up mountains and casting them into the sea is pastime. All that
water had to be taken up before it could be cast down, and carried
hundreds of miles before it could be there. You have heard Niagara's
thunder; have stood beneath the falling immensity; seen it ceaselessly
poured from an infinite hand; felt that you would be ground to atoms
if you fell into that resistless flood. Well, all that infinity of
[Page 250] water had to be lifted by main force, had to be taken up
out of the far Pacific, brought over the Rocky Mountains; and the
Mississippi keeps bearing its wide miles of water to the Gulf, and
Niagara keeps thundering age after age, because there is power
somewhere to carry the immeasurable floods all the time the other
way in the upper air.

But this is only the Alpha of power. Professor Clark, of Amherst,
Massachusetts, found that such a soft and pulpy thing as a squash
had so great a power of growth that it lifted three thousand pounds,
and held it day and night for months. It toiled and grew under the
growing weight, compacting its substance like oak to do the work.
All over the earth this tremendous power and push of life goes
on--in the little star-eyed flowers that look up to God only on
the Alpine heights, in every tuft of grass, in every acre of wheat,
in every mile of prairie, and in every lofty tree that wrestles
with the tempests of one hundred winters. But this is only the B
in the alphabet of power.

Rise above the earth, and you find the worlds tossed like playthings,
and hurled seventy times as fast as a rifle-ball, never an inch
out of place or a second out of time. But this is only the C in
the alphabet of power.

Rise to the sun. It is a quenchless reservoir of high-class energy.
Our tornadoes move sixty miles an hour, those of the sun twenty
thousand miles an hour. A forest on fire sends its spires of flame
one hundred feet in air, the sun sends its spires of flame two
hundred thousand miles. All our fires exhaust the fuel and burn
out. If the sun were pure coal, it would burn out in five thousand
years; and yet this sea of unquenchable [Page 251] flame seethes and
burns, and rolls and vivifies a dozen worlds, and flashes life along
the starry spaces for a million years without any apparent
diminution. It sends out its power to every planet, in the vast
circle in which it lies. It fills with light not merely a whole
circle, but a dome; not merely a dome above, but one below, and on
ever