THE GOSPEL OF NATURE 



Such appalling disregard of all human motives and 

 ends bewilders us. 



Of all the planets of our system probably only 

 two or three are in a condition to sustain life. Mer- 

 cury, the youngest of them all, is doubtless a dead 

 world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace 

 temperature on the other. But what matters it? 

 Whose loss or gain is it? Life seems only an incident 

 in the universe, evidently not an end. It appears or it 

 does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay? The 

 asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet be- 

 tween Mars and Jupiter. Some force which no adjec- 

 tive can describe or qualify blew it into fragments, 

 and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge rocks 

 making their useless rounds in the light of the sun 

 forever and ever. What matters it to the prodigal 

 All? Bodies larger than our sun collide in the depths 

 of space before our eyes with results so terrific that 

 words cannot even hint them. The last of these colli- 

 sions — of this "wreck of matter and crush of 

 worlds" — reported itself to our planet in Febru- 

 ary, 1901, when a star of the twelfth magnitude 

 suddenly blazed out as a star of the first magnitude 

 and then slowly faded. It was the grand finale of the 

 independent existence of two enormous celestial bod- 

 ies. They apparently ended in dust that whirled away 

 in the vast abyss of siderial space, blown by the 

 winds upon which suns and systems drift as autumn 

 leaves. It would be quite in keeping with the ob- 



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