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, aday, 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 zeons ago, and they will not reach the stage 
of life till eons 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 eons 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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