God hath chosen, as Paul said, the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and base things of the world and things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not to bring to naught things which are; that no flesh should glory in His presence. Christ said, “I thank Thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.”
Truth never changes; but as new truths are revealed to us, to meet the necessities of progress (in our development from ignorance into the wisdom of angels), our point of view is ever changing, like the landscape which we look out upon from the swiftly gliding railway-carriage that bears us to our destination. As yet, “Earth has shown us only the title-page of a book” that we may, if we will, read its first pages here, and continue reading throughout eternity.
When Bulwer wrote of “a power that can replenish or invigorate life, heal and preserve, cure disease: enabling the physical organism to re-establish the due equilibrium of its natural powers, thereby curing itself,” he foreshadowed one of Keely’s discoveries. “Once admit the possibility that the secrets of nature conceal forces yet undeveloped,” says the author of “Masollam,” “which may contain a cure for the evils by which it is now afflicted, and it is culpable timidity to shrink from risking all to discover that cure.” This author teaches that humanity at large has a claim higher than the claims of the blood-tie; that a love based upon no higher sentiment, makes us blind to the claims of duty; and this is why, when men or women are chosen to do a great work, for the human family, the ligaments which have bound them too exclusively to their own families, are cut and torn apart.
No greater work has ever been committed to a man to do than that which Keely’s discoveries are preparing the way for. Science was rocking the world into the sleep of death—for materialism is death—its votaries declaring atoms to be eternally active, and the intellect which had discovered the existence of these atoms to end with the life of the molecular body. On this subject Simmons has written:—
“Shall impalpable light speed so swiftly and safely through infinite space—and the mind that measures its speed, and makes it tell its secrets in the spectroscope, be buried with the body? Shall mere breath send its pulsations through the wire and, after fifty miles of silence, sound again in speech or music in a far-off city, or stamp itself in the phonograph to sound again in far-off centuries—and the soul that has wrought these wonders pass to eternal silence? Shall physical force persist for ever—and this love, which is the strongest force in nature, perish? It would seem wiser to trust that the infinite law, which is everywhere else so true, will take care of this human longing which it has made, and fulfil it in eternal safety. We make no argument, but we cannot ignore all the intimations of immortality. Cyrus Field tells us of the night when, after his weary search for that long-lost cable two miles deep in mid-ocean, the grapnel caught it and, trembling with suspense, they drew it to the deck, hardly trusting their eyes, but creeping to feel it and make sure it was there. And when, as they watched, a spark soon came from a finger in England, showing that the line was sound, strong men wept and rockets rent the midnight darkness. We and our world float like a ship on the mysterious sea of being, in whose abysses the grapnel of science touches no solid line of logic connecting us to another land. But now and then there come from convictions, stronger than cables, flashes of light bidding us trust that our dead share in divine immortality, and are safe in the arms of Infinite Law and Eternal Love.”
Keely’s demonstrations suggest “the missing link” between matter and mind, the solid line of logic which may yet be laid in “the widening dominion of the human mind over the forces of nature.” In “Keely’s Secrets,” No. 9, Vol. I. of the T.P.S., some of the elements of the possibilities resulting to the world from Keely’s discoveries were set down. War will become an impossibility; and, as Browning’s poem of “Childe Roland” forecasts, “The Dark Tower” of unbelief will crumble at the bugle-blast which levels its walls to their foundation, revealing such a boundless region of research as the mind of man could never conceive were he not the offspring of the Creator. Not long since, Mr. Keely was congratulated upon having secured the attention of men of science, connected with the University of Pennsylvania, to his work of research. “Now, you will be known as a great discoverer, not as Keely the motor-man,” said one of them present; whom he answered, “I have discovered so little, in comparison with what remains to be discovered, that I cannot call myself a discoverer.” One of the professors present took Keely by the hand and said, “You are a great discoverer.”
All thoughtful men who have witnessed the latest developments of the force displayed by Keely, in his researching experiments for aerial navigation, are made to realize that more through his discoveries, than by the progressive development of the altruistic element in humanity (dreamed of by speculative optimists), our race will be brought into that dispensation of peace and harmony, anticipated by “seers” and foretold by prophets as the millennial age. It requires no great measure of foresight to discern, as a natural consequence of the control and application of this force in art and commerce, that ameliorated condition of the masses which will end the mighty conflict now so blindly being waged between capital and labour.[1] And to the eye of faith, it is not difficult to look beyond the intervening æons of centuries, to the literal fulfilment of the promise of that millennial period when men shall live in brotherly love together; making heaven of earth as even now it is in our power to do if we live up to Christ’s command: “Whatsoever ye would that others should do unto you, that do ye also unto them.” Had some of the dogmatic scientists of this age followed this command, Keely’s discovery might have been sooner known in all its importance, protecting him, as their acknowledgment would have done, from the persecutions that have operated so detrimentally against the completion of researches which should have been finished before any attempt was made to apply the discovery to commercial ends. No scientist who witnessed the production of the force, displayed by Keely, in a proper spirit, but would have been welcomed by him to further experiments in its operations, as were Professor Leidy and Dr. Wilcox in 1889. So, in truth, those who printed their edicts against Keely about ten years since are, in part, responsible for the loss to the world which this long delay has occasioned. Still, in view of the acknowledged fact that not one of the great laws which science now accepts as incontrovertible truths, but was vehemently denied by the scientists of its time, declared to be a priori impossible; its discoverers and supporters denounced as fools or charlatans, and even investigation refused as being a waste of time and thought; it would be too much to expect from the thinkers of this age any greater degree of readiness to investigate claims, that threatened to demolish their cherished notions, than characterized their predecessors.
But the time was not ripe for the disclosure: “God never hurries.” He counts the centuries as we count the seconds, and the nearer that we approach to the least comprehension of His “underlying purpose,” the better fitted are we to do the work He assigns us, while waiting patiently for our path of duty to be made clear to us; like the labourer, in Tolstoi’s Confession, who completed the work that had been laid out for him, without understanding what the result would be, and unable to judge whether his master had planned well. If the prophecies of Scripture are fulfilled, the twentieth century will usher in the commencement of that age in which men and women will become aware of the great powers which they inherit, and of which Oliphant has said that we are so ignorant that we wholly fail to see them, though they sweep like mighty seas throughout all human nature.
What is the character of these powers which Oliphant has written so eloquently concerning? Can we not form an inference from St. Paul’s most precious and deeply scientific context, in which he introduced the quotation from the Greek poet Aratus, who was well known in Athens, having studied there?
If we are the offspring of God, how rich must be our inheritance! If we are the children of God, why do we not trust our Father? But this is not science! A philosopher has said that if ever a human being needed divine pity, it is the man of science who believes in nothing but what he can prove by scientific methods. Scientists will have to admit, in the light of Keely’s discoveries, that the sensibility and intelligence, which confer upon us our self-directive power, do not have their origin in our molecular structures. That they take their first beginning in matter is one of the most inadequate conceptions that was ever proposed for scientific belief. If it were so, we could not claim to be the offspring of God, who is the Fountain of all life, the ever living, from whom, as “His very kind,” we inherit this self-directive power; not the molecular bodies which are our clothing. God is our Father. The material structure is the mother and nurse. The hypothesis that there are no beings in the universe but those which possess molecular bodies, is the conjecture of a mind that has no conception of the illimitable power of the Almighty. The link, which connects mind with matter, gives us a higher conception of the Deity. Keely places it in the mind flow, the result of the sixth subdivision. When we are done with “the things of Time,” and not before, we are ready to rise out of our molecular bondage into the freedom we inherit as heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ of sonship with the Father.