Disintegration

“ With its destruction the lives of two great political parties passed away, and left the people with no distinct lines of demarkation. It is true that there bodies still exist, but the process of disintegration is rapidly going on, and the stench of their decay fills the nostrils of all whose senses are rendered acute by the intensifying power of intuitive perception. ”

“ Disintegration is quite painless, I assure you–but I want you to see them. ”

“ The gross body disintegrates every time a man dies. The soul not being made of any particles must be indestructible. What do we mean by destruction? Destruction is disintegration of the materials out of which anything is composed. If this glass is broken into pieces, the materials will disintegrate, and that will be the destruction of the glass. Disintegration of particles is what we mean by destruction. It naturally follows that nothing that is not composed of particles can be destroyed, can ever be disintegrated. The soul is not composed of any materials. ”

“ Disintegration takes place with enormous rapidity, probably about eight times as fast as on the Earth, and the violent rains carry the products speedily downhill where they fill the valleys and the oceans in front of all river mouths. ”

“ This composite association of the elements in the form of a human body is, therefore, subject to disintegration, which we call death, but after disintegration the elements themselves persist unchanged. Therefore, total annihilation is an impossibility, and existence can never become nonexistence. ”

“ Crises often, perhaps most often, precede catastrophies, as when revolutions break. The alternate truth that the catastrophies themselves are re-agents to generate the crisis-situation has not been so commonly noted. Nevertheless the disintegration of the normal by shock and calamity is an increasingly familiar spectacle. ”

“ As matters progress to the climax, as disaster after disaster overtakes human effort, and disintegration descends into the dissolution of law and order, the whole earth will be “filled with violence”. ”

“ As a tortoise puts forth its body out of its shell and again draws that body into it, so out of Love the twenty-three principles are projected, and drawn, in the fullness of time, back into its bosom again. This reaction or journey of the universe back to its source is called universal destruction, or dissolution, or disintegration. This universal dissolution takes place when the Three Cardinal Attributes of creation, out of which all the composing principles have sprung, fall into equilibrium; in other words, become equal in power or tension. ”

“ A stationary period may supervene, which may last until ended by war, by exhaustion, or by both combined, as seems to have been the case with the Eastern Empire; or, as in the Western, disintegration may set in, the civilized population may perish, and a reversion may take place to a primitive form of organism. ”

“ Wherefore I deem it just to conclude that the same cause which, in the beginning of time, raised mountains from the abyss, has down to the present day continued to produce others, in order to restore from time to time, the losses of all such as sink down in different places, or are rent asunder, or in other ways suffer disintegration. ”

“ For that which is non-existent does not exist. But when bodies are disintegrated, and experience a change, a dissolution of them takes place; so that a part of them goes to earth, a part to air, and a part to something else. ”

“ They looked forward confidently to another such catastrophe, to take place like the preceding, at the close of a cycle, when the sun was to be effaced from the heavens, the human race from the earth, and when the darkness of chaos was to settle on the habitable globe. ”

“ But just as there are waters below us, and beneath the earth, so, too, are there waters above us, and beyond the sky. If they should descend, obeying natural law, destruction would result. The clouds float as if suspended in space. When at times they descend, how great the terror they cause! But imagine the result of a universal collapse! How they would burst, in obedience to the law of their nature, did they not remain in place above us, suspended, as it were, by the Word! ”

“ Hundreds of tons of loosened rock and earth were crashing down-wards, and the horror-stricken men who saw what was happening were shouting, screaming, gesticulating, for well they knew the fate of any who should be struck unawares by the swift-descending mass. ”

“ Die, die, die, die, death comes to all." Destruction faces us wherever we turn. Destruction below and above, destruction behind and before. Change is the only Eternal,—why not as welcome Death as Life? ”

“ When They come close upon the world there is ever wreckage and disaster in the affairs of men. They bring disorder and confusion into the mind, a confusion that seems final, a disorder that seems to threaten death. For there is tumult in Their Presence, and apparent chaos that seems the abandonment of order. Out of this vast ruin, then, there issues life in new design. The dislocation is its entrance, the dishevelment its strength. There has been birth....’
The sunlight dazzled his eyes. That distant roar, like a wind, came close and swept his face. ”

“ Then terror—blind, sickening, unreasoning terror—seized the masses, and there began the most gigantic and terrible exodus in the history of the earth—a migration that in a few hours developed into a mad race of half the planet's inhabitants across thousands of miles. ”

“ Burdens under which others expire seem to have lost their influence upon us; and while they are 'driven to the wall,' destruction keeps far from us its blasting hand. We live in the region of death, yet seem hardly mortal. We cling to life in the midst of all reverses ”

“ What has hitherto seemed to us floating jetsom and blind wreckage, what has hitherto seemed to us mere brutal lumps of primeval clay tossed to and fro by the giant hands of chaos, what has hitherto seemed to us slabs of inhuman chemistry, suddenly assumes under the pressure of this great power out of the abyss a strange and lovely and terrible expressiveness. ”

“ Over them, we find the wrecks of a former world—once as beautiful, as thickly peopled, but more thoughtless and more wicked than the present, which was hurled into one general chaos, and its component, but incongruous parts, amalgamated in awful mockery by the deluge—that tremendous evidence of the wrath of Heaven. ”

“ With it was connected the notion that the material universe had undergone and was destined to undergo a repetition of catastrophes by fire and water; and after each destruction to be renewed in fresh beauty, when a golden age was again to commence, destined in a fated time to corruption and decay. ”

“ I will not now attempt to estimate the extent of that ruin,—to determine whether the earth would still move on its course, in cold, dark and lifeless desolation, or whether the elementary particles of which it is composed, being released from all sustaining or combining force, would be dissolved and dissipated through the immensity of space. It is sufficient to see that there would instantly follow an entire destruction of all that now renders the earth a habitation for man. For all practical uses the destruction would be as total as if the earth were annihilated. ”

“ He links a chain of circumstance bearing on destruction’s delirious delusions that now rocks the foundations of the world, which reacts on and affects every civilization, person, and individual on earth. ”

“ I deplore, as a citizen of that world, the general devastation, the blood that has been shed in the field or on the scaffold, and the stupendous destruction that has overwhelmed a great nation.—While I can yet contemplate the minuti to feel the distresses of many amiable individuals—from these may you, my dear friend, have now escaped ”

“ Do you not behold the clouds open, and destruction lurid and dire pour down on the blasted earth? See you not the thunderbolt fall, and are deafened by the shout of heaven that follows its descent? Feel you not the earth quake and open with agonizing groans, while the air is pregnant with shrieks and wailings,—all announcing the last days of man? ”

“ Suddenly the rock upon which we stood began to crumble; huge fragments broke away at our very feet and went whirling down into the yawning gulf.
Hope!
The word was but mockery!
Chaos would have been more befitting, for chaos had surely come! ”

“ Even yet we are a sort of Salvator Rosa at a savage scene, and our black-lead pencil heaps up confused shatterings of rocks, and flings a mountainous region into convulsions, as if an earthquake heaved, in a way that is no canny, making people shudder as if something had gone wrong with this planet of ours, and creation were falling back into chaos. ”

“ Thither noble scions, criminals, priests, soldiers of fortune have drifted. Some have prospered and some in the wild surge of these seas have been wrecked and sunk.
The flotsam of humanity, like the drift of rivers, like the derelicts of the sea, is but wreckage of some sort hurried along in those irresistible currents that we call Fate. Each village has its little eddy where, round and round in quiet whirl, the neighbouring drift collects. Each country has its maelstrom, a black whirlpool where is collected the debris of human kind. ”

“ Accident and then exigency seemed the forces at work to this extraordinary effect; the play of energies as free and planless as those that force the forest from the soil to the sky; and then the fierce struggle for survival, with the stronger life persisting over the deformity, the mutilation, the destruction, the decay of the weaker. ”

“ Like a flood that slowly undermines a bank, and which the proprietor regards not when he sees so tiny a current dribbling and oozing through, and scarcely bowing the grass between which it trickles, so came the Destroyer—slowly and almost imperceptibly undermining the current of life, and eating out the foundations, until there needed but one mighty rush, and all was over beyond recovery, and the work of destruction was completed. ”

“ The catastrophists attributed all past changes to sudden and violent convulsions of nature, by which all living beings were destroyed, to be replaced by a fresh creation. At least such were the tenets of the extremists. ”

“ And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity? ”

“ Here we have an awful account of the final dissolution of the world, and which we are yet more nearly concerned in. The ruin that came upon the world and its inhabitants by the flood, we read, and hear, and think of, with concern, though those who were swept away by it were such as we never knew; but the judgment here spoken of is yet to come, and will surely come, though we know not when, nor upon what particular age or generation of men ”

“ Even the elements when out of order can do but little toward perfecting destruction. A deluge is wanted—or that crash of doom which, whether it is to come or not, is believed by the world to be very distant. ”

“ And, maddening, day’s red coursers thundered on,
Uncurbed, unguided by my palsied hand.
Then with loud ruin, blundering from the bridge,
Through space went swaying, now high up, now down,
[Pg 127] Scattering conflagration and fierce death
O’er earth’s shrunk verges where their scorchings scarred.
Time fled in terror, forests shrivelled up,
Ocean drew back in shudderings to his caves,
Huge mountains shook and rumbled to their base,
Great streams dried up, old cities smoked and fell,
And all life met confusion and despair,
And dread annihilation. ”

“ The clamor oppressed the spirit, the dust fretted the nostrils and blinded the eyes, the sweltering heat baked and exhausted the body, and everything-buildings, men, pavement—seemed strained, breaking, ready to burst, losing patience, on the verge of exploding into some immense catastrophe, some outbreak, after which one would be able to breathe freely and easily in the air refreshed by it. ”

“ But the empire! In that crisis,—in that narrow pass in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,—what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,— shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. ”

“ It matters little whether we regard it as the deepening or the destruction of the scientific universe. It matters little whether we say that grander abysses have opened in it, or merely that the bottom has fallen out of it. ”

“ Then, in expectation of instant death, they listened with an awe too great for expression to the infernal uproar, the crash of falling objects, the groaning and grinding of the swaying house, and above all to the voice of the deep, subterranean power which appeared to be rending the earth. ”

“ How many has this very feeling ruined, and will continue to ruin for succeeding ages, who can tell? "A sea of troubles" is incidental to our existence, and the dark prognostic that rises on our mental horizon, heralding the approach of some destructive blast, is too often unheeded by us until it has swept over our devoted heads. ”

“ Death and Devastation are the certain Consequences of Delay; every Moment is infinitely precious; an Hour lost may deluge your Country in Blood, and entail perpetual Slavery upon the few of your Posterity who may survive the Carnage. ”