Evening Republican, Volume 16, Number 116, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 May 1912 — THE QUIET HOUR [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

THE QUIET HOUR

Knowledge That Has Brought Man Nearer to God 1 ' l * u 11 "’Vrllgß THINKING IN MILLIONS * LET ns think a little to millions— ' not, my speculative friend, mtt- '■ lions of dollars, bat, to begin with, in millions of miles. Where were yon last year at this time? “Just where you are now and sighing for some experience of travel,” do yon say? Why, my dear sir, or madam, yon have traveled some hundreds of millions of miles to tola twelvemontbjand still are traveling. What Is Panama or Constantinople or Pekin to comparison with this great Journey of the sun and its attendant earth! While you have been longing to go from Boston to Lynn to vfsth friends, yon have in fact traversed an unlmaglnahle breadth of space. The difficulty of getting started is to your imagination. The veriest Lob-lie-by-the-flre, to the remotest hamlet—even that woman who lived for sixty year* within sight of the passing trains and never stepped on board of one of them—l# a for traveler. Yes, but you say, that cosmic travel is both unimaginable and unsatisfactory. Lynn and Boston are at least real places where bouses stand and tins are collected. One gets the excitement of the crowded station and may look out of the car window. But onr world-spiral round the hastening sun is like going from nowhlther to nowhere. There are neither stations nor stops nor scenery. • -v: v, :;

Two View* of Life's Journey. It Is quite true; of course, In one sense, that the pleasures of this prodigious journey are largely out of sight But do. not the world and your; fellow travelers take on a different aspect because you are not marooned! In some corner of the universe, hut travel In the midst of stars and sunsf These thoughts may not appeal to yon. Perhaps your Imagination la so rusty from disuse that you cannot make it work st all In this direction. Then yon are like the fly that buzzes In a moving railroad car. It is unaware that its car has moved from. Boston and will arrive In Montreal. So lon% as It finds food and occupation, the journey Is a matter of indifference. The fly is happy—let It buss, and find no fault with Its limitations. It will be quite as much at home la Canada as Massachusetts. And so are we, except that age draws on, In all the stages of our unimaginable journey. The vlyidest Imagination, like the exactest research, cannot grasp and picture the facts and Implications of this planetary and solar flight—a journey where to stop would be annihilation, and In which we have no hint of destination. Did we start from anywhere? We can only guess. Are we bound for anywhere? Wo can never know, gome of our friends, the astronomers, have reasoned that we .are bound from a collision and catastrophe to a collision and cata* trophe. Others incline to guess that —barring accidents—our journey may be endless. The first effect of this la millions of miles was to make man seem insignificant and God remote. The poet Young, who told us that "An undevout astronomer Is mad,” might come back to find astronomers of this degree of madness not uncommon. God, regarded as the artificer, must certainly seem far away when we consider the unthinkable'distances we travel and the greater spaces we dis--1 eera. Man seems puny In the limits tions of Ids being and his knowledge. How slow our steps beside the silent onrush of the earth. A mile a minute is fast traveling for train or flight But the sun flies, they estimate, some sixteen miles a second —well toward a thousand miles while our Chicago limited passes from inflepest to milepost on its Journey. And the speed of light from star to star Is much more than a hundred thousand tunes as great aa that of the rolling train. How slow is man in the midst of'the swift movements of the universe.-Mow little is inan, who thinks the BtUo earth so large.

Good In the New Knowledge. - Yet the second and the real effect of this new knowledge was different, tt helped displace the thought of God as the artificer, tt gave man real dignity and elose relations in a larger universe. Hew little and cramped the ancient maps of the earth in space! In fact, space, as we think of it, had no real eadstsnee for the ancients. They did not get outride, the closed , box In which ran, planets and stars went circling round the earth, ta sit good frith many of them believed that Jerusalem was the phyrical center of all tli"g» in place, of that conceit of our* htmutn importance, we have gained the thought of God as the soul of the universe and. made the old doctrine of bis presence everywhere ffrmartiing more, than a- cold dogmS.fl If we can no longer localize the New Jerusalem (there was a map, I re* member, who wrote * bos* to prove that tbe globe within the sun was our heaven), we are learning to tidal, that this earth is gives ns to make as mueb like heavqn as we ess. And ail these things the Good Bos* told u» | oratories ago.—Boston TrpnscrtpV. |