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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