ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



a thousand other things — all make it a unique and 

 most desirable habitation. 



When we consider it in its astronomical aspects 

 as a celestial body floating in the luminiferous ether 

 as in a sea, held in leash by the sun, and as sensitive 

 to its changes as the poplar leaf to the wind, vast 

 beyond our power to visualize, yet only a grain of 

 sand on the shores of the Infinite, an evening or a 

 morning star to the beings on other planets, if there 

 are such, mottled with shining seas or green and 

 white continents and canopied with many-hued 

 cloud draperies, and existing in closest intimacies 

 with the wonders and the potencies of the sidereal 

 heavens — a veritable fruit on the vast sidereal tree 

 of life — when we realize all this, and more, can we 

 conceive of a more desirable or a better-founded 

 and better-furnished world? The voyage we make 

 upon it may be a long one; if we claim the century of 

 life which Nature seems to have allotted us on con- 

 ditions, we shall travel about thirty-six billions of 

 miles in our annual voyages around the sun, and 

 how many more millions with the sun around his 

 sun, we know not. A world made of the common 

 stuff of the universe, a handful of the dust of the 

 cosmos, yet thrilling with life, producing the race of 

 man, evolving the brain of Plato, of Aristotle, of 

 Bacon, the soul of Emerson, of Whitman, the heart 

 of Christ — a heavenly abode surely. Let us try to 

 make amends for depreciating it, for spurning it, 



52 



