Ah, Dives! consider, if there is no other life than this, the fate of these uncounted millions of your race!  What does existence give to them?  What do they get out of all this abundant and beautiful world?

To look down the vista of such a life as theirs is like gazing into one of the corridors of the Catacombs:  an alley filled with reeking bones of dead men; while from the cross-arches, waiting for the poor man’s coming on, ghastly shapes look out:—­sickness and want and sin and grim despair and red-eyed suicide.

Put yourself in his place, Dives, locked up in such a cavern as that, and the key thrown away!

Do not count too much, Dives, on your lands and houses and parchments; your guns and cannon and laws; your insurance companies and your governments.  There

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may be even now one coming from beyond Arcturus, or Aldebaran, or Coma Berenices, with glowing countenance and horrid hair, and millions of tons of débris, to overwhelm you and your possessions, and your corporations, and all the ant-like devices of man in one common ruin.

Build a little broader, Dives.  Establish spiritual relations.  Matter is not everything.  You do not deal in certainties.  You are but a vitalized speck, filled with a fraction of God’s delegated intelligence, crawling over an egg-shell filled with fire, whirling madly through infinite space, a target for the bombs of a universe.

Take your mind off your bricks and mortar, and put out your tentacles toward the great spiritual world around you.  Open communications with God.  You can not help God.  For Him who made the Milky Way you can do nothing.  But here are his creatures.  Not a nerve, muscle, or brain-convolution of the humblest of these but duplicates your own; you excel them simply in the coordination of certain inherited faculties which have given you success.  Widen your heart.  Put your intellect to work to so readjust the values of labor, and increase the productive capacity of Nature, that plenty and happiness, light and hope, may dwell in every heart, and the Catacombs be closed for ever.

And from such a world God will fend off the comets with his great right arm, and the angels will exult over it in heaven.

End of Ragnarok:  The Age of Fire and Gravel