Title: Among the Forces
Author: Warren, Henry White, 1831-1912
Language: English
As this book started as an ASCII text book there are no pictures available.


*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Among the Forces" ***


AMONG THE FORCES

  Thou madest him to have dominion over the works of
  THY hands.--Psalm viii, 6

by

HENRY WHITE WARREN, LL.D.

One of the Bishops of the Methodist Episcopal Church
Author of "Recreations in Astronomy," "The Bible in the World's
Education," etc.

New York: Eaton & Mains
Cincinnati: Curts & Jennings

1898



[Frontispiece: Old Faithful Geyser.]



E. I. W.

Eximia Inter Vires.



CONTENTS

  Why Written
  The Man Who Needed 452,696 Barrels of Water
  The Sun's Great Horses
  Old Sun Help
  Moon Help
  More Moon Help
  Star Help
  Help from Insensible Seas
  The Fairy Gravitation
  More Gravitation
  The Fairy Pulls Great Loads
  The Fairy Draws Greater Loads
  The Fairy Works a Pump Handle
  The Help of Inertia
  One Plant Help
  Gas Help
  Natural Affection of Metals
  Natural Affection Between Metal and Liquid
  Natural Affection of Metal and Gas
  Hint Help
  Creations Now in Progress
  Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms
  Mobility of Seeming Solids
  The Next World to Conquer
  Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces
  The Matterhorn
  The Grand Canon of the Colorado River.
  The Yellowstone Park Geysers
  Sea Sculpture
  The Power of Vegetable Life
  Spiritual Dynamics
  When This World is Not



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  Old Faithful Geyser . . . . Frontispiece
  Breaking Waves
  Incline at Mauch Chunk
  The Head of the Toboggan Slide.
  The Big Trees
  The Matterhorn
  The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.
  Formation of the Grotto Geyser
  Bee-Hive Geyser
  Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak
  "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.
  The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.
  Yellow Chili Squash in Harness
  Squash Grown Under Pressure
  A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.
  An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal
  A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.
  A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.
  Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch
  Arch Remains, Side Wall Broken



AMONG THE FORCES


WHY WRITTEN

Fairies, fays, genii, sprites, etc., were once supposed to be helpful
to some favored men.  The stories about these imaginary beings have
always had a fascinating interest.  The most famous of these stories
were told at Bagdad in the eleventh century, and were called _The
Arabian Nights' Entertainment_.  Then men were said to use all sorts of
obedient powers, sorceries, tricks, and genii to aid them in getting
wealth, fame, and beautiful brides.

But I find the realities of to-day far greater, more useful and
interesting, than the imaginations of the past.  The powers at work
about us are far more kindly and powerful than the Slave of the Ring or
of the Lamp.

The object of writing this series of papers about applications of
powers to the service of man, their designed king, is manifold.  I
desire all my readers to see what marvelous provision the Father has
made for his children in this their nursery and schoolhouse.  He has
always been trying to crowd on men more helps and blessings than they
were willing to take.  From the first mist that went up from the Garden
the power of steam has been in every drop of water.  Yet men carried
their burdens.  Since the first storm the swiftness and power of
lightning have been trying to startle man into seeing that in it were
speed and force to carry his thought and himself.  But man still
plodded and groaned under loads that might have been lifted by physical
forces.  I have seen in many lands men bringing to their houses water
from the hills in heavy stone jars.  Gravitation was meant to do that
work, and to make it leap and laugh with pearly spray in every woman's
kitchen.  The good Father has offered his all-power on all occasions to
all men.

I desire that the works of God should keep their designed relation to
thought.  He says, Consider the lilies; look into the heavens; number
the stars; go to the ant; be wise; ask the beasts, the fowl, the
fishes; or "talk even to the earth, and it showeth thee."

Every flower and star, rainbow and insect, was meant to be so
provocative of thought that any man who never saw a human book might be
largely educated.  And every one of these thoughts is related to man's
best prosperity and joy.  He is a most regal king if he achieve the
designed dominion over a thousand powerful servitors.

It is well to see that God's present actual powers in full play about
us are vastly beyond all the dreams of Arabian imagination.  It leads
us to expect greater things of him hereafter.  That human imagination
could so dream is proof of the greatness of its Creator.  But that he
has actually surpassed those dreams is prophecy of more greatness to
come.

I desire that my readers of this generation shall be the great thinkers
and inventors of the next.  There are amazing powers just waiting to be
revealed.  Draw aside the curtain.  We have not yet learned the A B C
of science.  We have not yet grasped the scepters of provided dominion.
Those who are most in the image and likeness of the Cause of these
forces are most likely to do it.



THE MAN WHO NEEDED 452,696 BARRELS OF WATER

A man once had a large field of wheat.  He had toiled hard to clear the
land, plow the soil, and sow the seed.  The crop grew beautifully and
was his joy by day and by night.  But when it was just ready to head
out it suddenly stopped growing for want of moisture.  It looked as if
all his hard work would be in vain.  The poor farmer thought of his
wife and children, who were likely to starve in the coming winter.  He
shed many tears, but they could not moisten one little stalk.

Suddenly he said, "I will water it myself."  The field was a mile
square, and it needed an inch of water over it all.  He quickly figured
out that there were 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile.  On every
twelve square feet a cubic foot of water was needed.  A cubic foot of
water weighs sixty-two and a third pounds.  Hence it would require
74,754 tons of water.  To draw this amount 74,754 teams, each drawing a
ton, would be required.  But they would tramp the wheat all down.
Besides, the nearest water in sufficient quantity was the ocean, one
thousand miles away over the mountains.  It would take three months to
make the journey.  And, worse than all else, the water of the ocean is
so salt that it would ruin the crop.

[Illustration: Breaking Waves.]

Alas! there were three impossibilities--so many teams, so many
miles, so long time--and two ruins if he could overcome the
impossibilities--trampling down the wheat and bringing so much salt.
Alas, alas! what could he do but see the poor wheat die of thirst and
his poor wife and children die of hunger?

Suddenly he determined to ask the sun to help him.  And the sun said he
would.  That was a very little thing for such a great body to do.  So
he heated the air over the ocean till it became so thirsty that it
drank plenty of water, choosing only the sweet fresh water and leaving
all the salt in the ocean.  Then the warm air rose, because the heat
had expanded it and made it lighter, and the other air rushed down the
mountains all over that side of the continent to take its place.  Then
the warm air went landward in an upper current and carried its load of
water in great piles and mountains of clouds; it lifted them over the
great ranges of mountains and rained down its thousands of tons of
sweet water a thousand miles from the sea, so gently that not a stalk
of wheat was trampled down, nor was a single root made acrid by any
taste of brine.

Besides the precious drink the sun brought the most delicate food for
the wheat.  There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so
delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia,
and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants.

Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured
perfectly.  Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his
joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great
One who made them both.



THE SUN'S GREAT HORSES

There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in
the distant mountains.  They were valueless there, but would be
exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he
could only find any power to transport them thither.  So he looked for
a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles.  He saw
that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him.  And
the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help
man.  He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a
thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that
he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted.

So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power,
which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of
the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere.  It
held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run
down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and
the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from
the mountains to the sea.

So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming
together like a great letter V.  Then the sun brought water from the
sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year.  The man put into
it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled
the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the
sea.

How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and
timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man.  For the
sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to
pull.

This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, "How
good the sun is!" nor, "How strong is gravitation!" but said
continually, "How smart I am!"



OLD SUN HELP

Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water.  Its
surface is below sea level.  Since 1440 they have been recovering land
from the sea.  They have acquired 230,000 acres in all.  Fifty years
ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem
Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of
water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile
land.  They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance
of ten feet, to get through in time.  Who could work the handle?

The sun would evaporate two inches a year, but that was too slow.  So
they used the old force of the sun, reservoired in former ages.  Coal
is condensed sunshine, still keeping all the old light and power.  By a
suitable engine they lifted 112 tons ten feet at every stroke, and in
1848, five years after they began to apply old sun force, 41,675 acres
were ready for sale and culture.

The water that accumulates now, from rain and infiltration, is lifted
out by the sun force as exhibited in wind on windmills.  They
groaningly work while men sleep.

The Netherlandish engineers are now devising plans to pump out the
Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles.  There is plenty of
power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual.  The
problem is the application of it.  The thinker is king.

This is only one instance of numberless applications of old sun force.
In this country coal does more work than every man, woman, and child in
the whole land.  It pumps out deep mines, hoists ore to the surface,
speeds a thousand trains, drives great ships, in face of waves and
winds, thousands of miles and faster than transcontinental trains.  It
digs, spins, weaves, saws, planes, grinds, plows, reaps, and does
everything it is asked to do.  It is a vast reservoir of force, for the
accumulation of which thousands of years were required.



MOON HELP

At Foo-Chow, China, there is a stone bridge, more than a mile long,
uniting the two parts of the city.  It is not constructed with arches,
but piers are built up from the bottom of the river and great granite
stringers are laid horizontally from pier to pier.  I measured some of
these great stone stringers, and found them to be three feet square and
forty-five feet long.  They weigh over thirty tons each.

How could they be lifted, handled, and put in place over the water on
slender piers?  How was it done?  There was no Hercules to perform the
mighty labor, nor Amphion to lure them to their place with the music of
his golden lyre.

Tradition says that the Chinese, being astute astronomers, got the moon
to do the work.  It was certainly very shrewd, if they did.  Why not
use the moon for more than a lantern?  Is it not a part of the "all
things" over which man was made to have dominion?

Well, the Chinese engineers brought the great granite blocks to the
bridge site on floats, and when the tide lifted the floats and stones
they blocked up the stones on the piers and let the floats sink with
the outgoing tide.  Then they blocked up the stones on the floats
again, and as the moon lifted the tides once more they lifted the
stones farther toward their place, until at length the work was done
for each set of stones.

Dear, good moon, what a pull you have!  You are not merely for the
delight of lovers, pleasant as you are for that, but you are ready to
do gigantic work.

No wonder that the Chinese, as they look at the solid and enduring
character of that bridge, name it, after the poetic and flowery habit
of the country, "The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages."



MORE MOON HELP

Years ago, before there were any railroads, New York city had thousands
of tons of merchandise it wished to send out West.  Teams were few and
slow, so they asked the moon to help.  It was ready; had been waiting
thousands of years.

We shall soon see that it is easy to slide millions of tons of coal
down hill, but how could we slide freight up from New York to Albany?

It is very simple.  Lift up the lower end of the river till it shall be
down hill all the way to Albany.  But who can lift up the end of the
river?  The moon.  It reaches abroad over the ocean and gathers up
water from afar, brings it up by Cape Hatteras and in from toward
England, pours it in through the Narrows, fills up the great harbor,
and sets the great Hudson flowing up toward Albany.  Then men put their
big boats on the current and slide up the river.  Six hours later the
moon takes the water out of the harbor and lets other boats slide the
other way.

New York itself has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense
amount of garbage and sewage.  It would soon breed a pestilence, and
the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its
aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence,
and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a
day.  Good moon!  It not only lights, but works.

The tide in New York Harbor rises only about five feet; up in the Bay
of Fundy it ramps, rushes, raves, and rises more than fifty feet high.

In former times men used to put mill wheels into the currents of the
tides; when they rushed into little bays and salt ponds they turned the
wheels one way; when out, the other.



STAR HELP

  "We for whose sake all Nature stands,
  And stars their courses move."

Do the stars, that are so far away and seem so small, send us any help?
Assuredly.  Nothing exists for itself.  All is for man.

Magnetism tells the sailor which way he is going.  Stars not only do
this, when visible, but they also tell just where on the round globe he
is.  A glance into their bright eyes, from a rolling deck, by an
uneducated sailor, aided by the tables of accomplished scholars, tells
him exactly where he is--in mid Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or
Antarctic Ocean, or at the mouth of the harbor he has sought for
months.  We lift up our eyes higher than the hills.  Help comes from
the skies.

This help was started long since, with providential foresight and care.
Is he steering by the North Star?  A ray of guidance was sent from that
lighthouse in the sky half a century before his need, that it might
arrive just at the critical time.  It has been ever since on its way.

The stars give us, on land and sea, all our reliable standards of time.
There is no other source.  They are reliable to the hundredth part of a
second.

The Italian physicians, in their ignorance of the origin of a disease,
named it the influenza, because they imagined that it came from the
influence of the stars.  No!  There is nothing malign in the sweet
influences of the Pleiades.

The stars are of special use as a mental gymnasium.  On their lofty
bars and trapezes the mind can swing itself higher and farther than on
any other material thing.  Infinity and omnipotence are factors in
their problems.  They also fill the soul of the rapt beholder with
adoring wonder.  They are the greatest symbols of the unweariableness
of the power and of the minuteness of the knowledge of God.  He calleth
all their millions by name, and for the greatness of his power not one
faileth to come.

Number the stars of a clear Eastern sky, if you are able.  So
multitudinous and enduring shall the influence of one good man be.



HELP FROM INSENSIBLE SEAS

Suppose one has been at sea a month.  He has tacked to every point of
the compass, been driven by gales, becalmed in doldrums.  At length
Euroclydon leaps on him, and he lets her drive.  And when for many days
and nights neither sun nor stars appear, how can he tell where he is,
which way he drives, where the land lies?

There is an insensible ocean.  No sense detects its presence.  It has
gulf streams that flow through us, storms whose waves engulf us, but we
feel them not.  There are various intensities of its power, the north
end of the world not having half as much as the south.  There are two
places in the north half of the world that have greater intensity than
the rest, and only one in the south.  It looks as if there were
unsoundable depths in some places and shoals in others.

The currents do not flow in exactly the same direction all the time,
but their variations are within definite limits.

How shall we detect these steady currents when wind and waves are in
tumultuous confusion?  They are always present.  No winds blow them
aside, no waves drench their subtle fire, no mountains make them
swerve.  But how shall we find them?

Float a bit of magnetic ore in a pail of water, or suspend a bit of
magnetized steel by a thread, and these currents make the ore or needle
point north and south.  Now let waves buffet either side, typhoons
roar, and maelstroms whirl; we have, out of the invisible, insensible
sea of magnetic influence, a sure and steady guide.  Now we can sail
out of sight of headlands.  We have in the darkness and light, in calm
and storm, an unswerving guide.  Now Columbus can steer for any new
world.

Does not this seem like a spiritual force?  Lodestone can impart its
qualities to hard steel without the impairment of its own power.  There
is a giving that does not impoverish, and a withholding that does not
enrich.

Wherever there is need there is supply.  The proper search with
appropriate faculties will find it.  There are yet more things in
heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.



THE FAIRY GRAVITATION

The Germans imagine that they have fairy kobolds, sprites, and gnomes
which play under ground and haunt mines.  I know a real one.  I will
give you his name.  It is called "Gravitation."  The name does not
sound any more fairylike than a sledge hammer, but its nature and work
are as fairylike as a spider's web.  I will give samples of his helpful
work for man.

In the mountains about Saltzburg, south of Munich, are great thick beds
of solid salt.  How can they get it down to the cities where it is
needed?  Instead of digging it out, and packing it on the backs of
mules for forty miles, they turn in a stream of water and make a little
lake which absorbs very much salt--all it can carry.  Then they lay a
pipe, like a fairy railroad, and gravitation carries the salt water
gently and swiftly forty miles, to where the railroads can take it
everywhere.  It goes so easily!  There is no railroad to build, no car
to haul back, only to stand still and see gravitation do the work.

How do they get the salt and water apart?  O, just as easily.  They ask
the wind to help them.  They cut brush about four feet long, and pile
it up twenty feet high and as long as they please.  Then a pipe with
holes in it is laid along the top, the water trickles down all over the
loose brush, and the thirsty wind blows through and drinks out most of
the water.  They might let on the water so slowly that all of it would
be drunk out by the wind, leaving the solid salt on the bushes.  But
they do not want it there.  So they turn on so much water that the
thirsty wind can drink only the most of it, and the rest drops down
into great pans, needing only a little evaporation by boiling to become
beautiful salt again, white as the snows of December.

There are other minerals besides salt in the beds in the mountains,
and, being soluble in water, they also come down the tiny railroad with
musical laughter.  How can we separate them, so that the salt shall be
pure for our tables?

The other minerals are less avaricious of water than salt, so they are
precipitated, or become solid, sooner than salt does.  Hence with nice
care the other minerals can be left solid on the bushes, while the salt
brine falls off.  Afterward pure water can be turned on and these other
minerals can be washed off in a solution of their own.  No fairies
could work better than those of solution and crystallization.



MORE GRAVITATION

At Hutchinson, Kan., there are great beds of solid rock salt four
hundred feet below the surface.  Men want to get and use two thousand
barrels a day.  How shall they get it to the top of the ground?  They
might dig a great well--or, as the miners say, sink a shaft--pump out
the water, go down and blast out the salt, and laboriously haul it up
in defiance of gravitation.  No; that is too hard.  Better ask this
strong gravitation to bring it up.

But does it work down and up?  Did any one ever know of gravitation
raising anything?  O yes, many things.  A balloon may weigh as much as
a ton, but when inflated it weighs less than so much air; so the
heavier air flows down under and shoulders it up.  When a heavy weight
and a light one are hung over a pulley, the light one goes up because
gravity acts more on the other.  Water poured down a long tube will
rise if the tube is bent up into a shorter arm.

Exactly.  So we bore a four-inch hole down to the salt and put in an
iron tube.

We do not care about the water.  It is no bother.  Then inside of this
tube we put a two-inch tube that is a few feet higher.  Now pour water
down the small longer tube.  It saturates itself with salt, and comes
flowing over the top of the shorter tube as easily as water runs down
hill.  Multiply the wells, dry out the water, and you have your two
thousand barrels of salt lifted every day--just as easy as thinking!

We want a steady, unswerving force that will pull our clock hands with
an exact motion day and night, year in and year out.  We hang up a
string, and ask gravitation to take hold and pull.  We put on some lead
or brass for a handle, to take hold of.  It takes hold and pulls,
unweariedly, unvaryingly, and ceaselessly.

It turns single water-wheels with a power of more than twelve hundred
horses.

It holds down houses, so that they are not blown away.  It was made to
serve man, and it works without a grumble.

Thus the higher force in nature always prevails over the lower, and the
greater amount over the less amount of the same force.  What is the
highest force?



THE FAIRY PULLS GREAT LOADS

Far back in the hills west of Mauch Chunk, Pa., lie great beds of coal.
They were made under the sea long ages ago, raised up, roofed over by
the Allegheny Mountains, and kept waiting as great reservoirs of power
for the use of man.

But how can these mountains be gotten to the distant cities by the sea?
Faith in what power can say to these mountains, "Be thou removed far
hence, and cast into the sea?"  It is easy.

Along the winding sides of the mountains have been laid two rails like
steel ribbons for a dozen miles, from the coal beds to water and
railroad transportation.  Put a half dozen loaded cars on the track,
and with one man at the brake, lest gravitation should prove too
willing a helper, away they go, through the springtime freshness or the
autumn glory, spinning and singing down to the point of universal
distribution.

[Illustration: Incline at Mauch Chunk.]

On one occasion the brake for some reason would not work.  The cars
just flew like an arrow.  The man's hair stood up from fright and the
wind.  Coming to a curve the cars kept straight on, ran down a bank,
dashed right into the end of a house and spilled their whole load in
the cellar.  Probably no man ever laid in a winter's supply of coal so
quickly or so undesirably.

But how do we get the cars back?  It is pleasant sliding down hill on a
rail, but who pulls the sled back?  Gravitation.  It is just as willing
to work both ways as one way.

Think of a great letter X a dozen miles long.

Lay it down on the side against three or four rough hills.  Bend the X
till it will fit the curves and precipices of these hills.  That is the
double track.  Now when loaded cars have come down one bar of the X by
gravity, draw them up by a sharp incline to the upper end of the other
bar, and away they go by gravity to the other end.  Draw them up one
more incline, and they are ready to take a new load and buzz down to
the bottom again.

I have been riding round the glorious mountain sides in a horseless,
steamless, electricityless carriage, and been delighted to find
hundreds of tons of coal shooting over my head at the crossings of the
X, and both cars were drawn in opposite directions by the same force of
gravity in the heart of the earth.

If you do not take off your hat and cheer for the superb force of
gravitation, the wind is very apt to take it off for you.



THE FAIRY DRAWS GREATER LOADS

Pittsburg has 5,000,000 tons of coal every year that it wishes to send
South, much of it as far as New Orleans--2,050 miles.  What force is
sufficient for moving such great mountains so far?  Any boy may find it.

Tie a stone to the end of a string, whirl it around the finger and feel
it pull.  How much is the pull?  That depends on the weight of the
stone, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl.  In
the case of David's sling it pulled away hard enough to crash into the
head of Goliath.  Suppose the stone to be as big as the earth (8,000
miles in diameter), the length of the string to be its distance from
the sun (92,500,000 miles), and the swiftness of flight the speed of
the earth in its orbit (1,000 miles a minute).  The pull represents the
power of gravitation that holds the earth to the sun.

If we use steel wires instead of gravitation for this purpose, each
strong enough to support half a score of people (1,500 pounds), how
many would it take?  We would need to distribute them over the whole
earth: from pole to pole, from side to side, over all the land and sea.
Then they would need to be so near together that a mouse could not run
around among them.

Here is a measureless power.  Can it be gotten to take Pittsburgh coal
to New Orleans?  Certainly; it was made to serve man.  So the coal is
put on great flatboats, 36 x 176 feet, a thousand tons to a boat, and
gravitation takes the mighty burden down the long toboggan slide of the
Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the journey's end.  How easy!

[Illustration: The Head of the Toboggan Slide.]

One load sent down was 43,000 tons.  The flatboats were lashed together
as one solid boat covering six and one half acres, more space than a
whole block of houses in a city, with one little steamboat to steer.
There is always plenty of power; just belt on for anything you want
done.  This is only one thing that gravitation does for man on these
rivers.  And there are many rivers.  They serve the savage on his log
and the scientist in his palace steamer with equal readiness.



THE FAIRY WORKS A PUMP HANDLE

The Slave of the Ring could take Aladdin into a cave of wealth, and by
speaking the words, "Open Sesame," Ali Baba was admitted into the cave
that held the treasures of the forty thieves.  But that is very little.
I have just come from a cave in Virginia City, Nev., from which men
took $120,000,000.

In following the veins of silver the miners went down 3,500 feet--more
than three fifths of a mile.  There it was fearfully hot, but the main
trouble was water.  They had dug a deep, deep well.  How could they get
the water out?  Pumps were of no use.  A column of water one foot
square of that height weighs 218,242 pounds.  Who could work the other
end of the pump handle?

They thought of evaporating the water and sending it up as steam.  But
it was found that it would take an incredible amount of coal.  They
thought of separating it into oxygen and hydrogen, and then its own
lightness would carry it up very quickly.  But they had no power that
would resolve even quarts into their ultimate elements, where tons
would be required.

So they asked gravitation to help them.  It readily offered to do so.
It could not let go its hold of the water in the mine, nor anywhere
else, for fear everything would go to pieces, but it offered to
overcome force with greater force.  So it sent the men twenty miles
away in the mountains to dig a ditch all the way to the mine, and then
gravitation brought water to a reservoir four hundred feet above the
mouth of the mine.  Now a column of this water one foot square can be
taken from this higher reservoir down to the bottom of the mine and
weigh 25,000 pounds more than a like column that comes from the bottom
to the top.  This extra 25,000 pounds is an extra force available to
lift itself and the other water out of the deep well, and they turn the
greater force into a pump and work it in the cylinder as if it were
steam.  It lifts not only the water that works the pump, but the other
water also out of the mine by gravitation.  So man gets the water out
by pouring more water in.



THE HELP OF INERTIA

Since the time of David many boys have swung pebbles by a string, or
sling, and felt the pull of what we call a centrifugal (center-fleeing)
force.  David utilized it to one good purpose.  Goliath was greatly
surprised; such a thing never entered his head before.  Whether a stone
or an idea enters one's head depends on the kind of head he has.

We utilize this force in many ways now.  Some boys swing a pail of milk
over their heads, and if swung fast enough the centrifugal force
overcomes the force of gravitation, and the milk does not fall.  That
is not utilizing the force.  It often terrorizes the careful mother,
anxious for the safety of the milk.

But in the arts of practical life we do utilize this force, which is
only inertia.

Once it took a long time for molasses to drain out of a hogshead of
damp sugar.  Now it is put into a great tub, with holes in the side,
which is made to revolve rapidly, and the molasses flies out.  In the
best laundries clothes are not wrung out, to the great damage of tender
fabrics, but are put into such a tub and whirled nearly dry.  So fifty
yards of woolen cloth just out of the dye vat--who could wring it?  It
is coiled in a tub called a wizard, and whirled.

Muddy water is put through a process called clarification.  It is the
same, except that there are no holes in the vessel.  The heavier
particles of dirt, that would settle in time, take the outside, leaving
perfectly clean water in the middle.  A perpendicular perforated pipe,
with a faucet below, drains off all the clear water and leaves all the
mud.  Milk is brought in from the milking and put into a separator;
whirl it, and the heavier milk takes the outside of the whirling mass,
and the lighter cream can be drawn off from the middle.  It is far more
perfectly separated than by any skimming.

A rotary snowplow slices off two feet of a ten-foot drift at each
revolution, and by centrifugal force flings it out of the cutting with
a speed that a hundred navvies or dagos cannot equal.



ONE PLANT HELP

A thousand acres of land on Cape Cod were once blown away.  This wind
excavation was ten feet deep.  It was not an extraordinary wind, but
extraordinary land.  It was made of rock ground up into fine sand by
the waves on the shore.

In all the deserts of the world the wind blows the itinerant sand on
its far journeys.  If the wind is moderate it heaps the sand up into
little hills, some of them six hundred feet high, around any
obstruction, and then blows the sand up the slanting face of the hill
and over the top, where it falls out of the wind on the leeward side.
In this way the hill is always traveling.  In North Carolina hills
start inland, and travel right on, burying a house or farm if it be in
the way, but resurrecting it again on the other side as the hill goes
on.  Anyone may see these hills at the south end of Lake Michigan, as
he approaches Chicago, west of San Francisco, all along up the Columbia
River--the sand having come on the wings of the wind from the coast.

But to see the whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a
really large desert.  The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly
buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of
sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and
harbors filled up.  Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations
are mere miasmatic marshes now.  This is partly in consequence of the
silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it
is because the sand blows in along the shore.  Harbors are especially
endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of
sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below the Narrows of the harbor
of New York.

How can man combat part of the continent on the move, driven by the
ceaseless powers of the air?  By a humble plant or two.  The movement
of the sand hills that threaten to destroy the marvelous beauty of the
grounds of the Hotel del Monte at Monterey is stopped by planting dwarf
pines.  The sand dunes that prevent much of Holland from being
reconquered by the sea are protected with great care by willows, etc.,
and the coast sands of parts of eastern France have been sown with sea
pine and broom.

The tract of a thousand acres on Cape Cod had been protected by humble
beach grass.  Some careless herder let the cows eat it in places, and
away went part of a township.  It is now a punishable crime on Cape Cod
to destroy beach grass.



GAS HELP

This refers to more than stump speech-making.  The old Romans drove
through solid rock numerous tunnels similar to the one for draining
Lago de Celano, fifty miles east of Rome.  This one was three and a
half miles long, through solid rock, and every chip cost a blow of a
human arm to dislodge it.  Of course the process was very slow.

We do works vastly greater.  We drive tunnels three times as long for
double-track railways through rock that is held down by an Alp.  We use
common air to drill the holes and a thin gas to break the rock.  The
Mont Cenis tunnel required the removal of 900,000 cubic yards of rock.
Near Dover, England, 1,000,000,000 tons of cliff were torn down and
scattered over fifteen acres in an instant.  How was it done?  By gas.

There are a dozen kinds of solids which can be handled--some of them
frozen, thawed, soaked in water, with impunity--but let a spark of fire
touch them and they break into vast volumes of uncontrollable gas that
will rend the heart out of a mountain in order to expand.

Gunpowder was first used in 1350; so the old Romans knew nothing of its
power.  They flung javelins a few rods by the strength of the arm; we
throw great iron shells, starting with an initial velocity of fifteen
hundred feet a second and going ten miles.  The air pressure against
the front of a fifteen-inch shell going at that speed is 2,865 pounds.
That ton and a half of resistance of gas in front must be much more
than overcome by gas behind.

But the least use of explosives is in war; not over ten per cent is so
used.  The Mont Cenis tunnel took enough for 200,000,000 musket
cartridges.  As much as 2,000 kegs have been fired at once in
California to loosen up gravel for mining, and 23 tons were exploded at
once under Hell Gate, at New York.

How strong is this gas?  As strong as you please.  Steam is sometimes
worked at a pressure of 400 pounds to the inch, but not usually over
100 pounds.  It would be no use to turn steam into a hole drilled in
rock.  The ordinary pressure of exploded gas is 80,000 pounds to the
square inch.  It can be made many times more forceful.  It works as
well in water, under the sea, or makes earthquakes in oil wells 2,000
feet deep, as under mountains.

The wildest imagination of Scheherezade never dreamed in _Arabian
Nights_ of genii that had a tithe of the power of these real forces.
Her genii shut up in bottles had to wait centuries for some fisherman
to let them out.



NATURAL AFFECTION OF METALS

"Sacra fames auri."  The hunger for gold, which in men is called
accursed, in metals is justly called sacred.

In all the water of the sea there is gold--about 400 tons in a cubic
mile--in very much of the soil, some in all Philadelphia clay, in the
Pactolian sands of every river where Midas has bathed, and in many
rocks of the earth.  But it is so fine and so mixed with other
substances that in many cases it cannot be seen.  Look at the ore from
a mine that is giving its owners millions of dollars.  Not a speck of
gold can be seen.  How can it be secured?  Set a trap for it.  Put down
something that has an affinity--voracious appetite, unslakable thirst,
metallic affection--for gold, and they will come together.

We have heard of potable gold--"_potabile aurum_."  There are metals to
which all gold is drinkable.  Mercury is one of them.  Cut transverse
channels, or nail little cleats across a wooden chute for carrying
water.  Put mercury in the grooves or before the cleats, and shovel
auriferous gravel and sand into the rushing water.  The mercury will
bibulously drink into itself all the fine invisible gold, while the
unaffectionate sand goes on, bereaved of its wealth.

Put gold-bearing quartz under an upright log shod with iron.  Lift and
drop the log a few hundred times on the rock, until it is crushed so
fine that it flows over the edge of the trough with constantly going
water, and an amalgam of mercury spread over the inclined way down
which the endusted water flows will drink up all the gold by force of
natural affection therefor.

Neither can the gold be seen in the mercury.  But it is there.  Squeeze
the mercury through chamois skin.  An amalgam, mostly gold, refuses to
go through.  Or apply heat.  The mercury flies away as vapor and the
gold remains.

If thou seekest for wisdom as for silver, and searchest for her as for
hid treasure, thou shalt find.



NATURAL AFFECTION BETWEEN METAL AND LIQUID

A little boy had a silver mug that he prized very highly, as it was the
gift of his grandfather.  The boy was not born with a silver spoon in
his mouth, but, what was much better, he had a mug often filled with
what he needed.

One day he dipped it into a glass jar of what seemed to him water, and
letting go of it saw it go to the bottom.  He went to find his father
to fish it out for him.  When he came back his heavy solid mug looked
as if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green
chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy
veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made.  Soon even this
fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen.  The liquid
had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle.  The
liquid was nitric acid.

The poor little boy had often seen salt, and especially sugar, absorbed
in water, but never his  precious solid silver mug, and the bright
tears rolled down his cheeks freely.

But his father thought of two things: First, that the blue tint told
him that the jeweler had sold for silver to the grandfather a mug that
was part copper; and secondly, that he would put some common salt into
the nitric acid--which it liked so much better than silver that it
dropped the silver, just as a boy might drop bread when he sought to
fill his hands with cake.

So the father recovered the invisible silver and made it into a
precious mug again.



NATURAL AFFECTION OP METAL AND GAS

A man was waked up one night in a strange house by a noise he could not
understand.  He wanted a light, and wanted it very much, but he had no
matches that would take fire by the heat of friction.  He knew of many
other ways of starting a fire.  If water gets to the cargo of lime in a
vessel it sets the ship on fire.  It is of no use to try to put it out
by water, for it only makes more heat.  He knew that dried alum and
sugar suitably mixed would burst into flame if exposed to the air; that
nitric acid and oil of turpentine would take fire if mixed; that flint
struck by steel would start fire enough to explode a powder magazine;
and that Elijah called down from heaven a kind of fire that burned
twelve "barrels" of water as easily as ordinary water puts out ordinary
fire.  But he had none of these ways of lighting his candle at
hand--not even the last.

So he took a bit of potassium metal, bright as silver, out of a bottle
of naphtha, put it in the candle wick, touched it with a bit of
dripping ice, and so lighted his candle.

The potassium was so avaricious of oxygen that it decomposed the water
to get it.  Indeed, it was a case of mutual affection.  The oxygen
preferred the company of potassium to that of the hydrogen in the
water, and went to it even at the risk of being burned.

I was so interested in seeing a bit of silver-like metal and water take
fire as they touched that I forgot all about the occasion of the noise.



HINT HELP

Benjamin C. B. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, once went into the lighthouse
at Cape May, and, observing that the window glass was translucent
rather than transparent, asked the keeper why he put ground glass in
the windows.  "We do not," said the keeper.  "We put in the clear
glass, and the wind blows the sand against it and roughens the outer
surface like ground glass."  The answer was to him like the falling
apple to Newton.  He put on his thinking cap and went out.  It was
better than the cap of Fortunatus to him.  He thought, "If nature does
this, why cannot I make a fiercer blast, let sand trickle into it, and
so hurl a million little hammers at the glass, and grind it more
swiftly than we do on stones with a stream of wet sand added?"

He tried jets of steam and of air with sand, and found that he could
roughen a pane of glass almost instantly.  By coating a part of the
glass with hot beeswax, applied with a brush, through a stencil, or
covering it with paper cut into any desired figures, he could engrave
the most delicate and intricate patterns as readily as if plain.  Glass
is often made all white, except a very thin coating of brilliant
colored glass on one side.  This he could cut through, leaving letters
of brilliant color and the general surface white, or _vice versa_.

Seal cutting is a very delicate and difficult art, old as the Pharaohs.
Protect the surface that is to be left, and the sand blast will cut out
the required design neatly and swiftly.

There is no known substance, not even corundum, hard enough to resist
the swift impact of myriads of little stones.

It will cut more granite into shape in an hour than a man can in a day.

Surely no one will be sorry to learn that General Tilghman sold part of
his patents, taken out in October, 1870, for $400,000, and receives the
untold benefits of the rest to this day.  So much for thinking.

Nature gives thousands of hints.  Some can take them; some can only
take the other thing.  The hints are greatly preferred by nature and
man.



CREATIONS NOW IN PROGRESS

The forces of creation are yet in full play.  Who can direct them?
Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker.  We are permitted
not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works.
"Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me,"
says the Greatest Worker.  Great profit incites to do the work noted
below.

Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for
lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it
has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was
regarded as less than half its value.  Such a stone is so valuable that
$15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface.  The
glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take
about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.

Why is there such a difference in value?  Simply arrangement and
compactness.  Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of
charcoal by arrangement and compression?  Not very satisfactorily as
yet.  We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make
diamonds.  Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we
have not yet attained the mastery of.

We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would
enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc.,
"Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect
palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact
architectural harmony."  But there is such a law and force for
crystals, if not for palaces.  There is wisdom to originate and power
to manage such a force.  It does not take masses of rock and stick them
together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas.  Atoms
as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by
one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact
as a diamond.

The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in
making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making
of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.

While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we
can use the diamonds themselves.  Set a number of them around a section
of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down
in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore
into the rock, leaving a core.  Force in water, to remove the dust and
chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any
direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what
sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance.  Hence, they go only
where they know that value lies.



SOME CURIOUS BEHAVIORS OF ATOMS

Ultimate atoms of matter are asserted to be impenetrable.  That is, if
a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be
condensible by any force.  But atoms of matter do not touch.  It is
thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till
there were no discernible substance left, only force.

Matter exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas.  It is thought
that all matter may be passed through the three stages--iron being
capable of being volatilized, and gases condensed to liquids and
solids--the chief difference of these states being greater or less
distance between the constituent atoms and molecules.  In gas the
particles are distant from each other, like gnats flying in the air; in
liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in
a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about.  The
congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the
street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the
congregation.  So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids
and gases, or _vice versa_.  The behavior of atoms in the process is
surpassingly interesting.

Gold changes its density, and therefore its thickness, between the two
dies of the mint that make it money.  How do the particles behave as
they snuggle up closer to each other?

Take a piece of iron wire and bend it.  The atoms on the inner side
become nearer together, those on the outside farther apart.  Twist it.
The outer particles revolve on each other; those of the middle do not
move.  They assume and maintain their new relations.

Hang a weight on a wire.  It does not stretch like a rubber thread, but
it stretches.  Eight wires were tested as to their tensile strength.
They gave an average of forty-five pounds, and an elongation averaging
nineteen per cent of the total length.  Then a wire of the same kind
was given time to adjust itself to its new and trying circumstances.
Forty pounds were hung on one day, three pounds more the next day, and
so on, increasing the weights by diminishing quantities, till in sixty
days it carried fifty-seven pounds.  So it seems that exercise
strengthened the wire nearly twenty-seven per cent.

While those atoms are hustling about, lengthening the wire and getting
a better grip on one another, they grow warm with the exercise.  Hold a
thick rubber band against your lip--suddenly stretch it.  The lip
easily perceives the greater heat.  After a few moments let it
contract.  The greater coldness is equally perceptible.

A wire suspending thirty-nine pounds being twisted ninety-five full
turns lengthened itself one sixteen-hundredth of its length.  Being
further twisted by twenty-five turns it shortened itself one fourth of
its previous elongation.  During the twisting some sections took far
more torsion than others.  A steel wire supporting thirty-nine pounds
was twisted one hundred and twenty times and then allowed to untwist at
will.  It let out only thirty-eight turns and retained eighty-two in
the new permanent relation of particles.  A wire has been known to
accommodate itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists, and still the
atoms did not let go of each other.  They slid about on each other as
freely as the atoms of water, but they still held on.  It is easier to
conceive of these atoms sliding about, making the wire thinner and
longer, when we consider that it is the opinion of our best physicists
that molecules made of atoms are never still.  Masses of matter may be
still, but not the constituent elements.  They are always in intensest
activity, like a mass of bees--those inside coming out, outside ones
going in--but the mass remains the same.

The atoms of water behave extraordinarily.  I know of a boiler and
pipes for heating a house.  When the fire was applied and the
temperature was changed from that of the street to two hundred degrees,
it was easy to see that there was a whole barrel more of it than when
it was let into the boiler.  It had been swollen by the heat, but it
was nothing but water.

Mobile, flexible, and yielding as water seems to be, it has an
obstinacy quite remarkable.  It was for a long time supposed to be
absolutely incompressible.  It is nearly so.  A pressure that would
reduce air to one hundredth of its bulk would not discernibly affect
water.  Put a ton weight on a cubic inch of water; it does not flinch
nor perceptibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not fill the space
they occupy.  They object to being crowded.  They make no objection to
having other matter come in and possess the space unoccupied by them.

Air so much enjoys its free, agile state, leaping over hills and
plains, kissing a thousand flowers, that it greatly objects to being
condensed to a liquid.  First we must take away all the heat.  Two
hundred and ten degrees of heat changes water to steam filling 1,728
times as much space.  No amount of pressure will condense steam to
water unless the heat is removed.  So take heat away from air till it
is more than two hundred degrees below zero, and then a pressure of
about two hundred atmospheres (14.7 pounds each) changes common air to
fluid.  It fights desperately against condensation, growing hot with
the effort, and it maintains its resilience for years at any point of
pressure short of the final surrender that gives up to become liquid.

Perhaps sometime we shall have the pure air of the mountains or the sea
condensed to fluid and sold by the quart to the dwellers in the city,
to be expanded into air once more.

The marvel is not greater that gas is able to sustain itself under the
awful pressure with its particles in extreme dispersion, than that what
we call solids should have their molecules in a mazy dance and yet keep
their strength.

Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations,
not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out
to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and
wiser than we are.



MOBILITY OF SEEMING SOLIDS

When a human breath, or the white jet of a steam whistle, or the black
cough of a locomotive smokestack is projected into the air it is easy
to see that the air is mobile.  Its particles easily roll over one
another in voluminously infolding wreaths.  The same is seen in water.
The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a
moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent
the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black
depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows
like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a
thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands.  All
the three shifting elements of the swift creations are mobile.  This
seems to be the case because these elements are not solid.  The
particles have plenty of room to play about each other, to execute mazy
dances and minuets with vastly more space than substance.

Extend the thought a little.  Things that seem to us most solid are
equally mobile.  An iron wire seems solid.  It is so; some parts much
more so than others.  The surface that has been in closest contact with
the die as the wire was drawn through, reducing its size by one half,
perhaps, is vastly more dense than the inner parts that have not been
so condensed.  File away one tenth of a wire, taking it all from the
surface, and you weaken the tensile strength of the wire one half.

But, dense and solid as this iron is, its particles are as mobile
within certain limits as the particles of air.  An electric message
sent through a mile of wire is not anything transmitted; matter is not
transferred, but the particles are set to dancing in wavy motion from
end to end.  Particles are leaping within ordered limits and according
to regular laws as really as the clouds swirl and the air trembles into
song through the throat of a singer.  When a wire is made sensitive by
electricity the breath of a child can make it vibrate from end to end,
ensouled with the child's laughter or fancies.  Nay, more, and far more
wonderful, the wire will be sensitive to the number of vibrations of a
certain note of music, and no receiver at the other end will gather up
its sensitive tremblings unless it is pitched to the keynote of the
vibrations sent.  In this way eight sets of vibrations have been sent
on one wire both ways at the same time, and no set of signals has in
any way interfered with the completeness and audibility of the rest.
Sixteen sets of waltzes were being performed at one and the same time
by the particles of one wire without confusion.  Because the air is
transmitting the notes of an organ from the loft to the opposite end of
the church, it is not incapable of bringing the sound of a voice in an
opposite direction to the organist from the other end of the church.

The extreme mobility of steel is seen when the red-hot metal is plunged
into water.  Instantly every particle takes a new position, making it a
hundredfold more hard than before it was heated.  But these particles
of transferred steel are still mobile.   A man's razor does not cut
smoothly.  It is dull, or has a ragged edge that is more inclined to
draw tears than cut hairs.  He draws the razor over the tender palm of
his hand a few times, rearranges the particles of the edge and builds
them out into a sharper form.  Then the razor returns to the lip with
the dainty touch of a kiss instead of a saw.  Or the tearful man dips
the razor in hot water and the particles run out to make a wider blade
and, of course, a thinner, sharper edge.  Drop the tire of a wagon
wheel into a circular fire.  As the heat increases each particle says
to its neighbor, "Please stand a little further off; this more than
July heat is uncomfortable."  So the close friends stand a little
further apart, lengthening the tire an inch or two.  Then, being taken
out of the fire and put on the wheel and cooled, the particles snuggle
up together again, holding the wheel with a grip of cold iron.  Mobile
and loose, with plenty of room to play, as the particles have, neither
wire nor tire loses its tensile strength.  They hold together, whether
arms are locked around each other's waist, or hand clasps hand in
farther reach.  What change has come to iron when it has been made red
or white hot?  Its particles have simply been mobilized.  It differs
from cold iron as an army in barracks and forts differs from an army
mobilized.  Nothing has been added but movement.  There is no caloric
substance.  Heat is a mode of motion.  The particles of iron have been
made to vibrate among themselves.  When the rapidity of movement
reaches four hundred and sixty millions of millions of vibrations per
second it so affects the eye that we say it is red-hot.  When other
systems of vibration have been added for yellow, etc., up to seven
hundred and thirty millions of millions for the violet, and all
continue in full play, the eye perceives what we call white heat.  It
is a simple illustration of the readiness of seeming solids to vibrate
with almost infinite swiftness.

I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below--the
workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa.
He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of
an inch of accuracy.  I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece
of glass three inches thick.  The human heat raised a lump detectable
by his measurements.  We were testing a piece of glass half an inch
thick; and five inches in diameter.  I put my two thumbnails at the two
sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had
compressed the glass to a shorter diameter.  We twisted it in so many
ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty."  And yet it was the
firmest texture possible to secure.  Great lenses are so sensitive that
one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape.
It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable
mountains.  I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you
into so much of his finest thinking."  He is a mechanic, not a
theologian.  This foremost man in the world in his fine department was
lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill.

But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether.
Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its
wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long,
and for extreme violet still less--.0000167 of an inch.

It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile.
This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms.  New
creations are easy, for man, even--much more so for God.  Of angels,
Milton says:

    "Thousands at his bidding speed,
  And post o'er land and ocean without rest."

No less is it true of atoms.  In him all things live and move.  Such
intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in
matter.



THE NEXT WORLD TO CONQUER

Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether.  It has higher
powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he
has yet attempted.

When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a
medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived.  The
existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was
launched as a theory.  Its reality has been so far demonstrated that
but very few doubters remain.

What facts of its conditions and powers can be known?  It differs
almost totally from our conceptions of matter.  Of the eighteen
necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be
predicated of it.  It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds
are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has
no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is
not cognizable by any of our present senses.  Does it not take us one
step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit?

Recall its actual activities.  Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations
of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call _do_, or _C_
of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper _C_, or
an octave above.  So the sound runs up in air till, above, say,
thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound
inaudible to our ears.  But not inaudible to finer ears.  To them the
morning stars sing together in mighty chorus:

  "Forever singing as they shine,
  'The hand that made us is divine.'"

Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound.  Since some
kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air,
though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower
intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but
in air.  Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether.
Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations
of ether per second are the different sorts of heat.  Between four
hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light.
Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to
our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays.
Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference?  Who
knoweth?

These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite
capacities and intensities of the ether.  Matter is more forceful, as
it is less dense.  Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate
resistance.  Steam is rarer and more forceful.  Gases suddenly born of
dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the
tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch.
Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented
by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it.

When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship
through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water
through it?  Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol.  Certainly the
vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond.  To be
sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance.  The speed of
light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in
space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass.  If ether can so
readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could
appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut."

Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately.
In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house
provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and
ceilings, without wire connections.  More than twenty years ago
Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty
miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites.  Last
year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one
hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of
Mull, a distance of four and a half miles.  Marconi, an Italian, has
sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the
London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill.
Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric
vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of
masonry.  Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such
infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must.  It has already
been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead
wires.  Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron.  A wire
will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without
interference.  What will not the more facile ether do?

Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and
knowledge not yet explored.  They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn.
The full day is yet to shine.

Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse--afraid of the
unknown master.  If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is
our Father, and that he has fitted up this house, out of his own
infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like him in wisdom and
power as well as in love.



OUR ENJOYMENT OF NATURE'S FORCES

We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the
exercise of force.  In early times when we knew of no forces to handle
but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men,
there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation.  In the
Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered
down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.

But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of
our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb
forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace.  We can now use our
forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery
on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our
fellow-men, resulting in ruin.  We now devote to the conquest of nature
what we once devoted to the conquest of men.  There is a fascination in
looking on force and its results.  Some men never stand in the presence
of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they
stood in the presence of God--and they do.

The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes
it an age of adventure and discovery.  The heart of equatorial Africa
has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.

Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme.  All
the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and
gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation.  And
yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated,
molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the
whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.

The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time.  Let
me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of
force on this world of ours.


THE MONTE ROSA

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of
thought and endeavor in Europe.  We are occasionally surprised by
hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were
killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere,
and we wonder why they went there.  The Alps are a great object of
interest to all Europe.  I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478
works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller.  It seems incredible.  In
this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a
single mountain, and that not the most difficult.  There are
publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology,
botany, and one volume of _Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont
Blanc_.  The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem.  The
summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but
two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends
folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the
Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for
bugs.  Every rod is a schoolhouse.  They speak of the "snow mountains"
with ardent affection.  Every Englishman, having no mountains at home,
speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps.  He, however, cares less for
their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a
gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability.  The name of every
mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and
the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand
testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy.  In the
grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of
the most interesting exhibits.  This general interest in the Alps is a
testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach,
and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the
enervating influences of civilization.  There is one place in the world
devoted by divine decree to pure air.  You are obliged to use it.
Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every
particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect
air.  Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and
disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done.  He crawled out
of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the
mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and
every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that
time.  In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge,
training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work,
man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains?  Come to Zermatt.  With a wand ten
miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks.  Europe has but one higher.
Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents
into the little green valley.  Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more
difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more
difficult than either or both.  A plumbline dropped from the summit of
Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt.  You
first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred
double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles.  In the
afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the
Riffelhouse.  It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs
of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your
house--only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the
house.  This takes three hours--an hour to each hundred stories; after
the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have
reached the first floor.  The next day you go up and down the Görner
Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a
view unequaled in Europe.  Ordering the guide to be ready and the
porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the
glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the
question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad."  There is
plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live
thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly
near.  We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent.  The
lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and
the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct.  Was the
storm over?  The guides would give no opinion.  It was their interest
to go, it was ours to go only in good weather.  By three o'clock I
noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that
has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an
inch upward.  I gave the order to start.  The other parties said, "Good
for your pluck!  _Bon voyage, gute reise_," and went to bed.  In an
hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier.
The sky was brilliant.  Hopes were high.  The glacier with its vast
medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long,
was crossed in the dawn.  The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks
with glory, and we shouted victory.  But in a moment the sun was
clouded, and so were we.  Soon it came out again, and continued clear.
But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear
weather."  Men get pious amid perils.  I thought of the aneroid, and
felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his
servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain.  Six hours and a
half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight.  I have no
fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do
the ascents.  They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and
enjoy, but to boast.  We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty
feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow
of ice below.  We scramble up the rocks of the mountain.  Hour after
hour we toil upward.  At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all
four roped together.  There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred
feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them.  If a man drops in
the rest must pull him out.  Being heavier than any other man of the
party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my
ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay
of dangling by a rope in a chasm.  The beauty of these cold blue ice
vaults cannot be described.  They are often fringed with icicles.  In
one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the
bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an
apparently reversed condition.  We passed one place where vast masses
of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start
a new avalanche.  We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened!  How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened
the effect in the valley below!  The glorious air made us know what the
man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive.  Some have
little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide.  Having carefully chosen him, by
testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only
generally, but step by step.  Put each foot in his track.  He had
trodden the snow to firmness.  But being heavier than he it often gave
way under my pressure.  One such slump and recovery takes more strength
than ten regular steps.  Not so in following the Guide to the fairer
and greater heights of the next world.  He who carried this world and
its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such
firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever
breaks down the track.  And just so in that upward way, one fall and
recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather?  Uncertainty.  Avalanches thundered
from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in
the air.  The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm.
Still the sun shone clear.  We had put in six of the eight hours' work
of ascent when snow began to fall.  Soon it was too thick to see far.
We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm.  It
was only twenty feet wide.  Getting round this the storm deepened till
we could scarcely see one another.  There was no mountain, no sky.  We
halted of necessity.  The guide said, "Go back."  I said, "Wait."  We
waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which
we had come--our only guide back if the storm continued--was lost
except the holes made by the Alpenstocks.  The snow drifted over, and
did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently
the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down.  In an hour we got
below the storm.  The valley into which we looked was full of brightest
sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk.  In another
hour the whole sky was perfectly clear.  O that I had kept my faith in
my aneroid!  Had I held to the faith that started me in the
morning--endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied
apparent knowledge of local guides--and then been able to surmount the
difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such
a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all
the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the
cleared air.  Better things were prepared for me than I knew;
indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and
held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of
darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and
softened snow, and said to the guide, "To-morrow I start for the
Matterhorn."  To do this we go down the three hundred stories to
Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree
profitable.  Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination,
has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.



THE MATTERHORN

The Matterhorn is peculiar.  I do not know of another mountain like it
on the earth.  There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the
moon.  How it came to be such I treated of fully in _Sights and
Insights_.  It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen
thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep
as to be unassailable.  Approach can be made only along the angle at
the junction of the planes.

[Illustration: The Matterhorn.]

It was long supposed to be inaccessible.  Assault after assault was
made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its
virgin height untrodden.  However, in 1864, seven men, almost
unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were
precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand
feet.  They had achieved the summit after hundreds of others had
failed.  They had reveled in the upper glories, deposited proof of
their visit, and started to return.  According to law, they were roped
together.  According to custom, in a difficult place all remain still,
holding the rope, except one who carefully moves on.  Croz, the first
guide, was reaching up to take the feet of Mr. Haddow and help him down
to where he stood.  Suddenly Haddow's strength failed, or he slipped
and struck Croz on the shoulders, knocking him off his narrow footing.
They two immediately jerked off Rev. Mr. Hudson.  The three falling
jerked off Lord Francis Douglas.  Four were loose and falling; only
three left on the rocks.  Just then the rope somehow parted, and all
four dropped that great fraction of a mile.  The mountain climber makes
a sad pilgrimage to the graves of three of them in Zermatt; the fourth
probably fell in a crevasse of the glacier at the foot, and may be
brought to the sight of friends in perhaps two score years, when the
river of ice shall have moved down into the valleys where the sun has
power to melt away the ice.  This accident gave the mountain a
reputation for danger to which an occasional death on it since has
added.

Each of these later unfortunate occurrences is attributable to personal
perversity or deficiency.  Peril depends more on the man than on
circumstances.  One is in danger on a wall twenty feet high, another
safe on a precipice of a thousand feet.  No man has a right to peril
his life in mere mountain climbing; that great sacrifice must be
reserved for saving others, or for establishing moral principle.

The morning after coming from Monte Rosa myself and son left Zermatt at
half past seven for the top of the Matterhorn, twelve hours distant,
under the guidance of Peter Knubel, his brother, and Peter Truffer,
three of the best guides for this work in the country.  In an hour the
dwellings of the mountain-loving people are left behind, the tree limit
is passed soon after, the grass cheers us for three hours, when we
enter on the wide desolation of the moraines.  Here is a little chapel.
I entered it as reverently and prayed as earnestly for God's will, not
mine, to be done as I ever did in my life, and I am confident that amid
the unutterable grandeur that succeeded I felt his presence and help as
fully as at any other time.

At ten minutes of two we were roped together and feeling our way
carefully in the cut steps on a glacier so steep that, standing erect,
one could put his hand upon it.  We were on this nearly an hour.  Just
as we left it for the rocks a great noise above, and a little to the
south, attracted attention.  A vast mass of stone had detached itself
from the overhanging cliff at the top, and falling on the steep slope
had broken into a hundred pieces.  These went bounding down the side in
long leaps.  Wherever one struck a cloud of powdered stone leaped into
the air, till the whole mountain side smoked and thundered with the
grand cannonade.  The omen augured to me that the mountain was going to
do its best for our reception and entertainment.  Fortunately these
rock avalanches occur on the steep, unapproachable sides, and not at
the angle where men climb.

How the mountain grew upon us as we clung to its sides!  When the great
objects below had changed to littleness the heights above seemed
greater than ever.  At half past four we came to a perpendicular height
of twenty feet, with a slight slope above.  Down this precipice hung a
rope; there was also an occasional projection of an inch or two of
stone for the mailed foot.  At the top, on a little shelf, under
hundreds of feet of overhanging rock, some stones had been built round
and over a little space for passing the night.  The rude cabin occupied
all the width of the shelf, so that passing to its other end there was
not room to walk without holding on by one's hands in the crevices of
the wall.  We were now at home; had taken nine hours to do what could
be done in eight.  What an eyrie in which to sleep!  Below us was a
sheer descent, of a thousand or two feet, to the glacier.  Above us
towered the crest of the mountain, seemingly higher than ever.  The
sharp shadow of the lofty pyramid lengthened toward Monte Rosa.  Italy
lifted up its mountains tipped with sunshine to cheer us.  The Obernese
Alps, beyond the Rhone, answered with numerous torches to light us to
our sleep.  According to prearrangement, at eight o'clock we kindled a
light on our crag to tell our friends in Zermatt that we had
accomplished the first stage of our journey.  They answered instantly
with a cheery blaze, and we lay down to sleep.

When four of us lay together I was so crowded against the wall that I
thought if it should give way I could fall two thousand feet out of bed
without possibility of stopping on the way.  The ice was two feet thick
on the floor, and by reason of the scarcity of bedding I was reminded
of the damp, chilly sheets of some unaired guest-chambers.  I do not
think I slept a moment, but I passed the night in a most happy,
thoughtful, and exultant frame of mind.

At half past three in the morning we were roped together--fifteen feet
of rope between each two men--for the final three or four hours' work.
It is everywhere steep; it is every minute hands and feet on the rocks;
sometimes you cling with fingers, elbows, knees, and feet, and are
tempted to add the nose and chin.  Where it is least steep the guide's
heels are right in your face; when it is precipitous you only see a
line of rope before you.  We make the final pause an hour before the
top.  Here every weight and the fear that so easily besets one must be
laid aside.  No part of the way has seemed so difficult; not even that
just past--when we rounded a shoulder on the ice for sixty feet,
sometimes not over twenty inches wide, on the verge of a precipice four
thousand feet high.  To this day I can see the wrinkled form of that
far-down glacier below, though I took care not to make more than one
glance at it.

The rocks become smoother and steeper, if possible.  A chain or rope
trails from above in four places.  You have good hope that it is well
secured, and wish you were lighter, as you go up hand over hand.  Then
a beautiful slope for hands, knees, and feet for half an hour, and the
top is reached at half past six.

The view is sublime.  Moses on Pisgah could have had no such vision.
He had knowledge added of the future grandeur of his people, but such a
revelation as this tells so clearly what God can do for his people
hereafter that that element of Moses's enjoyment can be perceived, if
not fully appreciated.  All the well-known mountains stand up like
friends to cheer us.  Mont Blanc has the smile of the morning sun to
greet us withal.  Monte Rosa chides us for not partaking of her
prepared visions.  The kingdoms of the world--France, Switzerland,
Italy--are at our feet.  One hundred and twenty snow-peaks flame like
huge altar piles in the morning sun.  The exhilarant air gives ecstasy
to body, the new visions intensity of feeling to soul.  The Old World
has sunk out of sight.  This is Mount Zion, the city of God.  New
Jerusalem has come down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her
husband.  The pavements are like glass mingled with fire.  The gates of
the morning are pearl.  The walls, near or far according to your
thought, are like jasper and sapphire.  The glory of God and of the
Lamb lightens it.

But we must descend, though it is good to be here.  It is even more
difficult and tedious than the ascent.  _Non facilis descensus_.  With
your face to the mountain you have only the present surface and the
effort for that instant.  But when you turn your back on the mountain
the imminent danger appears.  It is not merely ahead, but the sides are
much more dangerous.  On the way down we had more cannonades.  In six
hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let
ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand
four hundred feet.

Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel
for it a personal affection.  It has put more pictures of grandeur into
my being than ever entered in such a way before.  It is grand enough to
bear acquaintance.  People who view it from a distance must be
strangers.  It has been, and ever will be, a great example and lofty
monument of my Father's power.  He taketh up the isles as a very little
thing; he toucheth the mountains and they smoke.  The strength of the
hills is his also; and he has made all things for his children, and
waits to do greater things than these.



THE GRAND CANON OF THE COLORADO RIVER

Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a
woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south.  It
was once soft clay.  It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean
rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to
flow.  More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock.  Many
strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of
beauty was buried thousands of feet deep.  The strata were tilted
variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very
much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles
and kneads on the molding board.  Other rocks of a much harder nature,
composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's
infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea.  Still the
delicate ripple marks were preserved.  Nature's vast library was being
formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost.

Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white.  It once flowed
as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock
now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain.  The water
gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops.  Between
the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance
of more than a mile of impenetrable rock.  How did they ever get
together?  Let us see.

After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this
vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed
round with mountains.  Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed
in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way
along a few hundred miles.  Into this crack rushed a great river,
perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake
may be a little remnant puddle.  These tumultuous waters proceeded to
pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock
deposited between the two stones.  There was fall enough to make forty
Niagaras.

I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a
mountain valley.  It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a
precipice of one thousand feet.  The rock at the bottom was crushed
under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and
every few minutes the top became the bottom.  In one hour millions of
tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the
plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses.  I knew
three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep.
Water and gravitation make a frightful plow.  Here some prehistoric
Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.

The Colorado River is one of our great rivers.  It is over two thousand
miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern
border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side
of the Rocky Mountains.  Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to
what it once was.  It is easy to see that there were several epochs of
work.  Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the
depth of several thousand feet.  This cutting is of various widths.
Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying
hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say,
half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are
various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular
sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters.  The
outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood
and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the
chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.

We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the
mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the
rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off
whole oceans of rain.  The rivers that remained began to cut a much
narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below.  From the
great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting
lateral cañons down to the central flow.  Between these stand the
little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.

I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked
leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone
written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of
one formed, eons after, at the top.  They be brothers both, formed by
the same forces and for the same end.

Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to
stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done.  A whole
day is taken to go down the gorge to the river.  It takes seven miles
of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over
two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down
thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile.  It was
an immense day's work.

The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses
never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn
seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder.

There was the river--a regular freight train, running day and night,
the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the
elevated road of the upper air)--burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed
rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the
sea.  What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in
uncounted ages!  In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it
has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it
was easy to see the work done.  Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile
the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a
mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate.  The next rush of
waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into
the main river.  For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of
Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South
Boston Flats.  Boston made more land than the city originally
contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these
excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty
chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the
next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared
comparatively little.  One gets new meanings of the words almighty,
eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require
them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down
this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the
purpose.  In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of
it in extremest peril.  For weeks there was no possibility of climbing
to the plateau above.

Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at
first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of
color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its
illumined windows.  You do not know much about her, but in long years
of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in
the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in
the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you
find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed.
The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in
awe and adoration.  The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet
deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and
forty.  Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer
acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the
breezy mountain tops."  I have seen many sunrises In this world and one
other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for
weeks into its morning sunlight.  I knew what to expect.  But nature
always surpasses expectations.  The sinuosities of the rim sent back
their various colors.  A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and
water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of
the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music.  As the
world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished,
light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new
creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light"
had been uttered.  I had seen it for the first time the night before in
the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed
to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere.  It is well known that
the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky.  Blue is the color of the
atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a
jar, it shows its own true color.  So, looking into this inconceivable
cañon, the true color came out most beauteously.  There was a
background of red and yellowish rocks.  These made the cold blue blush
with warm color.  The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish
white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind
it.  God was laying the foundation of his perfect city there, and the
light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been
made by the luminousness of Him who is light.

One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and
hint of the world to come.  The communication of ideas and feelings
there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally
made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama,
parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm.
The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater
things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless
mines in the upper hills.  So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the
wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul.  One
should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to
live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more
wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.

The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature.  The
floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the
Lord.  Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and
sang:

  "Perpetual masses here intone,
    Uncounted censers swing,
  A psalm on every breeze is blown;
  The echoing peaks from throne to throne
    Greet the indwelling King;
  The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
  And seraph-tongued are earth and air."



THE YELLOWSTONE PARK GEYSERS


THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I have been to school.  Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful
teacher.  She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through
conic sections.  The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a
mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top
large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down.  In the center of this
was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical
chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a
height of from two to five feet.  I sat down with it half an hour,
compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations.
There were all the essentials of a geyser.  There was a mound, not
always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated
with mineral.  It might be three feet high; it might be thirty.  There
was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces.  It might be half
an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of
the Excelsior geyser.  It might rise six inches; it might rise two
hundred and fifty feet.  There was the interval between the jets.  It
might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years.

[Illustration: Formation of the Grotto Geyser.]

A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic."
Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole
in the middle about one foot across.  The water was perfectly calm.
But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise
about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically,
without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an
elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool.  One could stride
the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear.
He might be using the calm depth for a mirror.  But stay a moment too
long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst.

The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward.
I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more
than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle
into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood.  In the center
was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of
the earth.  That was not the geyser--it was only the trump through
which the archangel was to blow.  I had heard the preliminary tuning of
the instrument.

The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from
eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by
jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued
five or six hours before the grand eruption.  I hovered near the grand
stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were
over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain
fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that
famous spouter.

Geysers are more than a trifle freaky.  "Old Faithful" is a notable
exception.  Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of
star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty
feet high.  Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours
for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days.  This
Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor
to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours.  When I
finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been
duly exhibited.  I first carefully noted the frequency and height of
the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale.  There
were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet.
Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet
in height.  People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off.  I
said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now."  Stage loads
of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes,
and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time--not
to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy.  A
photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display.
He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his
camera tent and stole away.  Five hours had passed and night was near.
Everybody was gone.  I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I
was perfectly patient.  I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little
ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most
friendly way.

Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous
hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a
vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder,
one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the
desert.  The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away
all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps
a million times.  Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like
the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that
elevated masonry with a rushing cascade.  Shifting my position a
little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious
outpour with rainbows.  At such times one can neither measure nor
express emotions by words.  In the thunder which anyone can hear there
is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the
Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is
for thy precious sake."

In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated
steam succeeded.  At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters
and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a
trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown.  No archangel could have
done better.  As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very
heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the
air.  It looked more like lines of water than separated drops.  I found
it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air.

I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top.  I could have
put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power.  What a sight it
was!  There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet
wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam.  At thirty-two minutes
from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to
the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine.  All pure
steam is invisible.  At the same time the note of the trumpet
distinctly changed.  The heavy rain at the east as suddenly stopped.
The air could absorb the present amount of moisture.  One could see
farther down the terrible throat that seemed about to be rent asunder.
The awful grandeur was becoming too much for human endurance.  The
contorted forms of rocks on the summit began to take the forms and
heads of dragons, such as the Chinese carve on their monuments.  The
awful column began to change its effect from terror to fascination, and
I knew how Empedocles felt when he flung himself into the burning
Aetna.  It was time to get down and stand further off.

[Illustration: Bee-Hive Geyser.]

The long waiting had been rewarded.  "To patient faith the prize is
sure."  The grand tumult began to subside.  It was beyond all my
expectations.  Nature never disappoints, for she is of God and in her
he yet immanently abides.  The next day the sky and all the air were
full of falling rain.  How could it be otherwise?  It was the geyser
returning to earth.  I sought the place.  The awful trumpet was silent,
and the steam exhaled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath.

Only one more lesson will be recited at present.  I had just arrived in
camp when they told me that the Splendid geyser, after two days of
quiet, was showing signs of uneasiness.  I immediately went out to
study my lesson.  There was a little hill of very gentle slopes, a
little pool at the top, three holes at the west side of it, with a
dozen sputtering hot springs scattered about, while in a direct line at
the east, within one hundred and forty feet, were the Comet, the Daisy,
and another geyser.  The Daisy was a beauty, playing forty feet high
every two or four hours.   All the slopes were constantly flowing with
hot water.  This general survey was no sooner taken than our glorious
Splendid began to play.  The roaring column, tinted with the sunset
glories, gradually climbed to a height of two hundred feet, leaned a
little to the southeast, and bent like a glorious arch of triumph to
the earth, almost as solid on its descending as on its ascending side.
No wonder it is named "Splendid."

Whoever has studied waterfalls of great height--I have seen nearly
forty justly famous falls--has noticed that when a column or mass of
water makes the fearful plunge smaller masses of water are constantly
feathered off at the sides and delayed by the resistance of the air,
while the central mass hurries downward by its concentrated weight.
The general appearance is that of numerous spearheads with serrated
edges, feathered with light, thrust from some celestial armory into the
writhing pool of agonized waters below.  In the geyser one gets this
effect both in the ascending and in the descending flood.

Four times that first night dear old Splendid lured me from my bed to
watch her Titanic play in the full light of the moon.  During all this
time not a hot spring ceased its boiling, nor a smaller geyser its
wondrous play, for this gigantic outburst of power that might well have
absorbed every energy for a mile around.  Obviously they have no
connection.  Then my beloved Splendid settled into a three-days' rest.

These are the essential facts of geyser display.  There are very many
variations of performance in every respect, I have seen over twenty
geysers in almost jocular, and certainly in overwhelmingly magnificent,
activity.

  "To him who in the love of nature holds
  Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
  A various language."


WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

What is the power that can throw a stream of water two by six feet over
the tops of the highest skyscrapers of Chicago?  It is heat manifested
in the expansive power of steam.  Scientists have theorized long and
experimented patiently to read the open book of this tremendous
manifestation of uncontrollable energy.  At first the form and action
of a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory.  Everyone knows that
when steam accumulates under the lid it forces a gentle stream of water
from the higher nozzle.  This fact was made the basis of a theory to
account for geysers by Sir George Mackenzie in 1811.  But to suppose
that nature has gone into the teakettle manufacturing business to the
extent of thirty such kettles in a space of four square miles was seen
to be preposterous.  So the construction theory was given up.

But suppose a tube (how it is made will be explained later), large or
small, regular or irregular, to extend far into the earth, near or
through any great source of heat resulting from condensation,
combustion, chemical action, or central fire.  Now suppose this tube to
be filled with water from surface or subterranean sources.  Heat
converts water, under the pressure of one atmosphere, or fifteen pounds
to the square inch, into steam at a temperature of two hundred and
twelve degrees.  But under greater pressure more heat is required to
make steam.  The water never leaps and bubbles in an engine boiler.
The awful pressure compels it to be quiet.  A cubic inch of water will
make a cubic foot--one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times as
much--of steam under the pressure of one atmosphere.  But under the
pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure
of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom,
water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat.  Every engineer
knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical
ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios.  Steam made
by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said,
of fifteen pounds.

To simply double the two hundred and twelve degrees of heat increases
the steam pressure twenty-three times.

Now suppose the subterranean tube or lake of Old Faithful to be freshly
filled with its million gallons of water.  Sufficient heat makes steam
under any pressure.  It rises up the tube and is condensed to water
again by the colder water above.  Hence no commotion.  But the whole
volume of water grows hotter for an hour.  When it is too hot to absorb
the steam, and the tube is too narrow to let the amount made bubble up
through the water, it lifts the whole mass with a sudden jerk.  The
instant the pressure of the water is taken off in any degree, the water
below, that was kept water by the pressure, breaks into steam most
voluminously, and the measureless power floods the earth and sky with
water and steam.

It is also known that superheated steam suddenly takes on such great
power that no boiler can hold it.  Once let the water in a boiler get
very low and no boiler can hold the force of the resultant superheated
steam.  The same heat that, applied to water, gives perfect safety,
applied to steam gives utter destruction.  Hence the amazing force of
the vast jets of the geyser that follow the first spurts.

As soon as the steam is blown off the subterranean waterworks fill the
tube and the process is repeated.

This modus operandi was first proposed as a theory by Bunsen in 1846,
and later was demonstrated by the artificial geyser of Professor J. H.
J. Muller, of Freiburg.

[Illustration: Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak.]


MOUNDS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS

I have the extremely difficult task of representing emotions by
words--glories of color and form seen by the eye by symbols meant to be
addressed to the ear.  Before seeking to describe the diverse colors
made largely by one substance, let us remember that while silica, the
principal part of these water-built mounds, is one of the three parts
of granite, namely, the white crystal quartz, it is also the substance
of the beautifully variegated jasper, the lapis lazuli, the green
malachite, and the opal, with its cloudy milk-whiteness through which
flashes its heart of fire.  Silica and alumina combine to make common
clay, but alumina forms itself into the red ruby, the golden-tinted
topaz, the violet oriental amethyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet
sapphire, and the beautiful green emerald.  With substances of such
rare capabilities we may expect rich results in color and form.

We turn now to deposits from water of these two substances, especially
the first.  About the Old Faithful geyser is a mound about one hundred
and forty-five feet broad at the base, twelve feet high, jeweled over
with pools of beauty of every shape, beaded and fretted with glories of
color never seen before except in the sky.  How were they made?

Water is a general solvent.  It can take into its substance several
similar bulks of other substances without greatly increasing its own,
some actually diminishing it.  Hot alkaline water will dissolve even
silica rock.  When water is saturated with sugar, salt, or other
substance, if a little or much water is evaporated some of the
saturating substance must be deposited as a solid.  All crystals, as
quartz or diamonds, have been made by deposits from water.  Hot water
can hold in solution much more of a solid than cold water.  Therefore,
when hot water comes out of the earth and is cooled, some of the
saturating substance must be deposited as a solid.  It is done in
various ways, especially two.

Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across.
It leaps and boils two feet high.  It deposits nothing till the water
comes to the cooling edge.  Then it builds up a wall where it
overflows, and wherever it flows it builds.  The result is that you
walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little
lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the
circumference.  If there is but little overflow, the result may be to
deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular
wall around the cup two or ten feet high.  If the overflow is too much
to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one
hundred feet from the point of issue.  If the overflow is sufficient,
it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot
being wet.

[Illustration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.]

Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages
of evaporation.  Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping
toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as
if with a sieve.  At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as
one ever sees in the sunlit sky.  And every color ever seen in a sunset
flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths.  Suppose a low cone
to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful
geyser.  The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under
the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high,
making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which
are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye.  You
walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and
impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled
except by that perpetual glory of the sunset.

Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow.  Just as lakes that
have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid
salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet
high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids.  Where?  First,
against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce
the opening to a mere throat.  Second, each wavelet tossed in air is
cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that
overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice.  It may
build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle.
Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser.  If the water
supply continues, it also destroys itself.  The throat closes up by its
own deposits.  It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.

I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take
one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem
examination.  On my very last day I found opportunity.  I found a dead
geyser, though not by any means yet cold.  It was still so hot that
people had given it an infernal name.  I squeezed myself down through
its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a
cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty
feet long.  It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a
sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top.  The way down to the fiery
heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the
sides and at the bottom.  The water had evaporated by the intense heat,
and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and
volcano.  When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there
was no help from below.

I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a
tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the
top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree
firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering
twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty--but I despair.  The
half has not been told.  It cannot be.  Great and marvelous are all Thy
works, Lord God Almighty!  In wisdom hast Thou made them all.

Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as
real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is
a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words
for thoughts which they signify."  Using these faculties and not mere
eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness,
finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment,
but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been
made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."



SEA SCULPTURE*

*Reprinted from _The Chautauquan_.


When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first
launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long
before they could reach it.  But they made a cloud of smoke under the
cover of which a second column was launched.  They would all be shot
down.  But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column
broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt.  They carried it,
but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.

So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge
with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at
Santa Cruz, California.

There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a
thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the
rocky shore.  While they are yet some distance from the land a small
boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower
places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force.  Those
roaring waves rear up two or three times as high.  They have great
perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring.  The spray flies
from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the
wind.  No ship can hold anchor in the breakers.  They may dare a
thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this
resistless power and they are doomed.  The waves seem frantic with
rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with
thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the
rocks we will try to relate.

[Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of
that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of
roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative
processes, abound.  The breakers from which the house is named are not
seen in the picture.  When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one
hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point,
feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at
some other world's end.  All these pictures are taken in the calm
weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of
spray, often fifty feet high.  At the bottom of the cliff appear the
nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have
fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it
away.  Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and
figures, solemn and grotesque.  It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra,
Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds
the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the
ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific,
that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong.
Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was
moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the
sea; like God it useth me."  There is a wideness like his mercy, a
power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length
of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular
order, like the leaves of a book on its side.  But by various forces
they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled
together.  These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1)
igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the
ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3)
limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard;
(4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having
huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around
which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6)
conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold
snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of
organic matter.  In our second illustration some of these layers, or
strata, may be distinguished.

[Illustration: The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place
less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half
a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years
go by, it drives its wedges home in that place.  A shallow cave
results.  Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet
with awful force in the middle.  Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a
drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the
reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus.  This tunnel may be
driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore.  At each
inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it.  It seeks
outlet.  And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack
in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from
the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to
seventy feet deep.  Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning
carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.

No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great
excavation one hundred feet back from the shore.  It is one hundred and
fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep.  All the
material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave.  On the
natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York,
might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered.  Through the arch
a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide.  Through
the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness
the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture.  When the
arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be
carried out to sea like many another.

[Illustration: A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff?  Its waves
wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers
reaching out into the sea.  The wear and tear on such a projection is
immense.  A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the
cliff.  At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the
pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may
sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin
falls with a sound of thunder on the beach.  But let him once be caught
and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of
bones within him.

In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as
the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand
times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the
projecting finger.  It is often done.  Illustration No. 4 shows at low
tide such a projection cut through.  Since the picture was taken the
bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the
pier stands lonely in the sea.

[Illustration: An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial
nearer the famous Cliff Drive.  I go to the frail one every year with
anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away.  How I wish I could
show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer
yet to the drive.  But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a
point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell
of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle.

[Illustration: A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches.  The long
projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully
seen in any one view.  I have waded and swam through these rocky
vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have
mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little
specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks
that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of
the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of
the wildest storm could work them harm.  All these seek their food from
Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that
they may drink.

[Illustration: A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is
still standing.  Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier,
scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel
to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore.  The
one now standing makes the fourth.  But the ever-working sea carves and
carries away arch and shore alike.  At some points a careful and even
admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless
tooth gnaws on unceasingly.

[Illustration: Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

On the right near the point is seen a board sign.  It says here, as in
many other places, "Danger."  Sometimes two converging waves meet at
the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and
carry away anyone who stands there.  One large and two small shreds of
skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience
there that did not result quite so disastrously.

The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut
through the rocky barrier of the shore.  But in this case the trend of
the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke
into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two
entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland.  It
terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which
are not shown in the picture.

[Illustration: Arch Remains Side Wall Broken, Santa Clara, Cal.]

What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured
over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand?  It is carried out by gentle
undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never
blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer
air.  It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day.
There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales
of to-day and possibly of man.  Sometime, if the depths become heights,
as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may
read therein much of the present history of the world.  We say to that
coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it
shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."



THE POWER OF VEGETABLE LIFE

I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a
pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head.  They are
smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and
clearly distinguishable one from another.  They have such intense
individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of
one kind be made to look or act like those of another.  These little
masses of matter are centers of incredible power.  They are seeds.

Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft,
succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food,
but mostly drink, for hungry beasts.  It exhausts all its energy
quickly.  Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready
for the oven.

Try the other seed.  It is of the pin head size.  It is dark brown,
hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's.
The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun
kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play.
They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm
white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and
tough as an oak.  This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark
ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth.  Soon after the seed
thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go
upward to the light.  Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong.
They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is
to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of
California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet
high.

How is it to be done?  By powers latent in the seed developing and
expanding for a thousand years.  What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination?
That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be
made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango,
banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only _sequoia gigantea_.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives
one a headache to remember.  But this seed never makes a single
mistake.  It produces millions of leaves, but every one is
awl-shaped--subulate.  Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic,
balsamic, medicinal.  We go to the other side of the world to bring the
odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils.  But amid so many odors our
seed will make but one.  It is resinous, like some of those odors the
Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel
saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one
who destroyed their life.  The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man
can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.

[Illustration: The Big Trees.]

There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we
are hardly acute enough to discover.  The microscopist revels in the
forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its
color.  The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite.  But the big
tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its
thousands unfinished.

The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs,
outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity.  It
discriminates.

But how does it build itself?  Myriads of rootlets search the
surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf,
flower, and seed.  They often find what they want in other
organizations or other chemical compounds.  But with a power of
analytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to
their majestic growths.  But how is material conveyed from rootlet to
veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away?  The great tree is more full of
channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of canals, and it
is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed.
These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for
the perpendicular elevation of the freight.  The tiny boats run day and
night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are
a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever
landed on the way for bark or woody fiber.  Freight never goes astray,
nor are express packages miscarried.  What starts for bark, leaf,
fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else.
There are hundreds of miles of canals, but every boat knows where to
land its unmarked freight.  Curious as is this work underground, that
in the upper air is more so.  The tree builds most of its solid
substance from the mobile and tenuous air.  Trees are largely condensed
air.  By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the
tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built
into wood.  Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need
not dig for coal.

In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many
other kinds of force.  There is the power of cohesion.  How it holds
the particles of stone or iron together!  You can hardly break its
force with a great sledge.  But the power of life in the tree, or even
grass, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the
disintegrating rock what it wants.  So it must overcome the power of
chemical affinity in water and air.  The substances it wants are in
other combinations, the power of which must be overcome.

Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree's vast
weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it.  So for a
thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till
the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the
power of life.  There is not a place where one can put his finger that
there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is
plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher.  So
the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be
gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a
thousand years.  The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad
harp strings.  It makes wide miles of air aromatic.  Animal life feeds
on the quintessence of life in its seeds.  But most of all it is an
object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the
highest power has dominion over all other power.

The great power of vegetable life was shown under circumstances that
seemed the least favorable in the following experiment:

In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Mass., a squash of the yellow
Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift
by its power of growth.

[Illustration: Yellow Chili Squash in Harness.]

It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash
that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft,
succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb.  A good
idea of the harness is given by the illustration.  The squash was
confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was
indicated by weights on the lever over the top.  There were, including
seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and
rootlets.  These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four
hours.  They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed.
On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds.  By September 30 it lifted a ton.
On October 24 it carried over two tons.  The squash grew gnarled like
an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany.  Its inner
cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual.

The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones
from time to time.  More weights were sought.  They scurried through
the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at
varying distances, as shown in the cut.  By the 31st of October it was
carrying a weight of five thousand pounds.  Then owing to defects of
the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what
might have been done under better conditions.  Every particle of the
squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous
pressure.  But life will assert itself.

[Illustration: Squash in Cage.]

No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his
power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches."  The
tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out
into all branches that are really vitally attached.  No wonder that
much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted
power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."



SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS*

*Reprinted from _The Study_.

Will God indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon.  Will God indeed
work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day.
Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to
help out his human endeavors?  Does God put special forces to open some
doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder
others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and
invigorate a man's own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten,
because his heart is pure enough for God to work in it and through it?
If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent,
and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid?

First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves.  We did not
make this world.  We did not put into it even the lowest force,
gravitation.  It is more than our minds can compass to measure its
power.  We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the
sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought
down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder.  Much less can we measure
the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless
centrifugal force.  We did not make the next highest force, cohesion.
The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that
gravitation cannot overcome it.  But it is not by our energy.  We did
not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both
gravitation and cohesion.  Water, the result of chemical affinity
between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its constituent elements
with nothing less than a stream of lightning.  We did not make the next
highest force, vegetative life.  That masters gravitation, and lifts up
the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree's rootlets tear
asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the
oxygen from air and water.  We did not create that force, measureless
to our minds.  We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater
than all of them.  The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not
ourselves.

It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have
originated themselves.  It is equally so that they could maintain and
continue themselves.  There must be some continual upholding by a word
of power.

It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan
behind these forces.  They are not blind Samsons grinding in a
prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin
every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands.

If intelligent and planful, there must be personality.  We may as well
call it by the name by which it is universally known, God.

Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and
lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes?  It is better to
put it the other way.  Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when
one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think God is on
our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God's
side."  So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful
personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his
plans?

That will depend on what he wants done.  If he only wants mountains
lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a
continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of
strata and let them come down the other side up.  If he wants mountains
carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for
thousands of years numberless tons.  If he wants worlds held in
rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation.  Man is of no
use; he cannot reach so far.

But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly
welcome man's aid.  Has he?  Yes.  Obviously he wants things done he
cannot do alone.  Worlds are dead.  Trees do not think.  Morning stars
may sing together, but they cannot love.  None of them have character.
None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power
and love that flush the universe.  None of them are permanent, or worth
keeping forever.  They are only scaffolding.  He wants something
greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels
together can make.  He wants not mere matter acted upon from without,
but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of
granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier
than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting,
and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a
single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal
youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away.
God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better
that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours?  Many.
Gravitation holds us to the earth.  We do not drift, all sides up
successively, in space or chaos.  We never want a breath but there are
oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a
full expectation of the aid of the forces without us.  Man takes to
agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin.
He expects all its energies to cooperate with him.  He plants the grain
or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his
plans.  Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work
into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being.  If a
man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the
adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the
beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to
beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and
hand of mastery.  They all work for and with him.  Does he want his
burdens carried?  The river will convey the Indian on a log or the
armaments of the greatest nations.  The wind fits itself into the
shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land
than all the human race together.  Does he want swiftness?  The
lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am
I."  Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work
into man's plans.

Is not our whole question settled?  If these fundamental forces, these
oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them,
so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of
years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man
to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed,
until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be
otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these
forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible
signs and exponents, are working together with man?  Then, in all
probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be
thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or
things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man.
God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the
highest.  He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not
help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of
eternal life.

Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's
control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over
birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we
call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of
deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes.  He upholds
all things by the direct exercise of his power.  "The uniformities of
nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his
method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under
the pressure of a higher law."  There can be no general providence
which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care
for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not
number all the hairs.  The Old Testament doctrine of a special and
minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving
teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal
individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16).  The cold glacial
period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man,
making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired
before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is
past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds
and hearts has commenced.

It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is
not the title to a thousand acres.  He is soon dispossessed.  It is not
all the bonds and money he can hold.  A dead man's hands are empty.  It
is not reputation that the winds blow away.  But it is character that
he acquires and carries with him.  He has a fidelity to principle that
is like Abdiel's.  He is faithful among the faithless.  He has
allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth
cannot swerve for a moment.  He counts soul so much above the body that
no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway
him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against
even the existence of the body.

Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained?  Not
altogether by individual evolution.  Ancestral tendencies, parental
example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral
muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and
especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out
this greatest result of heaven and earth.  Of some men you expect
nothing but goodness and greatness.  They would belie all the
tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good.  Some are
constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that
sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds.  What could be
expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism?
What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the
sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the
earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and
inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty?  What could be
expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter
following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves
exiled for liberty to worship God?  What can be expected of men who
have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold?
Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations
been strengthened out of God?  Besides the strength of development by
the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape,
that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power
able to bear it.  Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?

But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of
God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there
are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him.  He starts a
rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers
and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster.  He launches his ship
on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles.  He
speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity
carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand
miles.  He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal
character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds
of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs,
a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal
aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works.

Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth,
wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it
believes in the divine co-operation to that end.  It must be born of
the Spirit.  God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba,
Father!  It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.

Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this
higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and
perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ
Jesus.  By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of
endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be
worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought.

And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say
nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who
hath redeemed us unto God, and washed us in his blood.

To what extent, then, may we expect God will lend his forces to work
out our plans?  First, in so far as those forces have to do with the
maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans.  No
energy will be withheld.  All our plans should be such.  The end in
character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by
success.  God has to choose the poor in this world's things, rich in
faith, to do his great work.  And he has to make "the best laid schemes
o' mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of
character.  He is then working with, not against, us.  He would rather
have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold.

But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we
expect in our plans and work for others?

Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word
of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing."  There must be an
outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost.  Over against that
settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and assurance of the
Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed
iteration), "unto the end of the world."  That has not yet come.

But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug,
railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to
be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be
exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten.
To what extent may we expect divine aid?

First, all these things are his purposes and plans.  But since it is
necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do
what we can.  We can plant and water, but God only can give the
increase.  Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was
stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of
the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help.  "Get up, O
lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the
wheel, and whip up your horses."  We may call on God to open the rock
in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our
teacups.  It is no use to ask God for a special shower when deep
plowing is all that is needed.  It is no use to ask God to build
churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till
we have done our best.

But when we have done our best what may we expect?  All things.  They
shall work together for good to those who love God enough to do their
best for him in any plane of work.  One could preach fifty sermons on
the great works done by men, obviously too great for man's
accomplishment.  Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul,
Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown,
Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who,
undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness.  One of the great sins
of our age is that men do not see God immanent in all things.  We have
found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments
of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after
the counsel of his own will.  A sustainer is as necessary as a creator.
There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh
all in all.  The next great service to be done by human philosophy is
to bring back God in human thought into his own world.  Since these
things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the
works of God by his power?

First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as
included in his.  All our works may be wrought in God, if we do his
works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength.

Second, they must be attempted with the right motive of glorifying God.
Christ is the pattern.  He came not to do his own will, but the will of
him who sent him.  And he did always the things that pleased him.  In
our fervid desires for the accomplishment of some great thing we should
be as willing it should be accomplished by another as by ourselves.
The personal pride is often a fly in the sweet-smelling savor.  God
would rather have a given work not done, or done by another, than to
have one of his dear ones puffed up with sinful pride.  Great Saul must
often be removed and the work be left undone, or be done by some humble
David.

  "Inaudible voices call us, and we go;
  Invisible hands restrain us, and we stay;
  Forces, unfelt by our dull senses, sway
  Our wavering wills, and hedge us in the way
  We call our own, because we do not know.

  "Are we, then, slaves of ignorant circumstance?
  Nay, God forbid!
  God holds the world, not blind, unreasoning chance!"

How shall we secure the cooperative power?  There is power of every
kind everywhere in plenty.  All the Niagaras and Mississippis have run
to waste since they began to thunder and flow.  Greater power is in the
wind everywhere.  One can rake up enough electricity to turn all the
wheels of a great city whenever he chooses to start his rake.  The sky
is full of Pentecosts.  Power enough, but how shall we belt on?  By
fasting, prayer, and by willing to do the will of God.  We have so much
haste that we do not tarry at Jerusalem for fullness of power.  Moses
was forty years in the wilderness: Daniel fasted and prayed for one and
twenty days.  We are told to pray without ceasing, and that there are
kinds of devils that go not out except at the command of those who fast
and pray.

  "More things are wrought by prayer than
    This world dreams of."

The Bible is a record of achievements impossible to man.  They are
achievements of leaderships, emancipations, governments, getting money
for building God's houses, making strong the weak, waxing valiant in
fight, and turning the world upside down.  The trouble with many of our
modern saints is that they seek for purity only instead of power,
ecstasy instead of excellence, self-satisfaction in a garden of spices
instead of a baptism that straightens them out in a garden of agony.
They are seekers of spiritual joys instead of good governments, cities
well policed and sewered, with every street safe for the feet of
innocence.  The next revelation of new possibilities of grace that will
break out of the old Word will be that of power.

How will this divine aid manifest itself?  In the giving of wisdom for
our plans and their execution.  God will not help in any foolish plans.
He wants no St. Peter's built in a village of six hundred people, no
temple, except on a Moriah to which a whole nation goes up.  Due
proportion is a law of all his creations.  The disciples planned not
only to begin at Jerusalem, but to stay there.  Their plans were wrong,
and they had to be driven out by persecutions and martyrdoms (Acts
viii, 4).  But Africa, Europe, and Asia eagerly received the light
which Jerusalem resisted.  Some ministers to-day stay by their fine
Jerusalems when the kitchens of the surrounding country wait to welcome
them.  The Spirit suffered not Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him
to Macedonia.  Had he then persisted in going to Asia his work would
have been in vain.

We may expect wisdom in the choice of the human agents we select.  Half
a general's success lies in his choice of lieutenants.  No class leader
should be appointed nor steward nominated till after prayer for divine
guidance.  God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of.
He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26).  When
Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the
fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than
any other man.

We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted.  Let Hezekiah
spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings
xix, 14).  The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20).  Let the answer
to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord,
strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and
Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14).  Then all the
heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our
God" (v. l6).  "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his
enemies to be at peace with him."  The purpose of the manifestation of
the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1
John iii, 8).

Lastly, we may expect actual help.  These plans are all dear to God.
He wishes them all accomplished.  They have been wisely made.
Opposition has been diminished.  It only remains that our hearts be
open to guidance and strengthening.  Moses was sure I AM had sent him.
Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth.
Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord
is your strength."  God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus.  The
three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them
from fire and lions.  "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall
give thee the desires of thy heart."  And the great promise of the Lord
to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for
comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission.  Paul said, "I can
do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."  And all great
doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been
girded for their work by the Almighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a
fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and
grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans
than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure
to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material;
that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a
part of his; that he may sing with new meaning,

  "We for whose sakes all nature stands
  And stars their courses move;"

that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may
boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary
enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for
himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as
this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and
that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified.

How shall it be done?

First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided
for, and expected.  We are children of God; there can be but one great
end through the ages in the universe.  There should be cooperation of
every force.  There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters
divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned,
exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers
of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line
ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed
tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped
in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that
God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man.
Promises of aid are abundant.  Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner
than one jot or tittle of these words fail.  We are invited to test them:
"Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows
of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that
there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the
preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to
change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest,
the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion
of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's
purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that
God can lead and we help.  Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking.
When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and
climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to
Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America.  Bishop
Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that
Christ always arrived before it came.  So in regard to work to be done.
The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and
will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we
arrive.  Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good
partner.  We are workers together with God.  What is being done worthy
of the copartnership?



WHEN THIS WORLD IS NOT*

*Reprinted from the _Methodist Review_.


"The day of the Lord will come . . .; in which the heavens shall pass
away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat,
the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

What is there after that?

To this question there are three answers:

I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there
were before the world was created.  They are not dependent on it.  The
sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore.
The world is not the main thing in the universe.  It is only a
temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose.  When
that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away.  The
time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the
removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made,
that those things which cannot be shaken may remain."  We already have
a kingdom that cannot be moved.  "The things which are seen are
temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."

It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an
empty desert.  God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent.
Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but
all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power.
David could think of no place of hiding from that presence.  The first
word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven."  And
the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer,
swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in
distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed.  What
God created with things that are therein is not empty.  Poets, the true
seers, recognize this.  When Longfellow died one of them, remembering
the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing
each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him
say of his wife long since gone before:

  And now I shall seek her once more,
    On some Mississippi's vast tide
  That flows the whole universe through,
    Than earth's widest rivers more wide.

  Evangeline I shall not miss
    Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
  On opposite sides of rivers so vast
    That islands of worlds intervene.

But what is there in space?  There is the great ceaseless force of
gravitation.  Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed
in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic.  Tie an
apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl
it around your finger, noting its pull.  That depends on the weight of
the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the
whirl.  The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the
head of Goliath.  But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in
diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles
long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the
tensile strength of the string?  If we covered the whole side of the
earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel
wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of
gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not
run around among them.

There swings the moon above us.  Its best service is not its light,
though lovers prize that highly.  Its gravitative work is its best.  It
lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast.
Our universal tug-boat is in the sky.  It saves millions of dollars in
towage to London alone every year.  And this world would not be
habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and
deposit of sewage along the shore.

Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not.  This
force is universally present and effective.  In the possibilities of a
no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter
that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference
to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter.  What gravitation
does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to
assert.  But as will be seen in our second division there is still
ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.

In space empty of worlds there is light.  It flies or runs one hundred
and eighty-six thousand miles a second.  There must be somewhat on
which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet.
We call it ether, not knowing what we mean.  But in this space is the
play of intensest force and quickest activity.  There are hundreds of
millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second.
Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions.  In a cubic mile
of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power.
Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power
of the celestial ether.  Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that
a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of
a pound of ponderable matter.  It is too fine for our experimentation,
too strong for our measurement.  We must get rid of our thumby fingers
first.

What is light doing in space?  That has greatly puzzled all
philosophers.  Without question there is inexpressible power.  It is
seen in velocity.  But what is it doing?  The law of conservation of
force forbids the thought that it can be wasted.  On the earth its
power long ages ago was turned into coal.  The power was reservoired in
mountains ready for man.  It is so great that a piece of coal that
weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at
sea.  But what is the thousand million times more light than ever
struck the earth doing in space?  That is among the things we want to
find out when we get there.  There will be ample opportunity, space,
time, and light enough.

It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is
full of causes of sound.  To anyone capable of turning these causes to
effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into
songful music.  Light makes its impression of color by its different
number of vibrations.  So music sounds its keys.  We know the number of
vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the
number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility.  We know the number of
vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet.
These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light
to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another.  The morning stars do
sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid
down, we may be able to hear them

          Singing as they shine,
  "The hand that made us is divine."

There are places where this music is so fine that the soft and
soul-like sounds of a zephyr in the pines would be like a storm in
comparison, and places where the fierce intensity of light in a
congeries of suns would make it seem as if all the stops of being from
piccolo to sub-bass had been drawn.  No angel flying interstellar
spaces, no soul fallen overboard and left behind by a swift-sailing
world, need fear being left in awful silences.

There seems to be good evidence that electrical disturbances in the sun
are almost instantly reported and effective on the earth.  It is
evident that the destructive force in cyclones is not wind, but
electricity.  It is altogether likely that it is generated in the sun,
and that all the space between it and us thrills with this unknown
power.[1]  All astronomers except Faye admit the connection between sun
spots and the condition of the earth's magnetic elements.  The
parallelism between auroral and sun-spot frequency is almost perfect.
That between sun spots and cyclones is as confidently asserted, but not
quite so demonstrable.  Enough proof exists to make this clear, that
space may be full of higher Andes and Alps, rivers broader than Gulf
Streams, skies brighter than the Milky Way, more beautiful than the
rainbow.  Occasionally some scoffer who thinks he is smart and does not
know that he is mistaken asks with an air of a Socrates putting his
last question: "You say that 'heaven is above us.'  But if one dies at
noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other
toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian
toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole.  Where is
your heaven anyhow?"  O sapient, sapient questioner!  Heaven is above
us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a
little world as this is no more than a bee's leaving different sides of
a bruised pear exuding honey.  Up or down he is in the same fragrant
garden, warm, light, redolent of roses, tremulous with bird song, amid
a thousand caves of honeysuckles, "illuminate seclusions swung in air"
to which his open sesame gives entrance at will.


II.  But there will be in space what the world has become.  It is
nowhere intimated that matter had been annihilated.  Worlds shall
perish as worlds.  They shall wax old as doth a garment.  They will be
folded up as a vesture, and they "shall be changed."  The motto with
which this article began says heavens pass away, elements melt, earth
and its works are burned up.  But always after the heaven and earth
pass away we are to look for "new heavens and a new earth."  On all
that God has made he has stamped the great principle of progress,
refinement, development--rock to soil, soil to vegetable life, to
insect, bird, and man.  Each dies as to what it is, that it may have
resurrection or may feed something higher.  So, in the light of
revelation, earth is not lost.  Science comes, after ages of creeping,
up to the same position.  It, too, asserts that matter is
indestructible.  Burn a candle in a great jar hermetically sealed.  The
weight of the jar and contents is just the same after the burning as
before.  A burned-up candle as big as the world will not be
annihilated.  It will be "changed."

It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean
metamorphoses of matter.  Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a
vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great
deal of mercury.  How shall we get it out?  You can jar out numberless
minute globules by hand.  This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and
so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water.  Now, to
get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in
the smoke.  The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that
heavy stuff out of the smoke again.  It is changed, volatilized, and it
likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to
come back to heaviness again.

Take a great mass of marble.  It was not always a mountain.  It floated
invisibly in the sea.  Invisible animals took it up, particle by
particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves.  The
ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make
limestone masses at the bottom of the sea.  It will not always remain
rock.  Air and water disintegrate it once more.  Little rootlets seize
upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants.  It becomes fiber
to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet.  But,
whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the
seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle
and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de
Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes
between lovers, it is still the same matter.  It may be diffused as gas
or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter.

Matter is worthy of God's creation.  Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy
is no less so.  Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean
individuality.  The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality.
It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain
exact quantities.  An atom of bromine will combine with one of
hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with
three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc.  They
marry without thought of divorce.  A group of atoms married by affinity
is called a molecule.  Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen
make water.  They are like three marbles laid near together on the
ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill
all the space it occupies.  We can put eight or ten similar bulks of
other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its
bulk, some actually diminishing it.  Water molecules are like a mass of
shot, with large interstices between.  Drive the atoms of water apart
by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a
larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is
still indissoluble.  One physicist has declared that the atoms of
oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than
one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of
England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2]  What must the
distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme
rarefactions?  It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some
comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron.  Now,
when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations
will be more easy.  We shall not be obliged to hew out our material
with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite.  Let us not fear that
these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our
purpose.  We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull
stupidity can count in a lifetime.

We are getting used to this sort of work already.  When we reduce
common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the
sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by
the vibration of platinum wire.  When we reduce it to a tenuity of one
millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by
vibrations of itself without any platinum wire.  The greater the
tenuity the greater the creative results.  For example, water in
freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds
to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an
incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides
splitting rocks.  On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam
its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a
thousand ways.  Take a bit of metal called zinc.  It is heavy, subject
to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion.  But cause it to be burned,
to pass away, and be changed.  To do this we use fire, not the ordinary
kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid.  The zinc is
burned up.  What becomes of it?  It becomes electricity.  How changed!
It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our
houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend
miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the
telegraph.  Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life.  Ah,
delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up
the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on
spirit-like tenuity.  And that is what the world goes into.  There is a
substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart
disease.  It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much
rarefied application.  Fill a tube with its vapor.  It is invisible as
ordinary air in daylight.  But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end
to end along its major axis.  A dense cloud forms along the path of the
sunbeam; creation is going on.  What the sun may do in the thinner
vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out
when we get there.  Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of
clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves
a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam.  Creative ordering was
observed in actual process.  It is done under our eyes to show us how
easy it is.  Would it be any less glorious if there were no
Popocatepetl?  A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how
easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence.  She has only
to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize
her creative wish.  Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even
provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on
the retreating blackness of a storm yonder.  Thunder is the sub-bass
nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary
notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff
that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations.
Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred
pounds' weight.  Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be
valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability.
We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have
delicacy of feeling and thought.  What were a wooden body worth?
Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility
of change.  Even iron is mobile in all its particles.  We call it
solid, but it is not.  We lift our eyes from this writing and behold
the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea.  Line after line of its
billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and
roar of advancing and refluent waves.  So the iron of the telephone
wire.  You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the
voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the
rolling surf in the wire's own substance.  And, in order that we may
know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that
the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not
this kind of material.  The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of
heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as
a train of cars is movable here.  There may still be rainbows and
rivers of life if there are no more rocks.  There is a real realm of
"scientific imagination."  But all our imaginings fall far short of
realities.  Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks
to walk on.  But a bird does not.  He oars himself along the upper
fields and rides on air.  So does a bicyclist and balloonist.  Some men
have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines.
That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling
tendencies.  Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood.
Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe.  So
we may air when we get the right shoe.  Browning gives us a delicious
sense of being amphibian as we swim.  And the butterfly, that winged
rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in
us a great longing to be polyphibian.  We have innate tendencies toward
a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if
we are not too much of the earth earthy.  We were designed for this
finer life.  We do take to it even now in the days of our
deterioration, not to say depravity.  The great marvels of the world
are not so much in matter as in man.  We were meant to be more
sensitive to finer influences than we are.  We are far more so than we
think.  Take your child into the street.  Another child coughs at a
window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific
whooping-cough.  All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of
the millionth dilution.  Many people feel "in their bones" the coming
of storms days before their arrival.  We knew a man who ate honey with
delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no
more.  This peculiarity he inherited from his father.  One man has an
insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the
third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse.  In the South
you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless
blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor.
Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had
violets within?  It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and
something far richer, for three thousand miles.  The first influences
which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping
infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison.  But they were read.
It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives
were influenced by the stars.  Every vegetable life, from the meanest
flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped
by the sun.  Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the
vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings
over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe.  Soul was
meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit.  This capability
has been somewhat lost in our deterioration.  To recover these finer
faculties men are required to die.  And for the field of exercising
them the world must be changed.  Paul understood this.  He associated
some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of
the powers of the body.  And the whole creation waiteth for the
apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God.

Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to
the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning?  Our whole
desire for education is a desire for refining influences.  We know
there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of
the Fourth of July.  There is a smile of joy at our country's education
and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a
dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably
mixed.  There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices
itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than
the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the
martyr's pyre.  We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements
because they are stronger and more like God.

Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual
aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings?  He should not.  Man has had
two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined,
peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any
one of the five senses.  That is prenatal.  He comes into the next
life.  At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes
of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new
surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior
companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for
love.  Why hesitate for a third mode of life?  He loses modes of
nourishment; so he has before.  He loses relations to former life; so
he has before.  He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so
he has before.  But each time and in every respect his powers,
possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.

  O the hour when this material
    Shall have vanished like a cloud,
  When amid the wide ethereal
    All the invisible shall crowd.
  In that sudden, strange transition,
    By what new and finer sense
  Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
    And receive the influence?

Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in
the second as knowledge of the second was in the first.  If a fit
intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its
first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the
second.  Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes,
light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and
hence companions, etc.  What fore-gleams have we of the future life?
They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet
realized.  What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings
for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light?  Everything
tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development.  The water
fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost,
straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest
among the rushes.  It is not disappointed.

Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here.  He
weeps for more worlds to conquer.  He is only a boy yet, getting a grip
on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand
that is able to command the tempest.  When he gets the proper pitch of
power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid,
and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation.  Then there
are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its
harbor.  They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America
did hers.  Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in
the use of a single talent.

Man has an instinct for travel and speed.  To travel a couple of months
is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days.  He earnestly
desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them,
yachts, and engines.  Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning
that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a
twinkling.  But he is stopped there.  How he yearns to go to the moon,
the sun, and stars!  But he could not take his present body through the
temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero.  So he
must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift
as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world
has ceased to be a world.  It is all provided for by death.

Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the
present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone.  A
thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to
others and to the world about him, beset him here.  There he shall know
even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable.  But the wails
of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.
Husbands and fathers are ever crying:

  Immortal?  I feel it and know it.
    Who doubts of such as she?
  But that's the pang's very essence,
    Immortal away from me.

But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships
up to be sundered no more forever.

Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God.  Job, in
his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and
desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I
might find him."  David cries out while his tears are flowing day and
night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God.  My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when
shall I come and appear before God?"  Moses, in the broadest of
visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy
glory."  And common men have always turned the high places of earth to
altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their
sacrifices.  But the means of knowing God are to be increased.  The
very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ
whom he has sent.  Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to
dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better
results, shall be taken there.  Every reader of the Apocalypse notices
with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven
seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open,
nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous
panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully
explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we
observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto
unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the
sound of these many waters in a storm.  Above all these superior
manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall _see_ God.


III. But there is in space what there was before the world began.
Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in
which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the
First Great Cause by creation, not by development.  This conception is
full of difficulties to thought.  We cannot even agree whether creation
was in time or eternity.  But all agree in this, that the invisible is
rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and
that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied.  Indeed,
when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one
two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range
of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many
prefer to consider an atom as a center of force and not as a material
entity at all.  But, amid uncertainties, this is certain, that the
forces of the visible worlds are extraneous.  They come out of the
invisible.  They are all also returning to the invisible; that is what
light is doing in space, previously referred to.  This incredibly
high-class energy is not banking up coal in the celestial ether as it
did on the earth, but is returning to the quick, mobile forces of the
invisible worlds.  One thing more is certain, that the origin of all
the forces of the invisible is in personality; for the atom, it is
agreed, bears all the marks of being a manufactured article.
Different-sized shot could not have greater uniformity of structure and
constitution.  And their whole behavior shows that they are controlled
by an admirable wisdom past finding out.

That these forces exist and are necessarily active there are three
proofs.  Worlds have been made, not of things and forces that do
appear.  They were abundantly displayed in the physical miracles of
Christ and others; and these forces, independently of the physical
miracles at various times, have continuously helped men.

(1) Concerning the first fact--that worlds have been made--nothing need
be said except that these forces, being personal, cannot be supposed to
be exhausted, and hence creations can go on continuously.  We are
assured that they do.  And the personal element more and more relates
itself to personalities.  "I go to prepare a place for you," to fit up
a mansion according to tastes, needs, and enjoyments of the future
occupant.

(2) This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world
has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world.  It does
not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed.
Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they
harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as
fierce as that which plays between two electric poles.  These forces
are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm
of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's
sudden appearance, disappear.  Who knows how frequently they come?  We,
for whose sake all nature stands "and stars their courses move," may
need more frequent motherly attentions than the infant knows of.  They
will not be lacking, even if not sufficiently evident to the infant to
be cried for.  "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all
these things."

(3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible
seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral
natures of man.  Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for
their whole significance.  It begins with God's walking with Adam in
the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my
Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by
the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world.  It
includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify
only to intensify the conception of the fact.  Paul says, "Having
therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when
otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him
would have prevented his continuing in life.  It is possible for all
who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of
God.  It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in
the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a
machine for perpetual motion.  The only difficulty is to belt on.  The
great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the
invisible.  Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing
better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than
other men's paragraphs and volumes.  And he left on record for us
promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through
unbelief.  We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of
things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight,
have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God."  They have
wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to
men.  It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the
power of an endless life.  But what they do is chiefly valuable as
evidence of what they are.  It is little that men quench the violence
of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again.  It is great that
they are able to do it.  That they hold the hand that holds the world
is something.  But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and
will to execute the best, is more.  Fire may kindle again and the
resurrected die, but the great personality survives.

These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary
world, and liable to cease when it fails.  They belong to the
permanent, invisible order of things.  Suppose one loses his body.
Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to
its breast.  It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in
unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone.  But
there are other attractions.  There was One uplifted on a cross to draw
all men unto him.  Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation
has for bodies.

  Then all his being thrills with Joy.  And past
  The comets' sweep, the choral stars above,
  With multiplying raptures drawn more swift
  He flies into the very heart of love.

It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen
our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe.  It is
not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as
a part of a great whole.  It is better for a state to be a part of a
glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to
the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island.  We
belong to more than this earth.  It is not of the greatest importance
whether we lose it or it lose itself.  We look for a "new heavens and a
new earth."  We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home
among their personalities.  This universe is a unity.  It is not made
up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the
sweetly blended notes of a psalm.  "Therefore will not we fear, though
the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the
midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll,"
the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it
is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the
removal of things that can be shaken.  For even then we may find the
calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting
to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving.  It says, "Lo,
it is I; be not afraid."

Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call
the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in
which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home
anywhere.  He will ever say:

  "The winds that o'er my ocean run
  Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun;
  Through life, through death, through faith, through time,
  Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime,
  Eternal trades that cannot veer,
  And blowing, teach us how to steer;
  And well for him whose joy, whose care,
  Is but to keep before them fair.

  "O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine,
  Spread canvas to these airs divine.
  Spread sail and let thy past life be
  Forgotten in thy destiny."



[1]The action that drives off the material of a comet's tail proves
that other forces besides gravitation are operative in the
interplanetary space.--_The Sun_, C. A. Young, p. 156.

[2]See _Recreations in Astronomy_, p. 357.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Among the Forces" ***

Copyright 2023 LibraryBlog. All rights reserved.