ere is no wear or tear in the perfect machinery
of the creation, rolling noiseless in its blue bearings of ether.
It seems, comparatively speaking, to have just begun. Its
oscillations are self adjusted, and science prophesies for
humanity an illimitable career on this earthly theatre. The swift
melting of the elements and restoration of chaos is a mere heathen
whim or a poetic figment. It is the bards who sing,

"The earth shall shortly die. Her grave is dug. I see the worlds,
night clad, all gathering In long and dark procession. And the
stars, Which stand as thick as glittering dewdrops on The fields
of heaven, shall pass in blazing mist."

Such pictures are delusion winning the imagination, not truth
commanding the reason. In spite of all the Cassandra screams of
the priesthood, vaticinating universal ruin, the young old earth,
fresh every spring, shall remain under God's preserving
providence, and humanity's inexhaustible generations renewedly
reign over its kingdoms, forever. Plotinus said, "If God repents
having made the world, why does he defer its destruction? If he
does not yet repent, he never will, as being now accustomed to it,
and becoming through time more friendly to it."

3 Lucan says, "Our bones and the stars shall be mingled on one
funeral pyre." Communis mundo superest rogus, ossibus astra
Misturus.

But to receive such a good piece of poetry as veritable prevision
is surely a puerile error which a mature mind in the nineteenth
century should be ashamed to commit.

The most recently broached theory of the end of the world is that
developed from some remarkable speculations as to the composition
and distribution of force. The view is briefly this. All force is
derived from heat. All heat is derived from the sun.4 The
mechanical value of a cubic mile of sunlight at the surface of the
earth is one horse power for a third of a minute; at the sun it is
fifteen thousand horse power for a minute. Now, it is calculated
that enough heat is radiated from the sun to require for its
production the annual consumption of the whole surface of the sun
to the depth of from ten to twenty miles. Of course, ultimately
the fuel will be all expended; then the forces of the system will
expire, and the creation will die.5 This brilliant and sublime
theorem assumes, first, that the heat of the sun arises from
consumption of matter, which may not be true; secondly, that it is
not a self replenishing process, as it cer