“For his gayer hours
  She has a voice of gladness and a smile,
  And eloquence of beauty; and she glides
  Into his darker musings with a mild
  And gentle sympathy, that steals away
  Their sharpness ere he is aware.”

Prophets who utter God’s voice of truth say, “The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for holy men, and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose.  It shall blossom abundantly and rejoice, even with joy and singing.”

Distinguish clearly between certainty and surmise.  The certainty is that the world will pass through catastrophic changes to a perfect world.  The grave of uniformitarianism is already covered with grass.  He that creates promises to complete.  The invisible, imponderable, inaudible ether is beyond our apprehension; it transmits impressions 186,000 miles a second; it is millions of times more capable and energetic than air.  What may be the bounds of its possibility none can imagine, for law is not abrogated nor designs disregarded as we ascend into higher realms.  Law works out more beautiful designs with more absolute certainty.  Why [Page 242] should there not be a finer universe than this, and disconnected from this world altogether—­a fit home for immortal souls?  It is a necessity.

God filleth all in all, is everywhere omnipotent and wise.  Why should there be great vacuities, barren of power and its creative outgoings?  God has fixed the stars as proofs of his agency at some points in space.  But is it in points only?  Science is proud of its discovery that what men once thought to be empty space is more intensely active than the coarser forms of matter can be.  But in the long times which are past Job glanced at earth, seas, clouds, pillars of heaven, stars, day, night, all visible things, and then added:  “Lo! these are only the outlying borders of his works.  What a whisper of a word we hear of Him! The thunder of his power who can comprehend?”

Science discovers that man is adapted for mastery in this world.  He is of the highest order of visible creatures.  Neither is it possible to imagine an order of beings generically higher to be connected with the conditions of the material world.  This whole secret was known to the author of the oldest writing.  “And God blessed them, and God said unto them:  Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it:  and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”  The idea is never lost sight of in the sacred writings.  And while every man knows he must fail in one great contest, and yield himself to death, the later portions of the divine Word offer him victory even here.  The typical man is commissioned to destroy even death, and make man a sharer in the victory. [Page 243] Science babbles at this great truth of man’s position like a little child; Scripture treats it with a breadth of perfect wisdom we are only beginning to grasp.