As she was thus proclaiming her knowledge her hoary-headed grandfather, a man whom the Universities of the world had honored by affixing a score of alphabetical letters to his name, was experimenting in his laboratory. The lines of long and deep study had corrugated his brow and furrowed his face. Wearily he bent over his retorts and test tubes. At length he turned away with a heavy sigh, threw up his hands and despairingly exclaimed,—"Alas, alas! after fifty years of study and investigation, I find I know nothing."
There is a moral in this story that he who runs may read. Most of us are like the young lady,—in the pride of our ignorance, we fancy we know almost everything. We boast of the progress of our time, of what has been accomplished in our modern world, we proclaim our triumphs from the hilltops,—"Ha!" we shout, "we have annihilated time and distance; we have conquered the forces of nature and made them subservient to our will; we have chained the lightning and imprisoned the thunder; we have wandered through the fields of space and measured the dimensions and revolutions of stars and suns and planets and systems. We have opened the eternal gates of knowledge for all to enter and crowned man king of the universe."
Vain boasting! The gates of knowledge have been opened, but we have merely got a peep at what lies within. And man, so far from being king of the universe, is but as a speck on the fly-wheel that controls the mighty machinery of creation. What we know is infinitesimal to what we do not know. We have delved in the fields of science, but as yet our ploughshares have merely scratched the tiniest portion of the surface,—the furrow that lies in the distance is unending. In the infinite book of knowledge we have just turned over a few of the first pages; but as it is infinite, alas! we can never hope to reach the final page, for there is no final page. What we have accomplished is but as a mere drop in the ocean, whose waves wash the continents of eternity. No scholar, no scientist can bound those continents, can tell the limits to which they stretch, inasmuch as they are illimitable.
Ask the most learned savant if he can fix the boundaries of space, and he will answer,—No! Ask him if he can define mind and matter, and you will receive the same answer.
"What is mind? It is no matter."
"What is matter? Never mind."
The atom formerly thought to be indivisible and the smallest particle of matter has been reduced to molecules, corpuscles, ions, and electrons; but the nature, the primal cause of these, the greatest scientists on earth are unable to determine. Learning is as helpless as ignorance when brought up against this stone-wall of mystery. The effect is seen, but the cause remains indeterminable. The scientist, gray-haired in experience and experiment, knows no more in this regard than the prattling child at its mother's knee. The child asks,—"Who made the world?" and the mother answers, "God made the world." The infant mind, suggestive of the future craving for knowledge, immediately asks,—"Who is God?" Question of questions to which the philosopher and the peasant must give the same answer,—"God is the infinite, the eternal, the source of all things, the alpha and omega of creation, from Him all came, to Him all must return." He is the beginning of Science, the foundation on which our edifice of knowledge rests.
We hear of the conflict between Science and Religion. There is no conflict, can be none, for all Science must be based on faith,—faith in Him who holds worlds and suns "in the hollow of His hand." All our great scientists have been deeply religious men, acknowledging their own insignificance before Him who fills the universe with His presence.
What is the universe and what place do we hold in it? The mind of man becomes appalled in consideration of the question. The orb we know as the sun is centre of a system of worlds of which our earth is almost the most insignificant; yet great as is the sun when compared to the little bit of matter on which we dwell and have our being, it is itself but a mote, as it were, in the beam of the Universe. Formerly this sun was thought to be fixed and immovable, but the progress of science demonstrated that while the earth moves around this luminary, the latter is moving with mighty velocity in an orbit of its own. Tis the same with all the other bodies which we erroneously call "fixed stars." These stars are the suns of other systems of worlds, countless systems, all rushing through the immensity of space, for there is nothing fixed or stationary in creation,—all is movement, constant, unvarying. Suns and stars and systems perform their revolutions with unerring precision, each unit-world true to its own course, thus proving to the soul of reason and the consciousness of faith that there must needs be an omnipotent hand at the lever of this grand machinery of the universe, the hand that fashioned it, that of God. Addison beautifully expresses the idea in referring to the revolutions of the stars:
"In reason's ear they all rejoice,
And utter forth one glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine-
'The Hand that made us is Divine.'"