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; >::::

Old Faithful Geyser.

P. io8

Among the Forces

Thou madest hlr. to have dominion over the works of
1 HY hAnds.~Psa/M viti, 6

HENRY WHITE WARREN, LUD.

One OFTHB Bishops op the Methodist Episcopal Ch
Author of "Recreations in Astronomv!" "t^b
Bible in the World's Education," Etc

URCH

WILLIAM BRIGGS

METHODIST ROOK AND PUBMSHING HOUSE

TORON'JO

248170

EATON & MAINS,

^898.

Eaton & Mains Press,
150 Fifth Avenue, New York.

16- II* m

£ximfa Inter tDi

re0.

CONTENTS

., . PAGE

Why Written 9

Ths Man Who Meeded 452,696 Barrels of Water. . 12

The Sun 's Great Horses 15

Old .Sun Help 17

Moon Help ; 19

More Moon Help 2 1

Star Help 23

Help from Insensible Seas 25

The Fairy Gravitation 27

More Gravitation 30

The Fairy Pulls Great Loads 32

The Fairy Draws Greater Loads 35

The Fairy Works a Pump Handle 37

The Help of Inertia 39

One Plant Help 41

Gas Help 44

Natural Affection of Metals 47

Natural Affection Between Metal and Liquid 49

is'atural Affection of Metal and Gas 51

Hint Help 53

Creations Now in Progress 55

Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms 58

Mobility of Seeming Solids 54

The Next World to Conquer 71

Our Enjoyment of Nature s Forces 76

Contents

PAGE

The Matterhorn 87

The Grand Canon of the Colorado River 96

The Yellowstone Park Geysers 106

Sea Sculpture 124

The Power of Vegetable Life 134

Spiritual Dynamics 1 42

When This World is Not 165

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

PACING

Old Faithful Geyser Frontispiece

Breaking Waves \2

Incline at Mauch Chunk 24

The Head of the Toboggan Slide 36

The Big Trees 52

The Matterhorn 88

The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers 96

Fv rmation of the Grotto Geyser 1O6

Bee-Hive Geyser. 112

Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak 1 1 8

"The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal 124

The Work and the Worker. Santa Cruz, Cal 130

Yellow Chili Squash in Harness 1 40

Squash Grown Under Pressure 141

A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal 1 48

An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal 1 56

A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal 1 64

A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal 1 72

Remains of 1 Quadruple Natural Arch 1 80

Arch Remains, Side Wall Broken 188

Among the Forces

WHY WRITTEN

BAIRIES, fays, genii, sprites, etc., were
once supposed to be helpful to some
favored men. The stories about these
imaginary beings have always had a fasci-
nating 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 imagi-
nations 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

! i

; i

Why Wtittcn

provision the Father has made for his chil-
dren 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."

Why Written

Eve.y 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 be-
yond 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 Cre-
ator. 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 cur-
tain. We have not yet learned the A B C of
science. We have not yet grasped the scep-
ters of provided dominion. Those who are
most in the image and likeness of the Cause
of these forces are most likely to do it.

l\\

THE MAN WHO NEEDED 452^96 BAR-
RELS OF WATER

HMAN 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 grow-
ing 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 fig-
ured 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
12

iU)

III

The Man Who Needed Water

all down. Besides, the nearest water in suf-
ficient 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.

Alas! there were three impossibilities — so
many teams, so many miles, so long time —
and two ruins if he could overcome the im-
possibilities — 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 wr
ter 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 up-
per current and carried its load of water in

The Man Who f deeded Water

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 gen-
tly 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 stimu-
lating, nitrogen, ammonia, and half a dozen
other things that are so nutritious to grow-
ing 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.
14

THE SUN'S GREAT HORSES

HERE was once a man who had thou-
sands of acres of mighty forests in the
distant mountains. They were value-
less 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 for-
est 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

The Sun's Great Horses

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 k^tter 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 I "
i6

OLD SUN HELP

Sr^ OLLAND is a land that is said to draw
|1 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 for-
mer 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
(2) 17

Old Sun Help

and infiltration •*• ' '^ted out by the sun force
as exhibited i.. .vind on windmills. They
groaningly work while men sleep.

The Netherlandish engineers are now de-
vising plans to pump out the ZuyderZee, 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 coun-
try coal does more work than every man,
woman, and child in the whole land. It
pumps out deep mines, hoists ore to the sur-
face, 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,
18

MOON HELP

HT 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 as-
tute 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

Moon Help

great granite blocks to the bridge site on
floats, and when the tide Hftcd the floats and
stones they blocked up the stones on the
piers and let the floats sink with the outgo-
ing tide. Then they blocked up the stones
on the floats again, and as the moon lifted
the tides once more they lifted tiie 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
ac 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.
20

MORE MOON HELP

YEARS ago, before there were any rail-
roads, 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,

More Moon Help

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 pesti-
lence, 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."

ty^\ O the stars, that are so far away and
I I 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 roilnd
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 Atlan-
tic, 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 steer-
ing 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.

Star Help

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

The Italian physicians, in their ignorance
of the origin of a disease, named it the influ-
enza, 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 tra-
pezes 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 en-
during shall the influence of one good man
be.

Incline at Mauch Chunk.

HELP FROM INSENSIBLE SEAS

^^ UPPOSE one has been at sea a month.
*j^^ He has tacked to every point of the
•^ compass, been driven by gales, be-

calmed in doldrums. At length Eurocly-
don leaps on him, and he lets her drive.
And when for many days and nights neither
sun nor stars appear, how can he tell w^ ; re
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 in-
tensity 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 varia-
tions are within definite limits.

How shall we detect these steady currents

Help from Insensible Seas

when wind and waves are in tumultuous con-
fusion ? 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 un-
swerving 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 pow-
er. There is a giving that does not impov-
erish, 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. .
26

' 4

THE FAIRY GRAVITATION

HE Germans imagine tiiat 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 every-
where. It goes so easily ! There is no rail-
road 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 ?

The Fairy Gravitation

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 net 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 sepa-
rate 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
28

The Fairy Gravitation

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 crys-
tallization.

MORE GRAVITATION

HT Hutchinson, Kan., tliere 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 si:lt, and
laboriously haul it up in defiance of gravita-
tion. 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 any-
thing ? 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.
30

More Gravitation

Wc 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 mo-
tion 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 hoises.

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 ?

li *

THE FAIRY PULLS GREAT LOADS

BAR back in the hills west of Maiich
Cliunk, Pa., lie great beds of coal.
They were made under the sea loni^
ages ago, raised up, roofed over by the Alle-
gheny 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 Ou. 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 au-
tumn glory, spinning and singing down to
the point of universal distribution.

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
32

! 'i

The Fairy Pulls Great Loads ^

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 up-
per 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

agam.

I have been riding round the glorious

mountain sides in a horseless, steamless, elec-

tricityless carriage, and been delighted to find

hundreds of tons of coal shooting over my

(3) 33

The Fairy Pulls Great Loads

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.
34

ads

ars
the
th.
eer
nd

THE FAIRY DRAWS GREATER LOADS

c/^ITTSBURG has 5,000,000 tons of
w<sj coal every year that it wishes to send
•* • South, much of it as far as New Or-
leans — 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 (i,oou 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 sup-
port half a score of people (1,500 pounds),
how many would it take ? We would need

1 ' ■ !■

The Fairy Draws Greater Loads

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 Pittsburg's coal to New Or-
leans ? 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 gravi-
tation takes the mighty burden down the
long toboggan slide of the Ohio and Mis-
sissippi Rivers to the journey's end. How
easy !

One load sent down was 45,000 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.
36

■ ;|

.;:

THE FAIRY WORKS A PUMP HAISTDLE

H E Slave of the Ring could take Alad-
din 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 col-
umn 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

I I

The Fairy Works a Pump Handle

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 grav-
itation brought water to a reservoir four hun-
dred 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
pound" 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.
38

THE HELP OF INERTIA

^^INCE the time of David many boys
•V^^ have swung pebbles by a string, or
r^ sling, and felt the pull of what we
call a centrifugal (cente'-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 centrif-
ugal 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 util-
ize 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

:\i ij

The Help of Inertia

clothes are not wrung out, to the great dam-
age 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, tak' 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 1 3 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 cen-
trifugal force flings it out of the cutting
with a speed that a liundred navvies or dagcs

cannot equal.
40

"^v

ONE PLANT HELP

H 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 extraor-
dinary 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 res-
urrecting 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 ap-
proaches Chicago, west of San Francisco, all
along up the Columbia River — the sand hav-
ing come on the wings of the wind from the
coast.

¥i'

One Plant Help

But to see the whole visible world on a
march one needs to go to a really large des-
ert. 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 conti-
nent 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 Hol-
land from being reconquered by the sea are
protected with great care by willows, etc.,
43

One Plant Help

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

HIS refers to more than stump speech-
miiking. The old Romans drove
through soHd rock numerous tunnels
similar to the one for draining Lago di Ce-
lano, 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
44

;

Gas Help

rend the heart out of a mountain in order
to expand.

Gunpowder was first used in 1350; so the
old Romans knew nothinj^ of its power.
They flun|^ javelins a few rods by the strength
of the arm ; we throw great iron shells, start-
ing 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 25 tons were ex-
ploded 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 o^ 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

Gas Help

made many times more forceful. It works
as well in water, under the sea, or makes
earthquakes in oil wells 2,ocx) 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.

ielp

Drks
ikes
>, as

ade
eiiii
real
J to
lem

NATURAL AFFECTION OF METALS

ACRA fames aiiri." The luinyjcr for
gold, which in men is called ac-
cursed, in metals is justly called
sacred.

In all the water of the sea there is gold —
about 4CX) 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 can-
not 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
aurumy 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,

Natural Affection of Metals

and shovel auriferous gravel and sand into
the rushing water. The mercury will bibu-
lously drink into itself all the fine invisible
gold, while the unaffectionate sand goes on,
bereaved of its wealtlh

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 mer-
cury. But it is there. Squeeze the mercury
through chamois skin. An amalgam, mostly
gold, refujes 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.
48

s'. 1 u

NATURAL AFFECTION BETWEEN
METAL AND LIQUID

H 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 liq-
uid had eaten or drank the solid metal up, par-
ticle 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.
(4) 49

(!.>

.,, :;

'^I!

ill

'!f iJ

Affection Between Metal and Liquid

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.
SO

NATURAL AFFECTION OF METAL
AND GAS

HMAN 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 maga-
zine ; 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

Natural Affection of Metal and Gas

the candle wick, touched it with a bit of
dripping ice, and so lighted his candle.

The potassium was so avaricious of oxy-
gen that it decomposed the water to get it.
Indeeti, it was a case ^f mutual affection.
The oxygen preferred the company of potas-
sium 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.

*if

HINT HELP

t/^ENJAMIN C. B. TILGHMAN, of
I^ Philadelphia, once went into the
*^^^^ lighthouse at Cape May, and, observ-
ing 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

Hint Help

engrave the most delicate and intricate pat-
terns 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 sur-
face 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 THghman 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.
54

:s,
id
:o

CREATIONS NOW IN PROGRESS

HE forces of creation are yet in full
play. Who can direct them ? Re-
wards 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 dia-
mond 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 valu-
able that $15,000 has been spent in grind-
ing 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 com-

1 ■'

J ■

Creations Now in Prog;ress

pression? Not very satisfactorily as yet.
We can apply almost limitless pressure, but
that does not make diamonds. Every parti-
cle must go to its place by some law and force
we have not yet attained the mastery of.

Wc 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, but-
tresses, !:ovvers, and windows all in exact ar-
chitectural 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
56

Oeatlons Now in Progress

builds large white diamonds vv e can use the
diamonds themselves. Set a liumber 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 ma-
chinery, and it will bore into the rock, leav-
ing a core. Force in water, to remove the
dust and chips, and the diamond teeth will
eat their way hundreds of feet in an^' direc-
tion ; and by examining the extracted core
miners can tell what sort of ore there is hun-
dreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go
only where they know that value lies.

SOME CURIOUS BEHAVIORS OF
ATOMS

aLTIMATE atoms of matter are assert-
ed 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 be-
ing capable of being volatilized, and gases
condensed to liquids and solids — the chief dif-
ference 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, dist-^.nt 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
58

Some Curfous Behaviors of Atoms

:he

congregation. So, matter can change in go-
ing 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 to-
gether, 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 rela-
tions.

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 nine-
teen per cent of the total length. Then a
wire of the same kind was given time to ad-
just itself to its new and trying circumstances.
Forty pounds were hung on one day, three
pounds more the next day, and so on, in-
creasing the vv'eights by diminishing quanti-

Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

ties, till in sixty clays it carried fifty-seven
pounds. So it seems that exercise strength-
ened 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 be-
ing 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 sec-
tions 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 parti-
cles. A wire has been known to accommo-
date itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists,
and still the atoms did not let go of each
other. They slid about on each other as
60

Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

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 ac-
tivity, like a mass of bees — those inside com-
ing 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 tem-
perature 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 remark-
able. 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

%m i

Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

inch of water ; it does not flinch nor percep-
tibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not
fill the space they occupy. They object to
being crowded. They mak^i 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 thou-
sand 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 fill-
ing 1,728 times as much space. No amount
of pressure will condense steam to water un-
less 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 resil-
ience for years at any point of pressure short
of the final surrender that gives up to be-
come 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
63

: .i

The Big Trees.

P. 135

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Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

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.

l!i 3

tJl

MOBILITY OF SEEMING SOLIDS

HEN 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, im-
prisoning 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 ele-
ments 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
64

Mobility of Seeming Solids

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

But, dense and solid as this iron is, its par-
ticles 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 mo-
tion from end to end. Particles are leaping
within ordered limits and according to regu-
lar 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

(5)

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eJiii

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Mobility of Seeming Solids

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 incapa-
ble 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. In-
stantly 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 in-
clined to draw tears than cut hairs. He
draws the razor over the tender palm of his
hand a few times, rearranges the particles
66

:\y

Mobility of Seemingf Solids

of the edge and builds them out into a
sharper form. Then the razor returns to the
Up 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 in-
creases each particle says to its neighbor,
** Please stnnd 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 charge 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

Mobility of Sccmingf Solids

but movement. There is no caloric sub-
stance. 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
t so affects the eye that we say it is red-
hoL. When other systems of vibration have
been :.dded 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 Alle-
gheny, 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 de-
tectable 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
68

Mobility of Scemingf Solids

its bed, and could see at once that I had
compressed the glass to a shorter diamett\.
We twisted it in so many ways that I sa d,
•* 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 dis-
cernibly out of shape. It were easy to
show that there is no .olid earth nor im-
movable mountains. 1 oa <e away saying to
my friend, " I am glad God lets you into so
much of his finest thir.'cing." He is a me-
chanic, not a ther'ogian. This foremost
man in the world in nis 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 vibra-
tions reach into millions of millions per
second, and its wave-lcnixths 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,

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Mobility of Sccminj? Solids

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.

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''^)j

THE NEXT WORLD TO CONQUER

QAN'S next realm of conquest is the
celestial ether. It has higher pow-
ers, greater intensities, and quicker
activities than any realm he has yet at-
tempted.

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 doubt-
ers 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, chem-
ical relations, nor inertia ; is not heatable,
and is not cognizable by any of our present
senses. Does it not take us one step toward

The Next World to Conquer

an apprehension of the revealed condition
of spirit?

Recall its actual activities. Two hundred
and fifty-eight vibrations of air per second
l)roduce on the ear the sensation vvc call doy
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 sinj^ing as they shine,
• The hand that made us is divine.* "

Electricity has as great a variety of vibra-
tions as sound. Since some kinds of elec-
tricity do not readily pass through space de-
void of air, though light and heat do, it seems
likely that some of the lower intensities and
slower vibrations of electricity arc not in
ether but in air. Certainly some o{ the
higher intensities arc in ether. Between two
hundred and four hundred millions of millions
of vibrations of ether per second are the dif-
ferent sorts of heat. Between four hundred
and eight hundred vibrations are the differ-
72

The Next World to Conqutt

cnt colors of light. IJcyond eight hundred
vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to
our eyes, known as chemical rays and proba-
bly 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 pres-
sure of eighty thousand pounds to the square
inch. Ether is so rare that its density, com-
pared with water, is represented by a deci-
mal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers be-
fore 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 let-
ting 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. Th- speed

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. i

The Next "World to Gjnquer

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 hun-
dred 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 docs not elastically
74

The Next "World to Conquer

vibrate to such infinitesimal impulses as elec-
tric 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 mas-
ter. 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

E are a fighting race ; not because we
enjoy fights, but we enjoy the ex-
ercise 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.

]kit since wc have found field, room, and
ample verge for the play of our forces in ma-
terial 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, re-
sulting 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 fascina-
tion in looking on force and its results. Some
men never stand in the presence of an engine
76

Out Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

in full play without a feeling of reverence, as
if they stood in the presence of God — and
they do.

The turning to thc*5e forces is a character-
istic of our age that makes it an age of ad-
venture and discovery. The heart of equato-
rial 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 cohe-
sions, 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, infil-
trated, 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 mani-
festations 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 en-
deavor in Europe. We arc occasionally sur-

^W''^.'

i f

Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

prised by hearing that such a man fell into a
crevasse, or that four men were killed o i the
Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and
others elsewhere, and wc 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 incredi-
ble. In this list are over a dozen volumes
describing different ascents of a single moun-
tain, and that not the most difficult. There
are publications of learned societies on geol-
ogy, entomology, paleontology, botany, and
one volume of PhilosopJiical and Religious
Walks about Mo:it Blanc. The geology of
the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The
summit of the Jungfrau, for example, con-
sists of gneis? .; anite, but two masses of
Jura limestone 1 ,^e 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
78

It II

%.;,-

Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

owned the Alps. He, however, cares Ic .:,
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 Eng-
land, France, and Italy. In the grand exhi-
bition of the nation at Milan the Alpine
clubs have one of the most interesting ex-
hibits. This fjcneral interest in the Alus ^:
a testimony to man's admiration of the grand-
est work of God within reach, and to his coi-
tinued devotion to physical hardihoc-l in the
midst of the enervating influences c civiliza-
tion. There is one place in the world de-
voted 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. Me crawled out of the hotel on the

) :

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Oar Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

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 thne. 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 your-
self on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend
than Mont Blanc ; try the Matterhorn, vastly
more difficult than either or both. A plumb-
line 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 hun-
dred 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 often feet each ;
80

Lip

Ottr Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

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 hun-
dred 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 Corner Grat, equal to
one hundred and seventy more stories, for
practice and a view unequaled in Europe
Ordering the guide to be ready and thei
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 omi-
nously distinct. Was the storm over? The
guides would give no opinion. It was their
(6) ^ 8i

I ''r^ i

Out Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

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 instru-
ment 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 ! Bori voyage^gute
rcise'' 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 con-
fided 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 as-
82

Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

cents. 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 scram-
ble 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 to-
gether. 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 dan-
gling 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.

Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

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

Here we learned the use of a guide. Hav-
ing carefully chosen him, by testimony of per-
sons 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. Pie who carried
this world and its burden of sin on his heart
trod the quicksands of time into such firm-
ness that no man walking in his steps, how-
ever 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? Uncer-
tainty. Avalanches thundered from the
84

ler-
[hc

Out Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

Brcithorn and Lyskamm, tcllin<; of a pene-
trative moisture in the air. The Mattcrhorn
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 val-
ley 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

IMAGE EVALUATION
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IL25 III 1.4

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Photographic

Sciences
Coiporation

23 WEST MAIN STREIT

WEBSTER, N.Y. MS80

(716) 872-4503

I /

Our Enjoyment of Naturc^s Forces

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 cuhnination, has been one of the richest
I have ever enjoyed.
86

THE MATTERHORN

HE 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 hun-
dred 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.

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. How-
ever, in 1864, seven men, almost unexpect-
edly, achieved the victory ; but in descend-
ing 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 rev-
eled in the upper glories, deposited proof
of their visit, and started to return. Accord-
ing to law, they were roped together. Accord-

The Matter horn

ing to custom, in a difficult place all remain
still, holding the rope, except one who care-
fully 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. Thi:^ accident gave the moun-
tain a reputation for danger to which an
occasional death on it since has added.

Each of these later unfortunate occur-
rences is attributable to personal perversity
or defic'cncy. Peril depends more on the man
88

The Matterhorn.

P. 87

The Matterhom

than on circumstances. One is in clanger on a
wall twenty feet high, another safe on a preci-
pice of a thousand feet. No man has a right
to peril his life in mere mountain climbing;
that great sacrifice must be reserved for sav-
ing 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 Knubcl, his brother, and Peter Trufifer,
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 unutter-
able grandeur that succeeded I felt his pres-
ence and help as fully as at any other time.

At ten minutes of two we were roped to-
gether 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

The Matterhom

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 hun-
dred 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 wi>;h the grand cannonade. 7rhe
omen auf^ured to me that the mountain was
going to do its best for our reception and
entertainment. Fortunately these rock ava-
lanches occur on the steep, unapproachable
sides, and not at the angle where men climb.
How the mountain greiv 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
90

The Matterhof n

built round and over a little space for pass-
in^f the night. The rude cabin occupied all
the width of the shelf, so that passmg 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, seem-
ingly 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 nu-
merous torches to light us to our sleep. Ac-
cording 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 stop-

The Matterhorn

ping 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 ado 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 be-
fore 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 diffi-
cult ; 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
92

The Matterhorn

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.

TiiC 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 Mo-
ses'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 pre-
pared 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

The Matterhorn

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
v/alls, 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 descen-
sus. 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 per-
sonal affection. It has put more pictures of
94

The Matterhorn

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.

1 f

ill

THE GRAND CANON OF THE COLO
RADO RIVER

^y^ EFORE me lies a thin bit of red rock,
I 1 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 mold-
ing board. Other rocks of a much harder
nature, composed in part of the shells of in-
expressible 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.
96

CO
u
<D
<A
>>
<U

c
o

3
Du

.'! i

The Grand Canon of the G)Iofado River

Beside this stone now lies another of the
purest white. It once flowed as water im-
pregnated with lime, and clung to the lower
side of a rock now as high above the sea as
many a famous mountain. The water gradu-
ally evaporated, and the lime still hung like
tiny drops. Between the two stones now so
near together was once a perpendicular dis-
tance 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
(7) 97

■

'1 '

The Grand Canon of the Golora<lo River

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 Lit the bottom was crushed under the
frightful weight of the tumbling superin-
cumbent mass, and every few minutes the
top became the bottom. In one hour mil-
lions 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;
98

The Grand Canon of the G>Iorado Rivet

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 defi-
antly 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 un-
known at the present may have shut off
whole oceans of rain. The rivers that re-
mained began to cut a much narrower chan-
nel into the softer sand and clay-rock below.
From the great mountain-rimmed plateau
rivers poured in at the sides, cutting lateral
canons 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

The Grand Canon of the Colorado River

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 na-
ture 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 woik.

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 Hornli
shoulder.

There was the river — a regular freight train,
running day and night, the track unincum-
bered with returning cars (they were re-
turned by the elevated road of the upper
air) — burdened with dissolved rock and earth,
loo

The Grand Canon of the G)Iorado River

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 caflon 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 cailon
with every variety of stone, from the wall a
mile high, into one tremendous heap of con-
glomerate. 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 sub-
limities, but the next day, seen from the

lOI

The Grand Canon of the Colorado River

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 re-
quire them all.

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

Any great scene in nature is like the wom-
an 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 ^mow 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 mor.t
ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight
of the caflon often brings strong men to their
knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at
102

The Grand Canon of the G)Ioi*ado River

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 im-
pression, but in the longer and closer ac-
quaintance every sense of beauty is flooded
to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "joc-
und 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 sur-
passes expectations. The sinuosities of the
rim sent back their various colors. A hun-
dred 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 pene-
trated 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

103

The Grand Canon of the G)Iorado River

really seemec ..ake, in respect to breadth,
depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed else-
where. 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 cafion, the true color
came out most beautcously. There was a
background of red and yellowish rocks.
These made the cold blue blush with warm
color. The sapphire was backed with sar-
donyx, and the bluish white of the chalced-
ony 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 ex-
press low physical wants, but it is by charade,
panorama, parable, and music rolling like
104

The Grand Canon of the G)IofaJo River

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 find-
ing 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 Yoscm-
ite, 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,
?.n(\ seraph-tongued are earth and air."

105

THE YELLOWSTONE PARK GEYSERS

THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I II AVE been to school. Dame Nature
is a most kind and skillful teacher.
She first put mc 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 mu-
sical 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 laugh-
ter 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
io6

I 111!

^!ll

V
M

IJU

The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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.

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 eco-
nomically, 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 with-
out 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 th nn twenty feet

107

3 1'

4if

I '

The Ycflowstone Park Geysers

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 sug-
gestively, 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 play-
io8

The Yellowstone Park Geysers

ing 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 photog-
rapher 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 av/ay. Five
hours had passed and night was near. Every-

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

body wiis gone. I lay down on the ground
to convince myself that I was perfectly pa-
tient. 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 con-
tinuous 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 cov-
ered all that elevated masonry with a rush-
ing 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 ex-
press 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
no

The Yellowstone Pafk Geysers

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 suc-
ceeded. At the same time the fierce swish
of ascending waters and of descending cas-
cades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as
of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was
blown. No archangel could have done bet-
ter. As the steam rolled skyward i*- 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

III

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 endur-
ance. 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 col-
umn began to change its effect from terror
to fascination, and I knew how Empedocles
felt when he flung himself into the burning
-^tna. It was time to get down and stand
further off.

The long waiting had been rewarded.
"To patient faith the prize is sure." The
grand tumult began to subside. It was be-
yond 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 ex-
haled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath.

112

Bee-Hive Geyser.

g jr3."-T E' . ' AlL ' J B Uil A. ■ f . ' lJM ETa*^

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 un-
easiness. 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 sput-
tering 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 flow-
ing with hot water. This general survey
was no sooner taken than our glorious Splen-
did 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 col-
(8) 113

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

umn or mass of water makes the fearful
l)lunL;c smaller masses of water are con-
stantly feathered off at the sides and de-
layed by the resistance of the air, while the
central mass hurries downward by its con-
centrated 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 Splen-
did lured me from my bed to w^.tch 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 outbu»*st of power that
might well have absorbed every energy for a
mile around. Obviously they have no con-
nection. Then my beloved Splendid settled
into a three-days' rest.

These are the essential facts of geyser dis-
play. There are very many variations of per-
formance in every respect. I have seen over
twenty geysers in almost jocular, and certain-
ly in overwhelmingly magnificent, activity.
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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

" 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 experi-
mented patiently to read the open book of
this tremendous manifestation of uncontrol-
lable energy. At first the form and action of
a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory.
Everyone knows that when steam accumu-
lates 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 i8i i.
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,

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

near or through any great source of heat
resulting from condensation, combustion,
chemical eiction, or central fire. Now sup-
pose 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 't 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. Pnt under the pressure
of a column of ,vater 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 pres-
sure 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 wq have said, of fifteen pounds.
ii6

The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 com-
motion. 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 pres-
sure of the water is taken off in any degree,
the water below, that was kept water by
the pressure, breaks into steam most volumi-
nously, 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

117

The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 sub-
terranean 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 Pro-
fessor J. H. J. Miiller, of Freiburg.

MOUNDS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS

I have the extremely difficult task of rep-
resenting 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
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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

golden-tinted topaz, the violet oriental ame-
thyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet sap-
phire, 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

II \

The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 wher-
ever 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 circum-
ference. If there is but little overflow, the re-
sult 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
o/^rflow is too much to be cooled at once, the
deposit may still be made fifty or one hun-
dred 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.

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 dif-
ferent minerals will be assorted as if with a

1 20

The Yeflowstone Park Geysers

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 occa-
sionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful
geyser. The cook 1 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 divid-
ing walls and gaze into the beaded and im-
pearled pools of a hundred shades of different
colors, never equaled except by that perpet-
ual 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 wave-
let tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the

121

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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 mem-
branous croup.

I ex'' edingly longed to try vivisection on
a geyser, or at least take one of half a hun-
dred, 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 dow^ through itshot 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 to-
gether 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

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The Yellowstone Park Geysers

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
soHd rock ; of mounds hundreds of feet high,
covering twenty acres with forms of indescrib-
able beauty — but I despair. The half has
not been told. It cannot be. Great and
marvelous are all Thy works, Lord God Al-
mighty ! 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 ♦^.ere eyesight, one must
surely say : " Since this world, in power, fine-
ness, 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."

123

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SEA SCULPTURE*

HEN 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 cov-
ering 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 fly-
ing 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

* Reprinted from 7^Ae Chautauqttan,

124

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Sea Sculpture

seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible
force. Those roaring waves rear up two or
three times as high. They have great per-
pendicular fronts down wliich Niagaras are
l)ouring. 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 chffs with thunder,
and are flung fifty feet into the air; with
what eflcct on the rocks we will try to
relate.

No. I 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, may-
be 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

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Sea Sculpture

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 nod-
ules 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, Cleo-
patra, Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the
famous Cliff Drive that rounds the light-
house at the point and stretches away for
miles above the ever-changing, now beauti-
ful, 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

126

Sea Sculpture

persistence like his patience, a lenj^th of
work like his eternity.

Tlie rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other
pkices, were kiid in regular order, like the
leaves of ii 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
,is follows: (i) 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 con-
cretion has taken place ; (5) shale from the
sea also ; (6) conglomerate, or drift, depos-
ited 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.

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,

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Sea Sculpture

after half a hundred thousand strokes, more
or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it
drives it? wedges home in that place. A
shallow cave results. Then the waters con-
verge 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 re-
flowing 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
son' J crack in the rock and the superincum-
bent 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 repre-
sents 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. AH the material had been
carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On
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Sea Sculpture

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 after-
noon 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.

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 head-
long through the pearly green Niagara that
has not yet fallen quite to his head and may
sport in the comparatively quiet water be-
yond, 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.

(9) .129

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Sea Sculpture

In the swirl of converging currents be-
tween 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. Illus-
tration No. 4 shows at low tide such a pro-
jection 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.

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 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
130

ilpture

its be-
coarse
a few
great
of the
Illus^
a pro-
ire was
IS been
le pier

ly frail
•er the
ail one
find it
[ could
ire and
drive.
:s worn
in over
e awful

under-
of rock
s being

waded
as, and

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Sea Sculpture

there, where any more than moderate waves
would have mangled me against the tusks
of the cruel rocks, I have found little speci-
mens 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. Ail these
seek their food from Him who feeds all life,
and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths
that they may drink.

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-wcrking 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.

On the right near the point is sren a
board sign. It says here, as in many other
places, " Danger." Sometimes two converg-

131

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Sculpture

iiig waves meet at the land, rise unexpect-
edly, sweep oyer the p6int irresistibly, and
carry away anyone who stands there. One
large and two/ small shreds of skin now gone
from the palm of my Icfit hand give proof
of an experience there that did not result
quite so disastrously. i

The illustration facing page i88 is another
example of an arch cut through the rocky
barrier of the shore. But 1 in this case the
trend of the less hard roclc was at such an
angle to the shore that thp sea broke into
the channel once more, an^i then the com-
bined waves from the two jpntrances forced
the passag^e one hundred ^nd forty paces
inland. ' It terminates in another natural
bridge and deep excavation! beyond, which
are not shown in the picture]

What becomes of this comminuted rock,
cleft by wedges of water, sjcoured over by
hundreds of tons of sharp siind? It is car-
ried out by gentle undercurrents into the
bay and ocean, and laid dovvn where winds
never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as
dust falls through the sumrner air. It in-
closes fossil]^ of the plant ana animal life of
to-day. There rest in naturef^ own sepul-
132

Sea Sculpture

cher 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 intel-
ligence may read therein much of the present
history of the world. We say to that com-
ing 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."

133

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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 to-
day is, and to-morrow is cut down and with-
ered, 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.
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The Power of Vegetable Life

Now the latent powers of thr'.t 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 lignt and goes
down into the dark ground, pushing aside
the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed
thrusts out of the same crevice anotl r 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 be-
come 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 en-
vironment be made to produce grass or any
other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango,
banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only
sequoia giganiea.

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The Power of Ve8:etable Life

There arc 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 — subu-
late. 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.

There are thousands of seeds finished with
a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute
enough to discover. The microscopist rev-
els in the forms of the dainty scales of its
armor and the opalescent tints of its color.
The sunset is not more delicate and exquis-
ite. But the big tree never makes but on =i
kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thou-
sands unfinished.
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The Power of Vegetable Life

The same is true of bark, grain of wood,
method of putting out limbs, outline of the
mass, reach of roots, and every other pecul-
iarity. 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 ma-
terial is conveyed. These channels are a suc-
cession 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 ivc express packages

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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 vegeta-
ble 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 to-
gether! 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 disintegrat-
ing rock what it wants. So it must over-
come the power of chemical affinity in water
and air. The substances it wants are in
other combinations, the power of which
must be overcome.
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The Power of Vegetable Life

Gravitation is a great power, but the thou-
sand 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 tri-
umphs over lesser power, and that the high-
est 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 tlic yellow Chili variety

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was put in harness in 1874 to see how much
it would lift by its power of £Towth.

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 har-
ness 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 root-
lets. These roots increased one thousand
feet in twenty-four hours. They were af-
forded 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 mahog-
any. 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

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The Power of Vegfctable Life

pieces of railroad iron and hung them at vary-
ing 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 Hfe will assert itself.

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

p. 140

141

SPIRITUAL DYNAMICS*

ILL 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 accord-
ance with what laws may we expect aia ?

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

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Spiritual Dynamics

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 gravita-
tion 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 t>( chemical affinity between oxygen
and hydrogen, can be rent into its constitu-
ent 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.

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It is unthinkable that these forces before
mentioned should have originated them-
selves. 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 intelli-
gence, 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 pur-
poses ? 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, power-
ful personality accept and use our energy in
the accomplishment of his plans?
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Spiritual Dynamics

That will depend on what he wants done.
If he only wants mountains Hfted, he can
put the shoulder of an earthquake under the
strata of a continent and tilt them up edge-
wise, 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 gravita-
tion. 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,
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He wants not mere matter acted upon from
without, but intelligences active in them-
selves ; wants not mere miles of granite, but
iieo-rts responsive to love, and character that
is turdier than granite, more enduring than
the h'lls 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 per-
manence that it shall flourish in immortal
youth when worlds, short-lived in compar-
ison, shall have passed away. God can
make worlds in plenty, but he wants some-
thing so much better that they shall be
mere parade-grounds for the training of his
armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are co-
operating 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 indi-
cates that the soil and he are akin. He ex-
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spiritual Dynamics

pects all its energies to cooperate with him.
He plants the grain or seed expecting that
all its vegetative forces will cowork wUh 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 x'^ects the solidity
of the rock, all the adaptati,.is of wood that
has been growing for a century, expects
the beauty of the fir tre( , the pine, and the
box to come togeth - 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

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these fundamental forces, these oceans of air
and energy, forces so great that man cannot
measure them, so dehcate 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 in-
effable 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 regu-
lar operations of nature, his sovereignty over
birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and
148

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Spiritual Dynamics

prosperity, over what we call accident, his
execution of righteous retributions, bringing
of deliverance, setting up thrones, and cast-
ing down princes. He upholds all things by
the direct exercise of his power. "The uni-
formities 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 docs 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 individ-
ual (Matt, vii, II ; 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.

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spiritual Dynamics

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 prin-
ciple thai; 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 m.oment. 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 charac-
ter been attained ? Not altogether by in-
dividual evolution. Ancestral tendencies,
parental example, the great force of strong,
eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired
in the gymnasium of temptation, and con-
fessedly and especially a spiritual force
vouchsafed from without, have wrought out
this crreatcst result of heaven and earth.
Of some men you expect nothing but good-
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Spiritual Dynamics

ness and greatness. They would belie all
the tendencies of their blood to be other-
wise than good. Some are constantly
trained under the mighty influences of great
principles that sway men as much as gravi-
tation sways the worlds. What could be ex-
pected 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 them-
selves 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 ex-
pected of men whose whole ancestry was
cut off by the slaughter following the revoca-
tion of the Edict of Nantes, and they them-
selves exiled for liberty to worship God ?
What can be expected of men who have
been tried in the furnace of temptation till
they arc pure gold ? Nay, more, what can
be expected of men who have in these temp-
tations been strengthened out of God ? Be-
sides 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

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Spiritual Dynamics

power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what
may not be expected of such men ?

But we will not forget that this great out-
come 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 gravita-
tion reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a
thousand times faster and faster. He launch-
es his ship on the sea and the wind and steam
carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his
quiet breath invo the ear of the phone and
electricity carries it in every tone and inflec-
tion of personal quality a thousand mil' ,.
He vows, and works for purity and great-
ness 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 influ-
ences of other men, and especially a thou-
sand personal aids of a present God, coop-
erate 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-

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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 espe-
cially so in regard to the development and
perfection of that life into the stature of per-
fect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continu-
ous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity
of endeavor that can only be represented by
groanings that cannot be worded m hu-
man 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

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Spiritual Dynamics

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 our-
selves 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 com-
mand and ass 'T.'> nee 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 sur-
veyed 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
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spiritual Dynamics

to be gotten. To what extent may we ex-
pect divine aid?

First, all these things are his purposes and
plans. But since it is necessary for our de-
velopment 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 im-
plored 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 v Icre r o
water is, but not to lift our teacups. t is lo
use to ask God for a special sho; cr when
deep plowing is all that is needed, it is no
use to ask God to build churches, send mis-
sionaries, endow schools, and convert the
world, till we hlave 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 ser-

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mons on the great works done by men, obvi-
ously 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 philoso-
phy 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.
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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 every-
where in plenty. All the Niagaras and Mis-

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spiritual Dynamics

sissippis 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. Tower enough,
but how shall we belt on ? J^y 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 an; wroug^ht by prayer than
This world tireams of."

The Hible is a record of achievements im-
possible to man. They arc achievements of
leaderships, emancipations, governments, get-
ting money for building God's houses, mak-
ing 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
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spiritual Dynamics

power, ecstasy instead of excellence, self-
satisfaction in a garden of spices instead of a
baptism that straij^htens them out in a gar-
den 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 revela-
tion 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, lie wants no St. Peter's built
in a village of six hundred people, no tem-
ple, except on a Moriah to which a whole
nation goes up. Due proportion is a law of
ixW 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, Eu-
rope, 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

159

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Spiritual Dynamics

Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him to
Macedonia. Had he then persisted in go-
ing to Asia his work would have been in
vain.

We may expect wisdom in the choice of
the human agents we select. Half a gen-
eral's success lies in his choice of lieutenants.
No class leader should be appointed nor
steward nominated till after prayer for di-
vine 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 asun-
der 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 dimin-
ished 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
160

Spiritual Dynamics

work was wrought of our God " (v. i6).
" 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 " (i 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
tor the accomplishment of their mission.
Paul said, " I can do all things through Christ
which strengtheneth me." And all great
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spiritual Dynamics

doers for God, in all ages, have gladly tes-
tified that they have been girded for their
work by the Ahnighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is
that every reader should get a fresh revela-
tion of the immanency of God in the king-
dom 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 meiming,

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

that in the burning vlvidjiesS^of this new
conception each man «iay boldly undertake
things for God^^onversions, purifications,
missionary enlargements, business enterprises
— that he knows are too great for himself;
that he npiay find new helps for spiritual vic-
tories a4 great as this age has found for ma-
terial ^riumphs in steam and electricity; and
that ilk all things man may be uplifted and
iiereby glorified.
162

God t

Spiritual Dynamics

How shall it be done f

First, by a vivid conception that coopera-
tion is designed, provided for, and expected.
We are children of God ; there can be but
one great end through the ages in the uni-
verse. 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 to-
day 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. Prom-
ises 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."

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Spiritual Dynamics

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
:on, 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 sin-
ner we seek to get converted before we ar-
rive. 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 ?
164

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WHEN THIS WORLD IS NOT*

<(frii»^HE day of the Lord will come .

in the 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 uni-
verse. It is only a temporary contrivance,
a mere scaffolding for a special purpose.
When that purpose «s 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

* Reprinled from the Methodist Review.

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remain." Wc 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 "cre-
ated 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 rcers, recognize this. When
Longfellow died one of them, remembering
the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evan-
geline, and their passing each ether on oppo-
site sides of an island in the Mississippi,
makes him say of his wife long since gone
before :

1 66

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When This World is Not

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 natui J forces, yet when dis-
played 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

167

When This World is Not

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 dol-
lars in towage to London alone every year.
And this world would not be habitable with-
out 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 univer-
sally present and effective. In the possibil-
ities of a no-worid condition a spirit may be
able to so relate itself to matter that gravi-
tation would impart its incredible swiftness
of transference to a soul thus temporarily re-
lating 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.
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When This World is Not

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 wc mean.
But in this space is the play of intenscst
force and quickest activity. There are hun-
dreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or
footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessi-
ties 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 ac-
tivity 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 pon-
derable matter. It is too fine for our ex-
perimentation, too strong for our measure-
ment. We must get rid of our thumby fin-
jrers first.

try

What is light doing in space ? That has

greatly puzzled all philosophers. Without

question there is inexpressible power. It

"^s seen in velocity. But what is it doing?

The law of conservation of force forbids the

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When This World is Not

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 num-
ber 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
giv^ "S a sensation of red or violet. These,
apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear,
pour not only light to one organ, but tune-
170

When This World is F A

ful 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 -ephyr
in the pines would be like a storm in com-
parison, and places where the fierce inten-
sity 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 fljnng 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.* All

* 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. Yoiint;, p. 156.

171

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astronomers except Faye admit the connec-
tion between sun spots and the condition of
the earth's magnetic elements. The paral-
lelism between auroral and sun-spot fre-
quency is almost perfect. That between
sun spots and cyclones is as confidently as-
serted, 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 to-
ward Orion and the other toward Hercules ;
or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Pata-
gonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky
near the south pole. Where is your heaven
anyhow ? " O sapient, sap-ient questioner !
Heaven is above us, you especially ; but go-
ing 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 fra-
172

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When This World is Not

grant garden, warm, light, redolent of roses,
tremulous with bird song, amid a thousand
caves of honeysuckles, " illuminate seclu-
sions 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
shairperish 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

173

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When This World is Not

and contents is just the same after the burn-
ing 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 mat-
ter. 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 pains-
taking 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 diffi-
cult 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, parti-
cle by particle, to build a testudo, a travel-
ing house, for themselves. The ephemeral
life departing, there was a rain of dead shells
174

When This WoAd is Not

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 fra-
grance 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 mean-
ing to the most fitting symbol that goes be-
tween 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. As-
tronomy 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 hydro-
gen ; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen ;
one o^ silicon with four of hydrogen, etc.

175

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Wtcn This World Is Not

They marry witl.out 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 occu-
pies. 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 be-
tween. Dri\ e the atoms of water apart by
heat till the water becomes steam, till they
are as three marbles a larger distance apart,
yet the molecrle is not destroyed, the union
is still indissoluble. One physicist has de-
clared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen
are probably not nearer to each otherun wat '.r
than one hundred and fifty men would be if
scattered over the surface of England — one
man for each four hundred square miles.*
What must the distance be in steam ? what
the greater distance in the more extreme
rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of

* See Recreations in Astronomy^ p. 257.
176

When T'^is Wovid is Not

cubic miles of some comets tails would not
make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron.
Now, wbon earth and oceans arc " changed '*
to this sort of tenuity creations will be more
easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out
our material with ^^roadaxcs, 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 \ife 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

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When This World is Not

the other hand, when water • - cfied into
steam its power is vastly more versatile, trac-
table, and serviceable in a thousand ways.
Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy,
subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohe-
sion. 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 be-
comes 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 sub-
stance called nitrite of amy!,* known to many
as a medicine for heart disease. It is ap-
plied by inhaling its odor — a style of very
much rarefied application. Fill a tube with
its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in
178

Not

When This World is Not

daylight. But pour a beam of direct sun-
light 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 ob-
served 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 Popo-
catepetl? A thrush among vines outside
is just now showing us how easy it is to cre-
ate 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 cre-
ative 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-bc'ss nature furnishes
her, and thus invites her to add the comple-
mentary notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity

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is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are
made of, and call for solid rocks for founda-
tions. Perhaps we may so call while we
have material bodies of two hundred pounds'
weight. Yet even these bodies are deUcate
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 ac-
cording to their fineness and facility of
change. Even iron is mobile in all its par-
ticles. 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 arc 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 stabil-
ity of things that are fine, we are told that
the city which hath enduring foundations is
1 80

When This World k Not

in the spirit world, not this kind of material.
The whole new Jerusalem to come down " out
of heaven, prepared as a bride adorwed 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 imagina-
tion." 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 work-
ers 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

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When This "World is Not

shall take to them with zest, if we are not
too much of the earth earthy. We were de-
signed 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 arc taken by homeopathic
doses of the millionth dilution. Many peo-
ple 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
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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 whirl-
wind in comparison. But they were read.
It is no wonder that the old astrologers
thought that men's whole lives were influ-
enced 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 -^olian (how the vowels and liquids
flow into the very name !) harp of a thousand
strings over which a thousand delicate influ-
ences might breathe. Soul was meant to be
sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This
capability has been somewhat lost in our de-
terioration. 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.

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Does one fear the change from gross to
fine, from force of freezing to the winged en-
ergy 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 explo-
sions of firecrackers when the two are inex-
tricably mixed. There is a flame of religious
love when theheart 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 ccifined, peculiarly nour-
ished, in the dark, without the possible exer-
cise of any one of the five senses. That is
prenatal. He comes into the next life. At
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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 supe-
rior 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 be-
fore. 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 knowl-
edge 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 exist-
ence, it could judge much of the conditions

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of the second. Feet suggest solid land ; lungs
suggest liquid air; eyes, light ; hands, acquis-
itiveness, and hence dominion ; tongue, talk,
and hence companions, etc. What fore-
gleams have we of the future life? They are
irom 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 apti-
tudes have fit field for development. The
water fowl flics 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 disap-
pointed.

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 con-
quest, 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
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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 ear-
nestly 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 tem-
peratures of space three or four hundred de-
grees 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

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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 un-
sunderable. 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
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When This World is Not

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 know-
ing God are to be increased. The very es-
sence of hfe 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 Apoca-
lypse notices with joy, if not rapture, that
when the book that was scaled 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 mar-
velous panoramas, charades, and symbolic sig-
nificances had to be carefully explained to
John, the man best able of any to understand
them — we observe with rapture that the regu-
lar 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 manifesta-
tions in finer realms the pure in heart shall
see God.

III. But there is in space what there was

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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 et'ernity. But all
agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly
absorbing all the force at least of the visi-
ble universe, and that when force is gone
the corpse will not remain unburied. In-
deed, 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 con-
sider an atom as a center of force and not
as a material entity at all. But> mid un-
certainties, 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 bank-
ing up coal in the celestial ether as it did
on the earth, but is returning to the quick,
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When This World is Not

mobile forces of the invisible worlds. One
tiling 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 arc controlled by
an admirable wisdom past finding out.

That these forces exist and are necessarily
active there arc 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 phys-
ical miracles at various times, have contin-
uously helped men.

(i) Concerning the first fact — that worlds
have been made — nothing need be said ex-
cept that these forces, being personal, can-
not be supposed to be exhausted, and hence
creations can go on continuously. We are
assured that they do. And the personal ele-
ment more and more relates itself to per-
sonalities. " I go to prepare a place for
you,'' to fit up a mansion according to tastes,
needs, and enjoyments of the future occupant.

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(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 elec-
tric poles. These forces are not the ordi-
nary 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 contin-
ually in full play on the intellectual and
moral natures of man. Our unique Chris-
tian Scriptures have this thought for their

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When This World is Not

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 opportun-
ity 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 other-
wise oppressive circumstances and hate of
men seeking to kill him would have pre-
vented 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 con-
tinuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotat-
ing 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 com-
mon men's best, his parentheses of thought
richer than other men's paragraphs and
volumes. And he left on record for us
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When This "World is Not

promises of greater works than these, at
which we stagger through unbeHef. 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
tiieir 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 vio-
lence of fire, and leceive 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 resu rrecjed Jie7bu t ^e greaT
personality survives,.^

These forces ^re not discontinuous, con-
nected witlrftiis temporary world, and liable
to cea^ewhen it fails. They belong to the
perprianent, invisible order of things. Sup-
pose one loses his body. Then there is no
force whereby earth can holds its child any

When This World is Not

longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific
speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown dis-
tances, 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 attrac-
tion 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 uni-

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When This World is Not

verse is a unity. It is not made up of sep-
arate, 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 moun-
tains 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 oiiip we call the world, or
fall overboard into Mississippis and Ama-

\ zons 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 fajdi,

' through time,

Great breaths of God, they sweep sublirp^"^

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When This World is Not

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."

197