told by some chemists, that the progressive interior
cooling and contraction of our orb will cause ever greater
interstices or vacant spaces among the solid substances below the
outer crust; and that into these pores, first all liquids, then
all gases and the whole atmosphere, will be absorbed: so that the
world will be left desolate, utterly uninhabitable by life.

Again: it is said that all force or energy tends at every
transformation to pass (at least partially) into heat; and
therefore that, finally, all force will be frittered down into the
one form of heat, all matter vanishing from its separate shapes
into the state of a homogeneous, nebulous fire. The portentous
sight, repeatedly descried by astronomers, of a nameless world,
away in remotest space, which has suddenly kindled, blazed,
smouldered, darkened, and vanished forever from its place, is
perhaps a solemn symbol of the fate of our own planet; hinting at
a time when the earth, too, shall make itself a funeral pyre,

And, awed in distant orbs, some race unknown Shall miss one star
whose smile had lit their own.

This same final crisis is also prophesied on the basis of a slight
retardation to which the planets are subjected in their passage
through the ethereal medium. No matter how slight the resistance
thus interposed, its consequence, it is thought, must accumulate
and ultimately compel all material bodies to approach each other;
and, as their successive collisions convert them into heat and
vapor, nothing will be left at last but one uniform nebula. The
process of evolution will then begin anew, and so the stupendous
history of the universe repeat itself eternally.

This is the sublimest of all the generalizations of science. It
may be true, and it may not be true. At any rate, it differs
immensely in the moral impression it makes from that made by the
current theological doctrine of the same catastrophe. We can
contemplate the scientific prophecy of the end of the world with a
peace of mind which the traditional prophecy does not permit.

In the first place, the ecclesiastical doctrine makes the
destruction of the world a result of wrath and vengeance. The
angry God looms above us with flaming features and avenging
weapons to tread down his enemies. We shrink in fright from the
wrath and power of the personal Judge, the inexorable Foe of the
wicked. But the scientific doctrine makes the end a result of
passionless laws, a steady evolution of eff