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.

Take a great mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated
invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by
particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The
ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make
limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain
rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize
upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber
to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But,
whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the
seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle
and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de
Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes
between lovers, it is still the same matter. It may be diffused as gas
or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter.

Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy
is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean
individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality.
It seems to be able to count, o