Gospel Philosophy: Showing the Absurdities of Infidelity, and the Harmony of the Gospel with Science and History — John Shaqi
Gospel Philosophy: Showing the Absurdities of Infidelity, and the Harmony of the Gospel with Science and HistoryWard, J. H. (Joseph Harvey)
Religion
Gospel Philosophy: Showing the Absurdities of Infidelity, and the Harmony of the Gospel with Science and History
Ward, J. H. (Joseph Harvey)
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints -- Doctrines
We are still more amazed when we consider the inconceivable space over
which this power extends. The bulk of the sun is beyond our mental
grasp. How then shall we comprehend its distance from {56} us? It is
generally considered that the sun is about ninety-two millions of miles
distant. It is easy to say these words, but difficult to realize their
meaning. Our express trains move at the rate of thirty miles an hour.
Now if a railway stretched from the earth to the sun, it would require
three hundred and fifty years for an express train to pass over it. If
Champlain, the founder of Quebec, and Capt. John Smith and Pocahontas,
so famous in early Virginia history, had stepped on board this train it
would still require nearly eighty years more for their descendants to
reach the end of their journey. The distance would still be so great,
that only the great grand-children of the present generation could
expect to reach the sun. And yet there is a power that reaches across
this vast distance, swings the world around its orbit like a haltered
colt trotting around a hitching post, lifts the ocean into a mighty
tide and lashes the rocky shores with the fury of the angry waves. But
this is not all. Light flashes across this mighty chasm in the brief
space of eight minutes and a half. The light by which we read these
lines started from the sun about the time we read the heading of this
article. What shall we say of a space so vast, that this light must
travel a year, a hundred, aye, even a thousand years before it reaches
its destination? And yet there is a power that governs even there,
a power so mighty that He "grasps the whole frame-work of stars and
systems, and sends them whirling and wheeling through the depths of
boundless space like a {57} handful of pebbles thrown through the air."
Well might the great philosopher and poet, Addison, exclaim:
"The spacious firmament on high
With all the blue ethereal sky,
And spangled heavens, a shining frame,
Their great Original proclaim.
"In Reason's ear they all rejoice
And utter forth a glorious voice,
Forever singing as they shine,
The hand that made us is divine."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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