CHARLES B. WARRING, >H.D. 215 



Then, whatever did not agree with the current theology 

 was deemed unworthy of belief ; now it is the fashion to 

 regard anything which does not agree with what some- 

 body has labeled ''scientific" as, ipso facto, untrne. 

 Once science was a bogie to frighten grayheaded children 

 and pantalooned women. Now they find it a fetich to 

 be worshipped. This is not greatly to be wondered at, 

 for the world has seen astronomers predict eclipses, and 

 transits, and conjunctions, and at the appointed hour the 

 predictions were fulfilled more exactly than a time-table 

 predicts the arrival of cars. They have read that mathe- 

 maticians map out the paths of comets, calculate the 

 delay that must come from the interfering attraction of 

 the planets, and announce how many hours late these 

 travelers from afar will arrive at perihelion — the 

 grand station at which their sunward journey ends. 

 They have learned that science has weighed the 

 earth, its sister planets and the sun, to say nothing of 

 moons and comets. They are told that this weighing is 

 not a matter of guessing, but is accomplished with a less 

 percentage of error than grocers weigh out their sugars. 

 Then, too, there is the outreach of science into the abyss 

 of space about us. It takes the distance from here to 

 the sun, measures it, takes that as its unit — its yard- 

 stick, some 93,000,000 miles long — and then tells with 

 almost absolute accuracy how many such "yards " it is 

 from the sun to each planet, how far the comets go be- 

 fore they begin to return, or whether they are strangers 

 in our system, looking in upon us for a few days, and 

 then speeding away, circling by sun after sun, until, 

 having completed the circuit of the universe in years too 

 infinite to number, they shall return to the spot where 

 our system once was, and find our earth with its sister 

 planets and all their satellites motionless and dead, 

 buried in the cold and dark sun. 

 They read that the velocity of light, to conceive of 



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