420 SKETCHES OF CREATION. 



perpetual motion on the earth.'''' Helmholtz says: "A time 

 will come when the comet will strike the sun ; and a simi- 

 lar end threatens all the planets, although after a time the 

 length of which baffles our imagination to conceive it." 

 Mayer contemplates the precipitation of asteroidal and 

 planetary masses upon the sun. Comte says : " In a future 

 too remote to be assigned, all the bodies of our system 

 must be united to the solar mass, from which it is probable 

 that they proceeded." Rorison, defending the Mosaic ac- 

 count of creation, admits, speaking of the earth : " It was 

 once all nebula ; it will yet, if left to physical agencies, col- 

 lapse into an exhausted and extinguished sun." Watson 

 says : " If we grant that the retardation of the comets 

 arises from the existence of an ethereal fluid, the total ob- 

 literation of the solar system is to be the final result." 



This, then, is the conclusion of science. So far as we 

 have been able to acquaint ourselves with the laws which 

 regulate the movements of the planetary bodies, the dura- 

 tion of the present order of the solar system is finite. 

 Nothing but an infinite miracle can save it from destruc- 

 tion. That such a miracle will be wrought we have no 

 warrant for assuming. From the very beginning of its 

 career, so far as we can judge, the history of matter has 

 been wrought out in accordance with methods which we 

 style the " laws of Nature." These methods have never 

 been abandoned, and there is not a particle of evidence 

 furnished by science that they ever will be abandoned un- 

 til they shall have completed their work. Whether the 

 forces of matter be viewed as inherent powers or as " im- 

 mediate divine agency," the argument from induction, in 

 which the doctrine of a final catastrophe rests, is an argu- 

 ment possessing strength beyond the power of arithmetic 

 to express. 



It is true that the final catastrophe is removed to the 



