The constant invention of man finds higher and higher powers.  Once he throttled his game, and often perished in the desperate struggle; then he trapped it; then pierced it with the javelin; then shot it with an arrow, or set the springy gases to hurl a rifle-ball at it.  Sometime he may point at it an electric spark, and it shall be his.  Once he wearily trudged his twenty miles a day, then he took the horse into service and made sixty; invoked the winds, and rode on their steady wings two hundred and forty; tamed the steam, and made almost one thousand; and if he cannot yet send his body, he can his mind, one thousand miles a second.  It all depends upon the grade of power he uses.  Now, hear the grand truth of nature:  as the years progress the higher grades of power increase.  Either by discovery or creation, there are still higher class forces to be made available.  Once there was no air, no usable electricity.  There is no lack of those higher powers now.  The higher we go the more of them we find.  Mr. Lockyer says that the past ten years have been years of revelation concerning the sun.  A man could not read in ten years the library of books created in that time concerning the sun.  But though we have solved certain problems and mysteries, the mysteries have increased tenfold.

We do not know that any new and higher forces have been added to matter since man’s acquaintance with it.  But it would be easy to add any number of them, or change any lower into higher.  That is the [Page 263] meaning of the falling granite that becomes soil, of the pulverized lava that decks the volcano’s trembling sides with flowers; that is the meaning of the grass becoming flesh, and of all high forces constitutionally arranged for mastery over lower.  Take the ore from the mountain.  It is loose, friable, worthless in itself.  Raise it in capacity to cast-iron, wrought-iron, steel, it becomes a highway for the commerce of nations, over the mountains and under them.  It becomes bones, muscles, body for the inspiring soul of steam.  It holds up the airy bridge over the deep chasm.  It is obedient in your hand as blade, hammer, bar, or spring.  It is inspirable by electricity, and bears human hopes, fears, and loves in its own bosom.  It has been raised from valueless ore.  Change it again to something as far above steel as that is above ore.  Change all earthly ores to highest possibility; string them to finest tissues, and the new result may fit God’s hand as tools, and thrill with his wisdom and creative processes, a body fitted for God’s spirit as well as the steel is fitted to your hand.  From this world take opacity, gravity, darkness, bring in more mind, love, and God, and then we will have heaven.  An immanent God makes a plastic world.