itself out of being. Eh? "Don't see it a bit! Its substance may have remained the same, and its form only may have changed." Its substance the same! Was ever guess so hazardous! Why, sir, it is precisely its substance as earth that has been changing, hence the change of form! Surely you can see that if the substance of any thing remained unchanged so would the form: would the form of my pen alter if its substance were not interfered with by rust or some other agent? The history of the earth is in fact the history of the changes in its substance-witness the geological strata. Now, how Idid the substance of the earth come to assume the form of these strata? Not by growing bigger from a point, but by continually growing less, condensing itself into them; which condensation, under the same abiding law, is still irresistibly active, and, in the nature of things, must so continue. How, say you? Why, by giving of its heat, and thus parting with its active powers and particles, just as your body does; becoming thereby dried up, ossified, mummified, as you are becoming more and more with every physical change you go through. "Well, really, I never thought of that before!" But I want you to think of it now, and to adjust yourself to the idea. Depend upon it, you won't be able much longer to escape thinking of it; and if you are not prepared for it when it comes, you may be thrown into intellectual confusion. Better, then, hear it from a friend than an enemy.

"True-yes; but suppose I were to argue the other idea that the earth has actually grown bigger; then it wouldn't die out!" No, if your idea can make and unmake facts; and certainly there is no law against suppositions except the limit of your invention. But if the earth may grow bigger to eternity, so, by the same rule, may every other world, whether sun or planet: do you not see that on this notion the reduction of the universe to one mass is only a question of time? If a dozen apples or a dozen worlds are continuously growing within a given space, the filling of the space is only a question of time. An indefinite time, say you? No more indefinite than certain, seeing there's eternity to do it in.

But, in truth, there is something solemnly absurd, on any terms, in the idea of a finite material thing enduring for ever!-not to name again such a sky-rocket conception as you have thrown off. So long as men take the earth for a completed, lifeless thing, in which neither addition nor subtraction is possible, they may shape any unreal destiny for it they please; but when the facts of life and growth, of

energy and work done in it, and through and through it, are fairly realized, their theory of eternal endurance is blown to the winds. Perpetual motion, perpetual work, are ideas simply unthinkable of any subject on the material plane.

66

'Well, I confess that looks likely, but I have another idea which may be neither an invention nor a skyrocket. I must grant, as regards matter alone, that it must work itself out, but why may not lifeforce be continually supplied to it from the spirit-world? Would not the present matter of the sun or the earth in this way serve as the perpetual vehicle of the spiritual force? Can the material be destroyed while that force is supplied to it?" You may turn catechist with pleasure, but do not use double-edged knives, my son, and cut your own fingers in consequence. Would not the same argument prove the possible immortality of the material body on this earth? But indeed you mistake. Matter alone! Pray, where did you ever find matter alone? All matter is supplied now with that spiritual life-force, and yet its forms are incessantly perishing. It is true that the spiritual and material are as cause and effect, but it is also true that each has a plane of its own on which to exist and do work; and it is the fact of this independent plane which makes intelligible to us why the connection which subsists between them, though essentially causal, can only be sustained while the structure of the material holds out. You say that the sun cannot consume while supplied with spiritual fuel; truly it cannot; but what if it becomes incapable of receiving that fuel? Rather say, then, that the sun cannot burn out so long as it is organized to receive the inflowing spiritual force: life is essential, but so is perfect organization; and though the organization come originally from, and be built and sustained out of, the life, that by no means exempts the organization from injury, or from the decadence of wear and tear. Your argument really means that, since the soul is the cause of the body, it ought to be impossible for you ever to grow old, or, let us say, to drown yourself.

"But is there no difference between the relation of the earth itself to its spiritual cause and that of anything on the earth-man's body, for instance to its immediate cause?" Grant the difference, but that does not touch the fact of the earth's constant change on its own plane, and therefore its essential perishableness.

"Why, then, if every sun and planet must perish, the universe must come to nothing after all!" Not so; that can only be the idea of those who have no conception of a spiritual, causal universe con

stantly at work. Does vegetation cease because it is constantly perishing? Creation, our principle alone being witness, is as constant as regards suns and planets as in the production of the changeful forms on each earth. Creation is eternal world-work on the universal scale; but surely a constant production here implies by necessity a constant perishing there. How, unless on the impossible supposition of the infinity of space, could God go on creating worlds to eternity if there were no corresponding cessation of worlds? No; the law that applies to a hundred yards of earth, with all that's on or in it, applies equally to "the great globe itself, yea, all which it inherits," to the solar system in its entirety, and to the vast complexity of the universe of worlds. And that law is expressible as the Principle of Continuity— the law of a sustained and mighty whole, by causal dependence of part on part, through the persistence of universal creative force amid the eternal changes of a perishable material basis. We are constrained to think that in no other way could the eternal, imperishable heaven-house be sustained on perishable material foundations than by the foundations' never-ending renewal. The perpetuity of material creation alone could compensate the lack of the material's intrinsic eternity.

But let us turn our thought aside from the contemplation, lest familiarity become irreverence, and we gaze too long in the face of the oppressive vastness. How shall we dare to measure the God-design for the unending future? I trust indeed that we do not mean that: we can only cry, out of our poverty of imperious thought, "Lord, we know not what our conceptions do measure, or whether anything. We presume not to declare that this and this can alone be true; but Thou hast given us to think thus and thus as enough for Thy children now, and in humility we accept the limit. Even so let it be, Lord, with all our thinking! Hold us ever in the grand reserve which comes of the hope of increasing light and clearer seeing!"

Let us turn, then, to some of the more familiar theological aspects of the matter.

You have been commonly taught that the earth is to endure for ever, because in the "Last Judgment" it is enforced that the human race on earth is the basis of the eternal heavens. For answer, you have only to say to yourself,-Yes, earth is the basis of heaven; but does that limit me to this earth? not in the least. If the theory now taught me supposed that earths should ever cease out of the universe, there would be legitimate ground of complaint against it; but I am

here, at the most, only called upon to believe what is entirely supposable, and is mentioned by Swedenborg as in certain cases inevitable, that the inhabitants of any spiritual earth might be transferred elsewhere; and, further, that such transference would, in the course of the eternal ages, be renewed according to necessity. Indeed, it is entirely necessary to my thought that such removal should, in the Divine Providence, be arranged to take place coincidently always with the spiritual needs of such inhabitants, and should thus appear to them, not as a removal, but as the beginning of a new and higher course of existence.

Again, you have heard it said that the inhabitants of the spiritual world would lose their occupation of ministering spirits if the earth should cease to be; but you can now see that the objection rests on a total misconception, and that such removal would not interfere with the work of a single soul.

Again, you have heard it said that God is not the Destroyer, but the Creator; that He has made all things perfect, not to destroy them, but to keep them so. To which your hearty response will be that you delight to think that God is not Apollyon; that it is but a remnant of a barbaric creed to think that because things die we are shut up to the conclusion that God of His wish and will destroys them; that things may not be destroyed for the sake of destroying them, but that, in natural course, they may "have their day and cease to be;" and that, though God has "made everything beautiful," it is only "in his time," in which "time" it has already served the purpose of its Divine Creator.

Moreover, you have heard it said that the only cause for the destruction of the race from any material earth is their wickedness; that since the race remains, the earth must too; and that, in regard to our earth, we have reason to hope for continued progress, and not for retrogression: in which notions you will not fail to perceive an evidence of mental confusion. True, you will think, the only human or internal cause for the destruction of a race is its wickedness; but what has this to do with external causes? It is true that man can only destroy HIMSELF by wickedness, and that if our race is ever to cease by its own hand, it must be by first becoming evil; in short, the physical extinction of a race by itself is the result of moral causes, which idea you, too, take for undoubted truth. But what then? cannot men die from physical causes just as from spiritual? From want of food, for instance, or the falling of a house? From causes from without quite

as much as from within? In fact, we need not in the least conceive of our race as again sinking into evil, since the gradual diminution of the earth's power of sustaining life would naturally and inevitably react to the diminution and final extinction of the race, and that long before the earth itself became absolutely effete. With that extinction of mankind, not with the earth's cessation, would come the removal of the inhabitants of the spiritual earth elsewhere. . . . But are not these spiritual and physical causes connected? Certainly; it is the withdrawal of these physical powers as the occasion, that leads to the withdrawal of the spiritual powers as the cause, of life on our earth; and this universally.

Yet again, you have heard that the Scriptures not only do not prove that the earth is to be destroyed, but, contrariwise, that it is to endure for ever. To which you will make answer that, of course, Scripture neither proves one thing nor the other; that, equally of course, the extinction of the earth here contemplated has no reference to the scriptural last judgment; that to quote such passages as "the earth abideth for ever," and the like, may be good enough play for checkmating literalists who believe that Scripture declares the earth's destruction at the last judgment, but that to use such expressions as reliable proof of the earth's eternity is the very despair of prosaicism; that you have, or think you have, the authority of Swedenborg as an exponent of Scripture for the belief that the earth is positively to be destroyed, since, in A. C. 931, he says, "It is here said, 'In all the days of the earth, seed-time and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night, shall not cease.' From this it may appear [is certain] that the earth is not to endure for ever, but that it likewise will have its end; for it is said, 'In all the days of the earth,' i.e. as long as the earth endures. But with respect to those who believe that the end of the world will be the same as the last judgment. in this they are deceived;" from which you may also contend that though deceived "in this," in connecting the last judgment with the end of the world, they are by no means deceived in expecting, on other grounds, the earth's destruction; that the idea of such language being figurative and spoken of the Church is unendurable, and directly negatived by the whole of the passage; that Swedenborg's idea here manifestly is that as every earth, or earth in general, must have its end, our earth is included, and, like the rest, will cease to be, since he says, "In all the days of earth (terra), i.e. so long as earth (terra) endures, from which it is certain that the earth (tellus)," our earth in