in happiness and make room for it in his life in order to live in this constant exhilaration. Then, one day, he awakens to find his world in ruins. Sorrow, pain, loss, have come upon him, and have come in the one form of all others that seems most impossible to bear. If it were death, even of the one dearest on earth, he would be sustained by divine consolations. If it were financial deprivation, he could meet it with fortitude and accept Goethe's counsel to "go and earn more." If it were any one of various other forms of trial, he reflects, there would be for his pain various forms of consolation; but the peculiar guise it has assumed paralyzes him with its baffling power, its darkness of eclipse. The element of hopelessness in it,—his own utter inability to understand the cause of the sorrow which is literally a thunderbolt out of a clear sky,—plunges him almost into despair. He had endeavored to give the best, but the result is as if he had given the worst; he had come to rely on a perfect and beautiful comprehension and sympathy, but he is confronted with the most inexplicable misapprehension of all his motives, the most complete misunderstanding of all his aspirations and prayers. This, or other combinations and conditions of which it may serve as a type, is one of the phases of human experience. If pain were only the inevitable result of conscious and intentional wrong-doing, then might one even learn to refrain from the error and thus avoid the result. But a deeper experience in life, a more profound insight into the springs of its action, reveal that pain, as well as joy, falls into experience as an event encountered on the onward march, rather than as being, invariably, conditions created by ourselves. In the final analysis of being, we may have created the causes sometime and somewhere; but in the immediate sense we fail to discern the trace of our own action. A joy, a radiance undreamed of, suddenly drops into a day, making it a memorable date forever; a joy that transmutes itself into exaltation and a higher range of energy. Naturally, we count such an experience divine, and offer our gratitude to God, the giver of all blessings. But a tragedy of sorrow, a darkness of desolation impenetrable and seemingly final, also falls suddenly into a day, and inexpressible amazement and incredulity that it can be real are added to the pain. But it is real. The sunshine has vanished; the stars have hidden their light; the air is leaden where once it was all gold and rose and pearl; one is alone in the desert, in a loneliness that no voice sounds through, in an anguish that no human sympathy can reach or sustain. All that made life worth the living has been inexplicably withdrawn; and how, then, shall he live? And why shall he live? he may even question. The springs of energy are broken and his powers are paralyzed. Whatever he has hitherto done, whatever he has tried or hoped to do in the joyous exaltation of the days that have vanished from all save memory, he can do no longer. It is not a question of choice, not a decision that he would not still continue his efforts; but it is the total impossibility of doing so that settles down upon him like a leaden pall. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the dumb cannot speak, the paralyzed cannot walk,—no matter how gladly they would fulfil these functions. So he looks at his own life. His world is in ruins, and he has no power to ever rebuild it again. In such conditions the problem of suicide may arrive like a ghastly spectre to confront the mind. It is a spectre that, according to statistics, is alarmingly prevalent. The statisticians talk of periods of it as "an epidemic." Both science and religion take note of it, discuss its bearing upon life, its tendency and its possible prevention. It is seen as the result of both great and of trivial causes. It is seen to follow a great sin, and to be the—terribly mistaken—refuge of a great sorrow. And the remedy lies,—where? It can hardly lie elsewhere than in a truer understanding of the very nature of life itself. The only remedy will be found in the larger general understanding that life cannot be extinguished. One may destroy his physical body,—he can do that at any moment and by an infinite variety of methods. But he cannot destroy himself. He may deprive himself of the instrument that was given to him for use in the physical world; he cannot escape from the duties that he should have fulfilled when he had the means of doing so in the use of this instrument we call the body. If science and religion could clearly teach the awful results that follow suicide, the terrible isolation and deprivation in which the spiritual being who has thrown away his instrument of service finds himself, it would be the one effective cure for a demoralizing tendency. If one has sinned, sometime and somewhere must he meet the consequences. He cannot escape them by escaping from his body, and the sooner he meets them, in repentance and atonement, the sooner will he work out to better and brighter conditions. If one encounters disaster or great personal sorrow, what then? One does not throw away all his possibilities of usefulness because he is himself unhappy. If he does do this he is ignoble. Life is a divine dream. It is a divine responsibility, primarily between each soul and God. It is one's business to live bravely, with dignity, with faith, with generosity of consideration and good will, with love, indeed, which is the expression of the highest energy. Yet, with his personal world in ruins, what shall he do? He must learn that supreme lesson of all time and eternity,—the lesson to accept and to joyfully embrace the will of God as thus revealed to him, in an inscrutable way.