asks with an air of a Socrates putting his last question:  “You say that ‘heaven is above us.’  But if one dies at noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole.  Where is your heaven anyhow?” O sapient, sapient questioner!  Heaven is above us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a little world as this is no more than a bee’s leaving different sides of a bruised pear exuding honey.  Up or down he is in the same fragrant garden, warm, light, redolent of roses, tremulous with bird song, amid a thousand caves of honeysuckles, “illuminate seclusions swung in air” to which his open sesame gives entrance at will.

II.  But there will be in space what the world has become.  It is nowhere intimated that matter had been annihilated.  Worlds shall perish as worlds.  They shall wax old as doth a garment.  They will be folded up as a vesture, and they “shall be changed.”  The motto with which this article began says heavens pass away, elements melt, earth and its works are burned up.  But always after the heaven and earth pass away we are to look for “new heavens and a new earth.”  On all that God has made he has stamped the great principle of progress, refinement, development—­rock to soil, soil to vegetable life, to insect, bird, and man.  Each dies as to what it is, that it may have resurrection or may feed something higher.  So, in the light of revelation, earth is not lost.  Science comes, after ages of creeping, up to the same position.  It, too, asserts that matter is indestructible.  Burn a candle in a great jar hermetically sealed.  The weight of the jar and contents is just the same after the burning as before.  A burned-up candle as big as the world will not be annihilated.  It will be “changed.”

It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter.  Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury.  How shall we get it out?  You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand.  This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water.  Now, to get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in the smoke.  The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that heavy stuff out of the smoke again.  It is changed, volatilized, and it likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to come back to heaviness again.