This wave is doubtless surpassed only by the great wave set in motion by the convulsion of Krakatoa, mentioned in the chapter on volcanoes. It travelled to a distance of 10,500 miles from its starting point, at a speed of from 400 to 500 miles an hour, according to the direction. Yet it has had several strong rivals. Had the great wave of 1867, at the time of the earthquake at St. Thomas, been raised in the open sea, instead of in the comparatively shut in Caribbean, it might have travelled to an equal distance. The sea wave which followed the earthquake at Simoda, Japan, in 1854, completely wiped out that town, leaving only fragments of a temple-wall, and some wrecked vessels, two miles inland. Most of the people perished. Recoiling from the coast, the wave rolled in upon the shores of California, travelling 5,000 miles in twelve hours.

The terrible earthquake that ravaged Jamaica in 1692, produced a wave that swept thirty-three feet of water over the highest house in Port Royal, destroying 3,000 persons. An English frigate, the Swan, was deposited on the top of a large building, breaking in the roof. The waves of the Lisbon and Calabrian earthquakes have been noticed elsewhere.

This same district in Peru has suffered similarly several times. Callao, with the ground on which it was built, was swept away in 1746. Only fifteen of its people ever reached Lima, six miles inland. When the town was rebuilt, a second disaster of this sort nearly destroyed it. Iquique and Arequipa, in Peru, were again destroyed May 9, 1877; and a wave seventy feet high swept the coast, and recoiling reached Japan next day, travelling two hundred and eighteen yards per second.

The cases given illustrate well the stupendous power and destructiveness of vibrations in the earth’s surface. But few have been given, nor have all the greatest been detailed. Mention only must suffice for the one which shook Naples and vicinity, December 5, 1456, destroying forty thousand people. Another in Persia, June 7, 1755, destroyed Kaschan, with forty thousand people; one at Cairo, Egypt, the preceding year, killed twenty thousand. Another in the Abruzzi, Italy, November 3, 1706, killed fifteen thousand persons; one at Palermo; Sicily, September 13, 1726, killed six thousand; one hundred thousand perished in the Pekin earthquake of November 30, 1731; two thousand were destroyed by an earthquake in the Kutch district, India, in 1819. Constantinople was overturned in the year 1800; six thousand people perished in an earthquake in Murcia, Spain, in 1829; fifteen hundred were killed by Italian earthquakes in 1835-36; Southern Syria suffered greatly in 1836; Hayti was shaken, and four thousand people perished, in 1842; one hundred thousand houses and thirty thousand people destroyed by an earthquake in Japan, 1854; Montenerro, Calabria, and ten thousand people in 1857; five thousand people in Ecuador, 1859; Northwestern Khorassan, Persia, with thirty thousand people, in 1871; Antioch again nearly destroyed in 1872; three thousand people killed in Cashmere, 1885.

Terrible as this list seems, the total but little exceeds the havoc wrought by the single Bengal famine of 1866. There would be little difficulty in proving that drought, with the consequent famine, has proved the most terrible agent of destruction known to man; and yet it is one that facilities for rapid transit should render least destructive.

Scientific men have within forty years made efforts to keep a sort of catalogue of shocks; but the frequency of earthquakes has rendered this a profitless task. Great ones are long remembered; but as for numbering the minor shocks, one might as well count rainfalls; several

occur every day; and it is only when unusually destructive, like extraordinary tempests, that they attract any attention; so that their being recorded depends even more upon location than upon actual force.

All the phenomena of volcanoes and earthquakes point us to one conclusion: that the earth may in time become as dead and deserted as the moon. The telescope shows the latter to be thickly dotted with volcanic craters, whose immensity, in comparison with those of our own globe, is astounding; yet all are extinct. It is not probable that the interior of our earth is molten; and we have seen that fractures and subsidence, caused by gradual cooling, seem to be the main cause of the local phenomena of volcanoes and earthquakes. As the ages roll on, these weak places may become still higher; and the belt of warm climate will grow narrower and narrower. Cooling at the present rate, 2,500,000,000 years will be necessary to render it as lifeless as the moon.

“As the cooling progresses, a sheet of snow and ice, from north and south, will descend from the mountains upon the table-lands and valleys, driving before it life and civilization, and covering forever the cities and nations that it meets on its passage. All life and human activity will press insensibly toward the inter-tropical zone. The great cities of the world will fall asleep in succession under their eternal shroud. During very many ages, equatorial humanity will undertake arctic expeditions to find again under the ice the place of Paris, Lyons, Bordeaux, and Marseilles. The sea-coasts will have changed, and the geographical map of the earth will have been transformed. No one will live and breathe, except in the equatorial zone, up to the day when the last family, nearly dead with cold and hunger, will sit on the shore of the last sea, in the rays of the sun, which will thereafter shine here on a dead, cold earth, revolving, like a satellite moon, about a sun unseen by mortal eyes, and distributing to an extinguished planet a useless heat.” So will end the history of our planet and its great disasters.

CHAPTER XXVII.

PREDICTION AND PREVENTION.

EVER since man has dwelt upon the earth, there has been a constant effort, not merely to foretell the future, but to control it. So strong is man’s faith in his own capacity, that wizards, jugglers, fakirs and tricksters, and necromancers have always found their vocation a lucrative one. It is easy to make one’s living by imposing upon the credulity of the public. Not merely the American people, but every other people, like to be humbugged. So strong is the tendency to gullibility, that the most extraordinary pretensions are the most readily credited. The capability of the public to judge in such cases is well illustrated by the Grecian story of the famous mimic, whose imitation of the grunt of a pig was so perfect, that thousands came to witness his performance. A countryman remarked that he could do still better, and, concealing a pig under his coat, he stole upon the stage. Pinching the animal’s ear, the pig squealed violently, but the audience hissed the squeak as a miserable fiasco. Whereat the countryman produced the pig, and left the audience pondering the situation.

The same tendency causes men to desire to attribute unusual appearances to causes beyond the domain of natural law. The savage finds thunder and lightning in the discharge of a gun; mysterious magic in a telescope; downright sorcery in quinine; witchcraft and incantation in a written prescription. If one, a little shrewder than his fellows, after long study of an ant’s nest, conceive the idea that they have a regularly constituted community, with a queen at the head, he needs only to suggest such a thing to his neighbors, to be set down as having communications with the Ant Queen; and he may readily aspire to the chieftainship, thence to be known as the Ant Chief. Imagination is so much easier than observation. Doubtless old Numa’s thoughtful air in his daily retreat, gave rise to the tale that he was in consultation with the nymph of a fountain. Any one who had devoted an hour each day to gazing pensively into a stream, might have achieved a like reputation, as the Hindoo fakir is held in high repute for sanctity, because he preserves strict silence and gazes for years at the end of his nose.

So when men achieve new results by natural means, it is preferred to assume otherwise. Good Roger Bacon invented gunpowder by witchcraft. The early chemists were in league with the Evil One. Faust and Gutenberg sold their souls to the devil, in order to get Bibles printed. The Magdeburg physicist, who made a water barometer in which a wooden figure rose or fell as the atmosphere varied, was the devil’s own child. Cows sickened and died at the will of shrivelled dames who rode through the air on broomsticks.

Foreknowledge is always confounded with foreordination. The weather prophet is transformed into a weathermaker. The myth of Aeolus is thus explained. Once a king of the Lipari Isles, by careful observation of the vapor cloud over Stromboli he was enabled to announce changes of weather a day or two in advance, as every observant man in that region can do to-day. The simple subjects attributed his knowledge to supernatural powers, and after his death perpetuated the story of Aeolus, the king of the winds, who dwelt in a cave in one of the islands.

In the time of Elijah, the prophets of Baal were confident of procuring rain by howling, cutting and slashing; while Ahab believed Elijah was responsible for the drought. The negro and the red man to-day show the same characteristics in this respect. The negro rain-maker makes fetich; the red chief, “big medicine,” to bring rains. The reputed success of each is proportioned to his shrewdness in recognizing tokens of change in the weather.

The great white man is often little better. While no longer trusting in the power of any one to control the weather, he has set up a god of false science, whom all must bow down to and worship. True knowledge is often flouted and scouted; but every one who would attract attention must assume at least the appearance of learning. College degrees are bought and sold at reasonable prices. No questions asked. The dancing-master is professor. The pugilist has become professor. The man who fiddles for beer in the corner saloon is professor. Weep, O Minerva!

So any one who wishes especial importance to be attached to his utterances, needs but assume a title, or a few mystic letters. Every great catastrophe produces a plentiful brood of them. As soon as the Charleston earthquake alarmed the country, it was announced that a grave “Prof.” had predicted it. He was the hero of the hour. Interviewers flocked from many quarters. For weeks the words of “Prof.” ——, were as ointment poured out. The papers gave him great space—published sketches of his career. So much adulation was too much for human nature; besides, he owed a duty to the public. A man so gifted should continue to give warning of impending dangers. He did so. They didn’t materialize. The “Prof.” has had little attention for three years.

The Louisville tornado afforded other cases. A woman in the west predicted a combined deluge and earthquake, with other minor horrors on the side, as prepared for the Pacific coast. Some of the gullible people sold out at great sacrifice, that they might lose as little as possible by the greatest cyclone and earthquake of the century. Others drew up a formal petition to the Governor, calling upon him to proclaim a day of supplication and fasting for the doomed cities of Oakland, San Francisco and Alameda. The end of the world drew nigh, and these three cities, as eminently wicked, would be first punished; after which Chicago and Milwaukee would suffer.

Bands of believers met and wrestled mightily in prayer that the unparalleled horrors might be averted. They were eminently successful.

Another came forward and announced that the entire Mississippi valley was to be visited with a cataclysm, such as no man had ever conceived. The floods were to break all the levees, wash away everything that was within a hundred miles of the stream, tear up the delta built by the deposits of ages, and leave the site of New Orleans at the bottom of the sea. At this writing the Crescent City is in hourly expectation of its doom.

Yet another seer, warned of the Lord in a vision, perhaps, has just declared the fate of the Atlantic coast. Before the end of the century there will be an earthquake such as no man ever before has known. The fountains of the great deep are to be broken up. All the cities of the New England coast will be desolated by immense sea waves. Manhattan Island, with the city of New York, and Long Island, are to be sunk to the bottom of the sea. Our hearts fail us for fear for the things that are coming upon the earth. Let us hope that peradventure there be yet five righteous men in Sodom.

Some years ago great sensation was occasioned by the discovery of Mother Shipton’s prophecy among some old English manuscripts. It began:

After a few statements of this sort, it closed by saying:

Great was the fright of not a few timid believers. Many arranged their affairs for the end of the world. Some, as the Millerites have several times done, prepared their ascension robes. Finally, the whole thing proved to be a hoax. A wag had endeavored to amuse himself at the expense of the public.

Such are fair specimens of predictions that continually appear in the newspapers. Certain men will always endeavor to astonish the ignorant by their words and works. Seldom do sober-minded people pay the least attention to them. As for minor changes in weather, they are so constant, and so limited in area, that, as stated elsewhere, any one is safe for announcing the character of the weather for any day in the year. From a score of places, he could obtain testimonials of the correctness of his prognostications; while nine score more, if they spoke, might declare him altogether mistaken.

But many will ask in all seriousness, if there is no means of prediction upon which all may depend. Is any more reliance to be placed upon the prognostications of the Signal Service than upon those of the self-constituted prophets?

A brief statement of the principles relied upon will be satisfactory on this point.

Our weather bureau was established in 1870. Such organizations are maintained, at the public expense, in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Russia, India, Algeria, and Japan. Several smaller countries share in the expense and benefits. Men long trained in the work grow more reliable. Each must first master the topography and the prevailing movements of the atmosphere of any region, ere he can presume to know anything of the probable changes.

How extremely important a knowledge of the country is, will be understood when it is remembered that mountain ranges may turn aside great storms, and hills of any considerable size may modify small ones. And in general, storm paths are so narrow, in comparison with the whole country, that the slightest variation at the start may be very important at the end of six hundred or seven hundred miles—or a day’s travel. So, announcing twenty-four hours beforehand the exact locality a storm may reach is really a very delicate piece of work. If a tyro should announce rain for North Georgia, he might be astonished to find a difference of twenty-one per cent. between Atlanta and Augusta. He would find in Tennessee sixteen per cent. difference between Knoxville and Nashville; or twelve and a half per cent. in Iowa between Dubuque and Davenport.

The Signal Service does not endeavor to forecast entirely new conditions so much as to give warning of storms already on the way. It can not safely say where a storm will arise; but it can declare with tolerable certainty the path a storm will pursue after having once started.

Yet, there are certain signs of rain that can be of use to the public. Americans, as a rule, pay less attention to the actions of the animal kingdom at change of weather than other nations; and the lower animals detect changes of weather more quickly than man. Slugs and snails often leave their crannies, and endeavor to find some drier retreat at the approach of rain. Swallows fly lower; chiefly because the insects they pursue abandon the upper air. Crickets and grasshoppers become less noisy, and seek snug retreats. Fish leap more frequently from the water. The oft-praised tree-frog seems not to have deserved the confidence placed in him as a barometer.

Quatremere Disjonval, when made a prisoner of war by the Dutch, made a careful study of the habits of the house spider, while in confinement. His observations played an important part in the war. “General Pichegru, being prevented by the mild weather from carrying out his intention of invading that country, was about to retire with his army from the Dutch frontier, when Disjonval found means to inform him that, from the signs he had observed in his spiders, a severe frost was sure to take place in the next ten days. Pichegru trusted to the prognostic: the frost came in time. Holland was conquered, and Disjonval released from his prison.”

Voigt asserts that the spider is so reliable a barometer because of its anatomy: the long, slender, unmailed legs being peculiarly sensitive to atmospheric changes. That is, when Madam Spider finds herself with a touch of rheumatism, she wraps herself in a thicker blanket and takes to her den. In fine weather the garden spiders are much more plentiful; and the tiny gossamer spiders also are numerous, and fly at greater heights.

These serve to illustrate the class of phenomena most relied upon by those in every land who must spend much time in the open air. The scientist may understand the laws of winds and rains: but the farmer, the shepherd, the fisherman, and sailor, to whom every phase of weather means much, can, relying upon the actions of the lower animals, detect approaching changes as readily, in many cases, as the Signal Service; and far more readily or correctly than the quasi learned theorist whose stock in trade is a hobby and an unlimited quantity of assumption.

It is one thing to understand law; it is quite another to be able to make practical application of it. Franklin identified lightning with electricity; a century passed before practical use of the electric light resulted. We know now the general laws of air currents, but little application of them has been made.

As to the possibility of controlling the winds, no one has thus far had the temerity to propose it. But that rainfall can be partially controlled is well known. The heaviest rains occur in forest areas; and in turn, the matted roots of the forest and jungle retard the descent of the rain into the water courses, and hinder the washing away of the soil. Floods have become more sudden and destructive in the lumber regions since the timber has been cut away, while the actual rainfall is not so great. So a number of our Western States require a “homesteader” to plant a tree claim.

A bold genius has recently asserted that we may produce rain at will, by sending up balloons loaded with dynamite or other powerful explosives, and then firing them. It has been observed that almost every great modern battle has been followed by a heavy rainfall; and the idea is, that the continued explosions have had much to do with them. Frequenters of Fourth of July picnics will readily vouch for the correctness of the theory.

Doubtless a more effective plan would be simply to apply the well known first principle of air-currents and storms—heated air; but this would be immensely expensive. Every year sees exemplifications of it, however, in the heavy rains that follow the great forest fires or prairie fires of our own land. Natives of tropical regions frequently burn the jungle at the close of the dry season; and the unusual heating of large areas in this way doubtless has much to do with hastening the advent of rain.

The expedient of firing the sawgrass ponds is frequently resorted to in Florida, and has been brought to the notice of the public in official meteorological reports. It is directly in accordance with the principle of restoration of the balance of forces, whereby a long heated term is followed by unusually heavy rains.

But, in contending with subterranean forces, man is hitherto balked. Numbers of instruments exist for measuring the force and direction of earthquake shocks, but these can be made of little practical use; for we have seen that the vibrations travel from forty to one hundred and fifty miles a minute, according to the nature of the soil. Hence, could we know a certain shock would travel around the world, it would not be possible, after it was first felt, to send warning ahead in time to be of any especial value. But we have seen that unusual disturbances of this sort are confined to certain regions, and are of constant recurrence; while in other lands, they are almost unknown. So any one understands pretty well what risks he runs in any particular district.

The Chinese were the first to invent a seismometer, or instrument for ascertaining the force and direction of any shock. Their apparatus consists of an upright pillar bearing a number of dragons’ heads—each one holding a ball in its mouth. So any slight tilting or vibration of the pillar would cause a ball to drop on the side toward which the shock travelled. The distance to which the ball was thrown served as a rude measure of the force.

Equally simple is Mallet’s contrivance—a number of cylinders of equal heights and different bases, placed upon a sanded surface. The more violent the shock, the larger the cylinder thrown down.

But observations of these vibrations, to be of use, must take note of the myriad tremors that will escape ordinary perceptions, or the powers of such rude instruments as the above. There are several sorts now used. Prof. Palmieri, of the Vesuvius Observatory, uses a delicate instrument, which records the slightest tremor on a dial-plate. The Italians have also applied the microphone to this work. The delicacy of this instrument may be imagined, when it is known that by its means a fly can be heard walking on the floor. So the slightest subterranean noise may be heard.

These instruments have taught us that the minor tremors increase in number and intensity as any unusual disturbance of Vesuvius approaches; just as the Signal Service can detect the gathering of a storm ere it actually bursts. Remembering also Bravard’s warning of Mendoza, in the last chapter, it is clear that in certain regions such observations can be made of practical value to the people at large.

One of the most ingenious apparatus for observing the vibrations of the soil is that constructed by M. d’Abbadie, at his observatory near the Pyrenees. A conical cavity forty-six feet deep is excavated in the solid rock. At the bottom is a basin of mercury. A long-focus lens over this reflects upon the surface of the ground the image of the metal below. The slightest tremor is carefully examined by a microscope. In short, this ingenious Frenchman has applied the reflecting telescope to the observation of the interior of the earth.

After all, the chief precautions must be of a different type. As already noticed, long observation has taught the Japanese and others that their safety depends mainly upon the construction of houses of the lightest type; when the sea wave is more to be dreaded than the shock. This is the general principle of building now adopted in countries where earthquakes are frequent; and doubtless the earthquake is partially responsible for the fact that many intelligent savage races have made no progress in architecture.

It should be noted, however, that the ancients believed that deep wells were a safeguard against earthquakes; such is the expression of several ancient writers. And in this connection we may mention the remarkable case of Quito, in Ecuador. Here we have a city of magnificent cathedrals, public edifices, and other lofty buildings, which have not in three centuries been overthrown by an earthquake. Yet it lies on the plateau on which stood Riobamba, where such terrible destruction was wrought in 1794, and at the base of the great volcano of Pichincha. It has been shaken time and again more severely than towns in the vicinity that have been totally destroyed. Yet it remains intact, and the people have an indifference to earthquakes that is astonishing. They attribute their safety to the fact of having deep cellars under every house. When we remember that tropical races are not, as a rule, a cellar building people, it may be that the idea is worthy of serious consideration. But many idle races of the tropics might, in lower grounds, merely exchange the results of an occasional earthquake for malaria-breeding pools.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

THE REIGN OF LAW.

Man was not long in gaining a knowledge of his environment, enough at least, if he would not be too venturesome, to conserve in some degree his happiness and life. He learned that fire will burn, that water will drown, that storms will blow, that floods will overwhelm, that winter will come, and that his life is dependent on continual quest and avoidance. But Nature held innumerable secrets which he did not know; many, which, even to-day, he has not learned. In proportion as he should become acquainted with these, he would be master of a situation, which, at the first, so nearly mastered him. He might acquire a magnificent fortune, if he would only work for it; accordingly, we are told that his Maker admonished him to “subdue and have dominion.”

Whether man has been six thousand years, or sixty thousand, in learning the little that he now knows, no one can tell; but during these years of his primary tuition he could not through knowledge have the mastery of Nature, for knowledge was too meager. It was well, therefore, that he should, in the meanwhile, have a partial mastery through faith. Ignorant of natural forces, or without means of avoidance, is it any wonder that he should fly for refuge to the Supernatural? Accordingly, God was his “refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Believing himself watched and defended by infinite power and love, he could “run through a troop or leap over a wall;” he could fancy himself “immortal till his work was done,” safe on the battle-field as in his chamber; he was not afraid of the “pestilence that walketh in darkness, nor of the destruction that wasteth at noonday;” of earthquake and storm and fire he was not afraid, for these were the ministers of Heaven’s will—if not to be avoided, then to be accepted with submission and trust.

Such faith in the presence and interposition of the Supernatural was instructive to the young world, and as necessary as its mother’s milk is to a babe. It gave comfort and repose and strength, for its subject felt that “underneath and round about him were the everlasting arms.” It made heroes of cowardly men on battle-fields; heroines of weak women in humble homes. It produced the sublimest characters of history; it vanquished death. Sustained by it, it is literally true that men “subdued kingdoms, wrought righteousness, stopped the mouths of lions, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword; out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight the armies of the aliens.”

The sudden loss of this faith from earth would be a calamity. It would be as though the sun and moon had been darkened, and the stars had gone out in the sky. Till men know more of Nature, they must continue to lean on the Supernatural. They may never do this less than they do it now; but they will do it more intelligently.

As the child, with growing strength, is weaned from the breast, so increasing knowledge tends to the destruction of faith. It may be stated as a law that, other things being equal, faith in the manifestation of the Supernatural—in the miraculous—is most facile to him who knows the least. Accordingly, the men of highest attainments have commonly the least of this kind of faith. They still believe in something back of Nature; some cause of Nature—in the Supernatural—but they expect nothing from it outside the lines of natural law. They know nothing of miracle or special providence. They see everywhere cause and effect; the one not present without the other; the perpetual grinding of machinery and the wretch mangled who is caught between the wheels; the wisest and best of men, pillars of state or prophets of the Lord, crushed as surely as the vilest and the meanest. All the prayers of God’s people will not make rivers flow back to their fountains, nor turn the Sahara into a sea; nor thaw the ice at the poles, nor relieve the famine, nor stop the pestilence, nor level a single mole-hill, nor make one hair white or black. The whole universe is held in the chain of cause and effect, with link joined to link forever and ever. The Supernatural may be the electric energy that thrills along the endless chain, but it never quits the conductor to find out new paths. What it does to-day, it did a thousand years ago, and will do a thousand years hence. So speaks and so believes the student of Nature. We may be extremely reluctant to admit his teaching, and yet the facts seem to be altogether with him. The evidence is overwhelming that men everywhere, good and bad alike, are dealing directly, not with the Supernatural, but, with Nature—with law; nothing but natural law. If any hesitate to accept this saying, we do not press them, for the time has not yet come when they could accept it with safety. The babe will cling to the mother’s breast as long as he needs it, and sometimes longer; but by and by he will abandon it of himself.

A world of iron law is not our ideal world, though the evidence grows that it is the real one. We like law well enough when it defends us; we are not pleased with it when it chastises us. At such a moment we would flee to some friendlier power. We would go to God and tell Him that Nature is not treating us well, and that we desire His interposition. It is because we are afraid of Nature that we take so much interest in the Supernatural. But what reason have we to think that the Supernatural is better than Nature?

The Supernatural has had more prophets than Nature, and will doubtless continue to have them. Far be it from us to forbid them. Let them prophecy in the name of the Lord. Let them “strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees;” inspire courage in adversity, calmness in the face of death.

But we should like to remind them that if they have done much good, they have also done some evil.

They have greatly obstructed a lesson, the most important for men to know; a lesson which they must learn at last, whether they like to learn it or not; a lesson which they need to learn as soon as they can, because certain knowledge is better to shape the life than is uncertain faith; a lesson that will bring them face to face with the real conditions of their present and eternal well-being,—we mean this lesson, that the Supernatural, the Primal Fountain of Force, goes forth only in streams of natural law. So far as can be shown, it manifests itself in no other way. Contrary to this, the prophets of the Supernatural have often encouraged man to believe that he shall not reap as he has sown; that he may sow to the flesh, and yet reap to the spirit; that outside and alongside the machinery of law is another and more masterful machinery of Providence and Grace; that the latter is ordained a sure corrective and deliverer from the evils of the former; that so almighty is this invisible, ever-active and presiding energy, that it can, by a momentary display, transform the most inveterate sinner into a saint, and crown him with everlasting happiness, although, meanwhile, it supinely leaves the innocent child the victim of Adam’s fall, to sink into the flames of hell. Our sense of justice is shocked, virtue is dismayed, vice is emboldened, and the so-called scheme of grace, less pitiful and just than that of nature, is seen to differ from it chiefly in this, that it offers greater encouragement to sin.

Nature throughout all her regions proclaims the dominion of law. She has incessantly denounced woe to its violator. A million times has she shown us the delinquent writhing under the scourge. Never once has the transgressor escaped. His transgression,

and soon or late he is overtaken. Privation or pain is the inexorable penalty. Nature with trumpet voices shouts incessantly, “Whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap.”

The dominion of law is shown in the punishment of intentional disobedience—what men call sin. Its natural consequences are remorse, degradation, and spiritual death. A being of loftiest make is reduced to the likeness of a vile and venomous thing, crawling on its belly through the dust. Higher enjoyments are exchanged for such as are brutish and vile,—so to speak, the life of a humming-bird, flitting through all sunny climes and scenes and feeding on nectar, is exchanged for the life of a swine, feeding on offal, and wallowing in the mire. And never once is a wound made by the lash of law healed without a scar; in other words, transgression leaves its permanent impress on the soul, and the transgressor, despite the incantations of priest or prophet, finds himself poorer forever. He has forfeited the peace of them that do well. He has peopled the past with bitter memories; the future with gloomy forebodings. Reason untrammeled, loyal to the truth and pursuing it with success, has been substituted with reason fettered with chains of prejudice and vile affection, loving and making a lie.

Habit, with every successive stroke of action, has riveted these chains more firmly, till the victim is fast bound hand and foot, and delivered over to despair. The order of downward progress is, transgression, spiritual pain, stupor, insensibility, permanent degradation, which is spiritual death. In all this, there is no immediate or special judgment of God; no working of the Supernatural apart from natural law. If there were no God at all, while the constitution of man and the universe should remain as they are, the consequences to the transgressor would, in no wise, be altered. The sinner has nothing to fear but natural law, and sooner or later he finds this terrible enough.

But the punishment of sin is not the most impressive proof of the dominion of law. We feel that the willful transgressor is entitled to the punishment of his deed; hence, even when his punishment is severest, he fails to command our fullest sympathy. That the organization of Nature should be such as systematically to afflict the sinner, is not more than our sense of justice would prompt us to expect.

But the punishment of ignorance offers a more impressive spectacle—a more striking exhibition of the dominion of law. It seems that ignorance, especially when absolutely unavoidable, might be pleaded in bar of punishment; but nature obviously does not accept the plea. Nor does it avail us in this emergency to appeal from Nature to the Supernatural. The Supernatural refuses to entertain the appeal—positively declines to interfere—and natural law is left to take its course. The ignorant must suffer as surely as the guilty, and often his suffering is not less severe. For the slightest mistakes men forfeit happiness or life,—mistakes not of themselves alone, but mistakes of others. The sin or the error belongs to one man; the weight of the suffering often falls to another. Even our benevolence seems to be punished; for quite frequently the effort to help others brings disaster to ourselves—to our fortunes, to our families, our lives. Seeking to rescue another from fire or water, from the assassin or the robber; from the domestic tyrant or the foreign invader, we lose life, and, for lack of our help, our children are uneducated, exposed to moral evil, neglected, turned out of doors. The very tramp whom, for pity, we took in from the street, robs us, or murders us. Meanwhile the Supernatural beholds and makes no sign—gives no indication that it is at all concerned.

The suffering which comes through unavoidable ignorance, or which is visited upon the innocent through the deeds of the guilty, is, in its sum total, appalling and unspeakable. It is a dark and fathomless ocean, whose waves have been incessantly beating on the shores of this dreary world since time began. Every drop of this mighty ocean has been wrung out through the operation of natural law. An omniscient eye, every hour of the day and night, through countless ages, has gazed into these waters of anguish, and has declined to lessen their quantity by a single atom. No order from the Supernatural has gone forth to countermand any decree of Nature. Man has stood alone, grappling with his antagonist; and though he has cried incessantly, heaven has left him to his fate. Could there be a more awful demonstration of the supremacy of natural law?

Nature slays in babyhood one-third of all the children that are born into the world, just because they have not strength to resist her; meanwhile she carefully preserves such tyrants as Tiberius to finish their three score years and ten, though every added year means the murder of a thousand of the best men and women to be found in a wide empire. Why does not the Supernatural rise up from his place and smite the tyrant to the earth? Is it not plain that we are dealing with natural forces alone?

For six thousand years—God knows how long—Africa has been a hell, than which perhaps no man need ever fear a worse. If the pulpit may convince a sinner that as a result of his ways he shall be turned black, body and soul, and sent to Africa, there perpetually to renew his life as often as it is extinguished by the superstition and fiendishness of his fellows, and the said sinner do not then begin to live more wisely, it will be useless to talk to him of fire and brimstone. Upon this horrible theater of action perhaps 600,000,000 of human beings have been projected in every century, coming without their will to a heritage of nakedness and superstition and barbarity absolutely prohibitive of happiness here or hope for the hereafter; and yet there has been no interposition of the Supernatural in their behalf. The laws of birth and death preside, just as if there were no power above us that cares for either.

It is one of the ordinances of nature that life without nourishment shall not be prolonged. There is reason to believe that God would see the last man starved from off this planet, and the planet itself plunged onward into the void, tenantless forever, before he would command that stones should be made bread. Not twenty years ago, 18,000,000 in the northern provinces of China starved to death in a single year. What horrible anxiety of hollow-eyed mothers for gasping babes; what hideous deaths day by day; what acres of unburied corpses; what throngs about religious altars, wringing their hands, and screaming to the heavens, till it would seem that the agony of their prayers would have shaken the very stars from the sky; and yet there was none that heard, nor any that regarded. Not a single stone was turned into bread; not a single life was sustained without food; and if any survived, it was the heartless brother who wrested the last morsel from his weak and dying sister. A ghastly instance of the dominion of law, attested by 18,000,000 of dead witnesses. Can we look upon such a scene and ever again expect a petty interposition in behalf of an individual when it has been denied to a nation, and when the Continent of Africa has waited for it through countless ages?

Instances might be multiplied to infinity. Every horror recorded in this book is a proclamation of the supremacy of law—a warning to men that if they would shun the effect they must avoid the cause; that they must foresee the laws and attributes of nature, and provide; or they must perish. Strange that after ages of such awful teaching man is yet a fool—too lazy, too stupid to open his eyes; vigorously fighting against knowledge when every interest of his soul and body are at stake; saying supinely, “it makes no difference whether you know much or little, or what you believe, provided only you are sincere;” and in the same breath dishonestly hearkening to his prejudices or his passions; becoming a compound of ignorance, superstition and self-will, which first defies and rouses the powers of Nature, and then flies howling to the Supernatural for deliverance. When we think how little man has learned, notwithstanding the severity of his schooling, we are less disposed to accuse the harshness of Nature’s administration.

Our reflections on the course of Nature have not proved that there is no God, but rather that there is. The order, regularity and certainty of natural forces indicates a changeless, exhaustless fountain from whence those forces flow. Amid the ceaseless mutations of the universe, this primal energy seems to be the one thing in which there is “no variableness, neither shadow of turning.” It flows on resistless along the same channels from age to age. It overwhelms whatever lies in its path. It would sweep away all the millions of earth like a grain of sand. It would sweep the very stars from the sky. Nothing can arrest it; nothing change its course. It accommodates itself to nobody; all must be accommodated to it, or suffer disaster. It is inexorable, like “that rock, upon which if a man fall, he shall be broken, but if it fall upon him, it will grind him to powder.” It is not man who is running this puny world; it is a changeless, eternal Power. No fear that any human combinations in capitols or temples will swerve this infinite energy, or control it in the least. That which is according to its nature it will do, and it will do nothing else. It is absolute monarch, and woe to him who resists its sway. We are amazed, awed and subdued in the contemplation. We begin to feel that there is but one thing for us to do, and that is, to learn its ways and by increasing knowledge and obedience, as rapidly as possible to put ourselves in accord with its goings-forth.

Should we enter some vast factory where there are acres of floor-space, and wheels and cogs and pulleys and hands and machines of patterns innumerable, all propelled by a giant engine hidden away in the cellar; should we see all this wilderness of wheels moving in concert, and every machine turning out the work for which it was intended, we should neither doubt the existence of the power, nor the benevolence of the whole design: nor if presently we saw a workman, reaching after some fancied good, drawn between wheels and mangled, or a hundred ignorant or careless persons caught up and whirled round and round and dashed to death; would we find any occasion to reverse our judgment—to doubt either the existence of a controlling force, or its essential goodness? Rather we should be impressed with its terrible supremacy, and with the importance of seeking out the lines of its manifestation and learning to avoid a conflict.

Law is not an entity, but only the mode of an entity; not a thing existing, but the attribute of a thing; not in itself a power, but the manner of the action of a power. When a power through a given cause produces a given effect, and the same effect from the same cause, this regularity of manifestation fulfills our idea of law.

The great original energy must act with this perfect regularity—that is, it must govern by law, and that equally, whether this original energy be a thing only, or a person. In either case, we must accept it as uncreated, necessary, having a definite constitution or nature. In this power or person, natural laws are rooted, and from it they proceed, as rays of light from the sun. To arrest the rays, you must quench the luminary; to arrest the current forces of nature, you must stay their author. The goings-forth of power from this exhaustless fountain are necessary, ceaseless, changeless, resistless. If this fountain is an impersonal force, we can no more expect it, on any account, to relax its energy, than we can expect the engine in the cellar to stop because some wretch up stairs has been caught between the wheels.

If it is personal, having the attributes of wisdom and goodness—which is the popular idea of God—still, from the very attributes with which it is invested, we must expect it to have all the uniformity, precision, and inexorableness of a machine. Its mode of action must be the same in all cases that are alike, though the series be infinite, else there will be more or less than perfect wisdom or perfect goodness in some of the series. More would be impossible: less would impeach the power; hence, the action must be uniform and resistless. It must show the characteristics of law—nothing else but law. God can not consent to do something that is not perfectly wise and perfectly good because He has been importuned so to do by fools, or because a creature is going to be crushed. Therefore, neither with Him—an infinitely wise and good being—nor with Nature’s laws, which are but the effluence of His nature, can there be any “variableness or shadow of turning.”

The general acceptance of this truth will mark a step forward in the progress of humanity. Such knowledge will largely displace the faith of the past and the present, but there will be a net gain. We have been looking for God outside of Nature; but while some profess to have seen him, the majority have been weak in faith, or wholly unbelieving. When we learn to see God in nature, we shall see him every day. We shall then truly realize that “in him we live and move and have our being.” We shall have substituted certainty in the governing power for something very like caprice. We shall not expect the Supernatural to forbid the Natural, any more than we shall expect the sun to quarrel with his beams. Knowing definitely what not to expect of God, we shall understand precisely what to expect from ourselves. We shall comprehend more fully the Maker’s meaning when He said, “Subdue and have dominion.”

Judaism alone, of all religions, took no cognizance of a future state. If man thoroughly adjusted himself to this world’s laws, he needed not fear for the hereafter. Therein is the strongest proof of its divine origin. And along this line a thousand victories have been won—but much yet remains. The results of human folly are lessening daily as man progresses. The means of rational enjoyment have been already vastly increased, and there will be further enlargement. But men, not angels, must do the work. Moses and his people stood, the sea before, and Pharaoh and his hosts behind them. In this extremity, he lifted his hands and cried to heaven. The answer that came was hardly such as he expected, but it may be very suggestive to us: “Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, THAT THEY GO FORWARD.”