class="subtitle">CREATIVE PROGRESS.

"And God said, Let there be light, and there was light."—Genesis  i., 3.

"God is light."—1 John, i. 5.

"Hail! holy light, offspring of Heaven first born,
Or of the eternal, co-eternal beam,
May I express thee unblamed? since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate."
    MILTON.

"A million torches lighted by Thy hand
Wander unwearied through the blue abyss:
They own Thy power, accomplish Thy command,
All gay with life, all eloquent with bliss.
What shall we call them? Piles of crystal light—
A glorious company of golden streams—
Lamps of celestial ether burning bright—
Suns lighting systems with their joyous beams?
But 'Thou to these art as the noon to night."
  DERZHAVIN, trans. by BOWRING.

II.

CREATIVE PROGRESS.

Worlds would be very imperfect and useless when simply endowed with attraction and inertia, if no time were allowed for these forces to work out their legitimate results. We want something more than swirling seas of attracted gases, something more than compacted rocks. We look for soil, verdure, a paradise of beauty, animal life, and immortal minds. Let us go on with the process.

Light is the child of force, and the child, like its father, is full of power. We dowered our created world with but a single quality—a force of attraction. It not only had attraction for its own material substance, but sent out an all-pervasive attraction into space. By the force of condensation it flamed like a sun, and not only lighted its own substance, but it filled all space with the luminous outgoings of its power. A world may be limited, but its influence cannot; its body may have bounds, but its soul is infinite. Everywhere is its manifestation as real, power as effective, presence as actual, as at the central point. He that studies ponderable bodies alone is not studying the universe, only its skeleton. Skeletons are somewhat interesting in themselves, but far more so when covered with flesh, flushed with beauty, and inspired with soul. The universe has bones, flesh, beauty, soul, and all is one. It can be understood only by a study of all its parts, and by tracing effect to cause.

But how can condensation cause light? Power cannot be quiet. The mighty locomotive trembles with its own energy. A smitten piece of iron has all its infinitesimal atoms set in vehement commotion; they surge back and forth among themselves, like the waves of a storm-blown lake. Heat is a mode of motion. A heated body commences a vigorous vibration among its particles, and communicates these vibrations to the surrounding air and ether. When these vibrations reach 396,000,000,000,000 per second, the human eye, fitted to be affected by that number, discerns the emitted undulations, and the object seems to glow with a dull red light; becoming hotter, the vibrations increase in rapidity. When they reach 765,000,000,000,000 per second the color becomes violet, and the eye can observe them no farther. Between these numbers are those of different rapidities, which affect the eye—as orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, in an almost infinite number of shades—according to the sensitiveness of the eye.

We now see how our dark immensity of attractive atoms can become luminous. A force of compression results in vibrations within, communicated to the ether, discerned by the eye. Illustrations are numerous. If we suddenly push a piston into a cylinder of brass, the force produces heat enough to set fire to an inflammable substance within. Strike a half-inch cube of iron a moderate blow and it becomes warm; a sufficient blow, and its vibrations become quick enough to be seen—it is red-hot. Attach a thermometer to an extended arm of a whirling wheel; drive it against the air five hundred feet per second, the mercury rises 16°. The earth goes 98,000 feet per second, or one thousand miles a minute. If it come to an aerolite or mass of metallic rock, or even a cloudlet of gas, standing still in space, its contact with our air evolves 600,000° of heat. And when the meteor comes toward the world twenty-six miles a second, the heat would become proportionally greater if the meteor could abide it, and not be consumed in fervent heat. It vanishes almost as soon as seen. If there were meteoric masses enough lying in our path, our sky would blaze with myriads of flashes of light. Enough have been seen to enable a person to read by them at night. If a sufficient number were present, we should miss their individual flashes as they blend their separate fires in one sea of insufferable glory. The sun is 1,300,000 times as large as our planet; its attraction proportionally greater; the aerolites more numerous; and hence an infinite hail of stones, small masses and little worlds, makes ceaseless trails of light, whose individuality is lost in one dazzling sea of glory.

On the 1st day of September, 1859, two astronomers, independently of each other, saw a sudden brightening on the surface of the sun. Probably two large meteoric masses were travelling side by side at two or three hundred miles per second, and striking the sun's atmosphere, suddenly blazed into light bright enough to be seen on the intolerable light of the photosphere as a background. The earth responded to this new cause of brilliance and heat in the sun. Vivid auroras appeared, not only at the north and south poles, but even where such spectacles are seldom seen. The electro-magnetic disturbances were more distinctly marked. "In many places the telegraphic wires struck work. In Washington and Philadelphia the electric signalmen received severe electric shocks; at a station in Norway the telegraphic apparatus was set fire to; and at Boston a flame of fire followed the pen of Bain's electric telegraph." There is the best of reason for believing that a continuous succession of such bodies might have gone far toward rendering the earth uncomfortable as a place of residence.

Of course, the same result of heat and light would follow from compression, if a body had the power of contraction in itself. We endowed every particle of our gas, myriads of miles in extent, with an attraction for every other particle. It immediately compressed itself into a light-giving body, which flamed out through the interstellar spaces, flushing all the celestial regions with exuberant light.

But heat exerts a repellent force among particles, and soon an equilibrium is reached, for there comes a time when the contracting body can contract no farther. But heat and light radiate away into cold space, then contraction goes on evolving more light, and so the suns flame on through the millions of years unquenched. It is estimated that the contraction of our sun, from filling immensity of space to its present size, could not afford heat enough to last more than 18,000,000 years, and that its contraction from its present density (that of a swamp) to such rock as that of which our earth is composed, could supply heat enough for 17,000,000 years longer. But the far-seeing mind of man knows a time must come when the present force of attraction shall have produced all the heat it can, and a new force of attraction must be added, or the sun itself will become cold as a cinder, dead as a burned-out