496 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. XII. 



membered that it had originally been delivered as a lecture in 

 the Session of 1857-58, but now appearing as almost his last 

 published words, the close had a new and striking significance. 

 " When Paper, Pen, and Ink," he says, " have made the tour of 

 the world, and have carried everywhere the acknowledgment of 

 brotherhood between people and people, and man and man, 

 and the Song of Bethlehem, fulfilled to the full, has enlightened 

 every intellect and softened every heart, their great mission will 

 be ended. And let us not complain that our writing materials 

 are one and all so frail and perishable, for God himself has been 

 content to write His will on the frailest things. Even His 

 choicest graphic media are temporal and perishable. The stars 

 of heaven are in our eyes the emblems of eternity, and they are 

 the letters in God's alphabet of the universe, and we have 

 counted them everlasting. Great astronomers of old have told 

 us that the sidereal system could not stop, but must for ever go 

 on printing in light its cyclical records of the firmament. But 

 in our own day, and amongst ourselves, has arisen a philosopher 1 

 to show us, as a result simply of physical forces working as we 

 observe them do, that the lettered firmament of heaven will one 

 day see all its scattered stars fall, like the ruined type- setting 

 of a printer, into one mingled mass. Already the most distant 

 stars, like the outermost sentinels of a flock of birds, have heard 

 the signal of sunset and return, and have begun to gather closer 

 together, and turn their faces homewards. Millions of years 

 must elapse before that home is reached, and the end comes, but 

 that end is sure. God alone is eternal, and they who through 

 His gift are partakers of his immortality. 



"It is wonderful to find a patient, mechanical philosopher, 

 looking only to what his mathematics can educe from the phe- 

 nomena of physical science, using words which, without exag- 

 geration, are exactly equivalent to these : ' Thou, Lord, in the 

 beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth, and the heavens 

 are the works of Thy hands ; they shall perish, but Thou re- 

 mainest, and they all shall wax old as doth a garment, and as a 

 vesture shalt Thou fold them up, and they shall be changed ; 

 but Thou art the same, and Thy years shall not fail !' " 



1 Professor William Thomson of Glasgow. 



