The Golden Censer Part 37

is 324 times as large as the sun, and so are many other stars. Now, the most distant star in the largest telescope cannot be at the edge of the universe. Why? It must be in the middle. It must be balanced by exactly as much attraction on one side as another. There must be, above, below, beyond that star, the same stupendous array of worlds, and each relatively outer star, aye, even the star on the farther side of that outer star, must in its turn, be held in the same magnificent and awful suspension. So forever. We actually have Infinity forced on our reason.

Eternity is the correlative and co-existent necessity of infinity.

Infinity, Eternity, Immortality, become the solemn Trinity confronting the physical as well as the spiritual world! G.o.d has even ordained that, when you move your hand, you affect the farthest of His worlds. Can you not grasp the idea that, in reason, the universe is boundless? Why, then, in reason, shall it not be our infinite pleasure to study G.o.d's plans forever? I know of no greater pleasure which I could conceive.

Those who ask for evidences,

AS THEY ASK FOR BREAD AND CHEESE,

expecting these great truths to be clear to their clotted minds, cannot even be brought to believe a house-fly has 25,000 eyes, constructed each on the plan of our own? They will hardly believe an unseen force flows through the magnetic needle, turning it to the north. If they had refused, with the same logic, to believe that A was A when they had to so believe in order to learn at all, they would now be groping in that stupid illiteracy, which, by a parity of reasoning, they so richly deserve.

SHALL G.o.d WEIGH OUT ARCTURUS FOR US,

to exhibit His power or its magnitude? Shall He speak to us, and not only kill us with his softer syllables, but send our nicely-balanced earth whirling in toward the sun, and all because some fool hath said in his heart there is no G.o.d? No. Our reason and our Oldest Record both point to Eternity as our proper life, the ripening of our soul, our comprehension of the infinite, and our better worthiness to praise G.o.d's holy name.

CONCLUSION.

No author of a work calculated to elevate the mind and enn.o.ble the ambitions of mankind could aspire to a higher climax; no writer of a series of admonitions, in escaping "a lame and impotent conclusion,"

could rest more calmly than he who, having built his tower upon the solid duties of to-day, peers out with the great lenses of Religion, into the hopes of the future--

"Past flaming bounds of place and time, The living throne, the sapphire blaze, Where angels tremble while they gaze."

[Ill.u.s.tration]