TIME AND CHANGE 



take the conceit out of us ! How we dwindle to mere 

 specks and our little lives to the span of a moment 

 in the presence of the cosmic bodies and the inter- 

 stellar spaces! How we hurry! How we husband 

 our time! A year, a month, a day, an hour may 

 mean so much to us. Behold the infinite leisure of 

 Nature! 



A few trillions or quadrillions of years, what mat- 

 ters it to the Eternal? Jupiter and Saturn must be 

 billions of years older than the earth. They are evid- 

 ently yet passing through that condition of cloud 

 and vapor and heat that the earth passed through 

 untold seons ago, and they will not reach the stage 

 of life till aeons to come. But what matters it? Only 

 man hurries. Only the Eternal has infinite time. 

 When life comes to Jupiter, the earth will doubtless 

 long have been a dead world. It may continue a 

 dead world for seons longer before it is melted up in 

 the eternal crucible and recast, and set on its career 

 of life again. 



Familiarity with the ways of the Eternal as they 

 are revealed in the physical universe certainly tends 

 to keep a man sane and sober and safeguards him 

 against the vagaries and half-truths which our creeds 

 and indoor artificial lives tend to breed. Shut away 

 from Nature, or only studying her through religious 

 fears and superstitions, what a mess a large body of 

 mankind in all ages have made of it! Think of the 

 obsession of the speedy "end of the world" which 



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