Religion and science; Science -- Juvenile literature
Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months
is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly
desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them,
yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning
that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a
twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon,
the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the
temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he
must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift
as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world
has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.
Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the
present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A
thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to
others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know
even as he is known by perfect intelligence.
Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails
of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel.
Husbands and fathers are ever crying:
Immortal? I feel it and know it.
Who doubts of such as she?
But that's the pang's very essence,
Immortal away from me.
But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships
up to be sundered no more forever.
Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God. Job, in
his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and
desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I
might find him." David cries out while his tears are flowing day and
night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul
after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when
shall I come and appear before God?" Moses, in the broadest of
visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy
glory." And common men have always turned the high places of earth to
altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their
sacrifices. But the means of knowing God are to be increased. The
very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ
whom he has sent. Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to
dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better
results, shall be taken there. Every reader of the Apocalypse notices
with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven
seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open,
nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous
panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully
explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we
observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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