that I did not share their fears, but watched the cloud, curious as to what the end of the world would be like.  I cannot brag, as Thoreau did, when he said he would not go around the corner to see the world blow up.  I am quite sure my curiosity would get the better of me and that I should go, even at this late day.  Or think of the more harmless obsession of many good people about the second coming of Christ, or about the resurrection of the physical body when the last trumpet shall sound.  A little natural knowledge ought to be fatal to all such notions.  Natural knowledge shows us how transient and insignificant we are, and how vast and everlasting the world is, which was aeons before we were, and will be other aeons after we are gone, yea, after the whole race of man is gone.  Natural knowledge takes the conceit out of us, and is the sure antidote to all our petty anthropomorphic views of the universe.

V

I was struck by this passage in one of the recently published letters of Saint-Gaudens:  “The principal thought in my life is that we are on a planet going no one knows where, probably to something higher (on the Darwinian principle of evolution); that, whatever it is, the passage is terribly sad and tragic, and to bear up at times against what seems to be the Great Power that is over us, the practice of love, charity, and courage are the great things.”

The “Great Power” that is over us does seem unmindful of us as individuals, if it does not seem positively against us, as Saint-Gaudens seemed to think it was.

Surely the ways of the Eternal are not as our ways.  Our standards of prudence, of economy, of usefulness, of waste, of delay, of failure—­how far off they seem from the scale upon which the universe is managed or deports itself!  If the earth should be blown to pieces to-day, and all life instantly blotted out, would it not be just like what we know of the cosmic prodigality and indifference?  Such appalling disregard of all human motives and ends bewilders us.

Of all the planets of our system probably only two or three are in a condition to sustain life.  Mercury, the youngest of them all, is doubtless a dead world, with absolute zero on one side and a furnace temperature on the other.  But what matters it?  Whose loss or gain is it?  Life seems only an incident in the universe, evidently not an end.  It appears or it does not appear, and who shall say yea or nay?  The asteroids at one time no doubt formed a planet between Mars and Jupiter.  Some force which no adjective can describe or qualify blew it into fragments, and there, in its stead, is this swarm of huge rocks making their useless rounds in the light of the sun forever and ever.  What matters it to the prodigal All?  Bodies larger than our sun collide in the depths of space before our eyes with results so terrific that words cannot even hint them.  The last of these collisions—­of