Henry White Warren

“ Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. ”

“ It sends out its power to every planet, in the vast circle in which it lies. It fills with light not merely a whole circle, but a dome; not merely a dome above, but one below, and on every side. At our distance of ninety-two and a half millions of miles, the great earth feels that power in gravitation, tides, rains, winds, and all possible life—every part is full of power. Fill the earth's orbit with a circle of such receptive worlds—seventy thousand instead of one—everyone would be as fully supplied with power from this central source. ”

“ It is not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home among their personalities. This universe is a unity. ”

“ That one unmoving centre may be that city more gorgeous than Eastern imagination ever conceived, whose pavement is transparent gold, whose walls are precious stones, whose light is life, and where no dark planetary bodies ever cast shadows. There reigns the King and Lord of all, and ranged about are the far-off provinces of his material systems. They all move in his sight, and receive power from a mind that never wearies. ”

“ Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling. ”

“ THE ULTIMATE FORCE.
The universe is God's name writ large. Thought goes up the shining suns as golden stairs, and reads the consecutive syllables—all might, and wisdom, and beauty; and if the heart be fine enough and pure enough, it also reads everywhere the mystic name of love. Let us learn to read the hieroglyphics, and then turn to the blazonry of the infinite page. That is the key-note; the heavens and the earth declaring the glory of God, and men with souls attuned listening. ”

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

“ There is then a possibility of finding the Author of nature, and the Father of man. He begins his studies anew. Now he sees that all lines of knowledge converge as they go out toward the infinite mystery; sees that these converging lines are the reins of government in this world; sees the converging lines grasped by an almighty hand; sees a loving face and form behind; sees that these lines of knowledge and power are his personal nerves, along which flashes his will, and every force in the universe answers like a perfect muscle. ”

“ So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at Santa Cruz, California.
There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. ”

“ There Hercules perpetually wrought his mighty labors for the good of man; there flashed and faded the changeful star Algol, as an eye in the head of the snaky-haired Medusa; over them flew Pegasus, the winged horse of the poet, careering among the stars; there the ship Argo, which had explored all strange seas of earth, nightly sailed in the infinite realms of heaven; there Perseus perpetually killed the sea-monster by celestial aid, and perpetually won the chained Andromeda for his bride. ”

“ This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed. Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's sudden appearance, disappear. ”

“ Go out in the falling rain, stand under the thunderous Niagara, feel the immeasurable rush of life, see the hanging worlds, and trace all this—the carried rain, the terrific thunder with God's bow of peace upon it, and the unfailing planets hung upon nothing—trace all this to the orb of day blazing in perpetual strength, but stop not there. Who made the sun? Contrivance fills all thought. Who made the sun? Nature says there is a mind, and that mind is Almighty. ”

“ The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands. ”

“ Thus we have brought to our doors a readable record of the very substances composing every world hot enough to shine by its own light. Thus, while our flag means all we have of liberty, free as the winds that kiss it, and bright as the stars that shine in it, the flag of the sun means all that it is in constituent elements, all that it is in condition. ”

“ It is not made up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll," the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the removal of things that can be shaken. ”

“ So at these distant stars the earth's enormous orbit, if lying like a blazing ring in space, with the world set on its edge like a pearl, and the sun blazing like a diamond in the centre, would all shrink to a mere point. Not quite to a point from the nearest stars, or we should never be able to measure the distance of any of them. ”

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

“ The Author of all lives only to do good, to send rain on the just and unjust, to cause his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and to give his spirit, like a perpetually widening river, to every man to profit withal.
The sun reaches his unrelaxing hand of gravitation to every other world at every instant. The tendency of every world is to fly off in a straight line. ”

“ But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. ”

“ Animal ferocity or a human Hercules could image their idea of power. Ours finds no symbol, but rises to the Almighty. Their heavens were full of fighting Orions, wild bulls, chained Andromedas, and devouring monsters. Our heavens are significant of harmony and unity; all worlds carried by one force, and all harmonized into perfect music. All their voices blend their various significations into a personal speaking, which says, "Hast thou not heard that the everlasting God, the Lord, the creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary?" ”

“ What fore-gleams have we of the future life? They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. ”

“ Science and religion are not two separate departments, they are not even two phases of the same truth. Science has a broader realm in the unseen than in the seen, in the source of power than in the outcomes of power, in the sublime laws of spirit than in the laws of matter; and religion sheds its beautiful light over all stages of life, till, whether we eat or whether we drink, or whatsoever we do, we may do all for the glory of God. Science and religion make common confession that the great object of life is to learn and to grow. ”

“ 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. ”

“ New York itself has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense amount of garbage and sewage. It would soon breed a pestilence, and the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence, and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a day. ”

“ The centre grows compact, heat is evolved by impact, as will be explained in Chapter II. Dull red light begins to look like coming dawn. Centuries go by; contraction goes on; light blazes in insufferable brightness; tornadoes, whirlpools, and tempests scarcely signify anything as applied to such tumultuous tossing.
There hangs the only world in existence; it hangs in empty space. It has no tendency to rise; none to fall; none to move at all in any direction. It seethes and, flames, and holds itself together by attractive power, and that is all the force with which we have endowed it. ”

“ Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes.
Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. ”