Yet is it a place for unwept tears, for the deep sadness and
hard resignation borne in upon us by the eternal loss of
something dearer once than life. All we who are weary and
heavy laden, in whom now shall we seek the rest which is not
nothingness?
My story is told, but I fain would take my leave with words
less sorrowful. If a man has no better legacy to bequeath
than bid his fellow-beings despair, he had better take it
with him to his grave.
We know all this, we know!
But it is in what we do not know that our hope and our
religion lies. Thrice blessed are we in the certainty that
here our range is infinite. This infinite that makes our
brains reel, that begets the feeling that makes us 'shrink,'
is perhaps the most portentous argument in the logic of the
sceptic. Since the days of Laplace, we have been haunted in
some form or other with the ghost of the MECANIQUE CELESTE.
Take one or two commonplaces from the text-books of
astronomy:
Every half-hour we are about ten thousand miles nearer to the
constellation of Lyra. 'The sun and his system must travel
at his present rate for far more than a million years (divide
this into half-hours) before we have crossed the abyss
between our present position and the frontiers of Lyra'
(Ball's 'Story of the Heavens').
'Sirius is about one million times as far from us as the sun.
If we take the distance of Sirius from the earth and
subdivide it into one million equal parts, each of these
parts would be long enough to span the great distance of
92,700,000 miles from the earth to the sun,' yet Sirius is
one of the NEAREST of the stars to us.
The velocity with which light traverses space is 186,300
miles a second, at which rate it has taken the rays from
Sirius which we may see to-night, nine years to reach us.
The proper motion of Sirius through space is about one
thousand miles a minute. Yet 'careful alignment of the eye
would hardly detect that Sirius was moving, in . . . even
three or four centuries.'
'There may be, and probably are, stars from which Noah might
be seen stepping into the Ark, Eve listening to the
temptation of the serpent, or that older race, eating the
oysters and leaving the shell-heaps behind them, when the
Baltic was an open sea' (Froude's 'Science of History').
Facts and figures such as these simply stupefy us. They
vaguely convey the idea of something immeasurably great, but
nothing further. They have no more effect upon us than words
addressed to some poor 'bewildered creature, stunned and
paralysed by awe; no more than the sentence of death to the
terror-stricken wretch at the bar.
