ACCEPTING THE UNIVERSE 



everything has a beginning and an end, but where is 

 the beginning or the ending of the cosmos? Where, 

 then, in this quest do we touch bottom? Nowhere. 

 There is no bottom. Only measurable, finite things 

 have bottoms and bounds. The immeasurable, the 

 Infinite, is over us and under us, and our lives are 

 like sparks against the night. But, just as we live in 

 the heavens and do not know it, so we live and move 

 and have our being in the Eternal. It is not afar off; 

 it is here; we are a part of it, and as inseparable from 

 it as from gravity. 



We are not like beings who have moved into a 

 house, made and furnished and provisioned in antici- 

 pation of our coming. We are creatures born in a 

 house, or amid an environment to which we must 

 slowly and more or less painfully fit ourselves. We 

 are the consequent, not the antecedent. In a differ- 

 ent world we should have been differently consti- 

 tuted. In a bigger world no doubt our bodies would 

 have been bigger and our strength greater; with less 

 or with more oxygen in the air, no doubt our lungs 

 would have been different. With less light no doubt 

 our eyes would have been larger, and with more light 

 they would probably have been smaller. We do not 

 feel the pressure of the atmosphere, but make the 

 pressure more or less, and we are at once disturbed. 

 The deep-sea fishes fairly explode when brought to 

 the surface, and no doubt the surface fishes would 

 be crushed in the deep sea bottoms. Just as we ad- 



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