The sunshine says to the sea, held in the grasp of gravitation, “Rise from your bed!  Let millions of tons of water fly on the wings of the viewless air, hundreds of miles to the distant mountains, and pour there those millions of tons that shall refresh a whole continent, and shall gather in rivers fitted to bear the commerce and the navies of nations.”  Gravitation says, “I will hold every particle of this ocean as near the centre of the earth as I can.”  Sunshine speaks with its word of power, and says, “Up and away!” And in the wreathing mists of morning these myriads of tons rise in the air, flyaway hundreds of miles, and supply all the Niagaras, Mississippis and Amazons of earth.  The sun says to the earth, wrapped in the mantle of winter, [Page 36] “Bloom again;” and the snows melt, the ice retires, and vegetation breaks forth, birds sing, and spring is about us.

Thus it is evident that every force is constitutionally arranged to be overcome by a higher, and all by the highest.  Gravitation of earth naturally and legitimately yields to the power of the sun’s heat, and then the waters fly into the clouds.  It as naturally and legitimately yields to the power of mind, and the waters of the Red Sea are divided and stand “upright as an heap.”  Water naturally bursts into flame when a bit of potassium is thrown into it, and as naturally when Elijah calls the right kind of fire from above.  What seems a miracle, and in contravention of law, is only the constitutional exercise of higher force over forces organized to be swayed.  If law were perfectly rigid, there could be but one force; but many grades exist from cohesion to mind and spirit.  The highest forces are meant to have victory, and thus give the highest order and perfectness.

Across the astronomic spaces reach all these powers, making creation a perpetual process rather than a single act.  It almost seems as if light, in its varied capacities, were the embodiment of God’s creative power; as if, having said, “Let there be light,” he need do nothing else, but allow it to carry forward the creative processes to the end of time.  It was Newton, one of the earliest and most acute investigators in this study of light, who said, “I seem to have wandered on the shore of Truth’s great ocean, and to have gathered a few pebbles more beautiful than common; but the vast ocean itself rolls before me undiscovered and unexplored.”

[Page 37] EXPERIMENTS WITH LIGHT.

A light set in a room is seen from every place; hence light streams in every possible direction.  If put in the centre of a hollow sphere, every point of the surface will be equally illumined.  If put in a sphere of twice the diameter, the same light will fall on all the larger surface.  The surfaces of spheres are as the squares of their diameters; hence, in the larger sphere the surface is illumined only one-quarter as much as the smaller.  The same is true of large and small rooms.  In Fig. 7 it is apparent that the light that falls on the first square is spread, at twice the distance, over the second square, which is four times as large, and at three times the distance over nine times the surface.  The varying amount of light received by each planet is also shown in fractions above each world, the amount received by the earth being 1.