THE PARADISE OF FOOLS PART XI

I sat in a great theater at the National Capital. It was thronged with youth, and beauty, old age, and wisdom. I saw a man, the image of his God, stand upon the stage, and I heard him speak. His gestures were the perfection of grace; his voice was music, and his language was more beautiful than I had ever heard from mortal lips. He painted picture after picture of the pleasures, and joys, and sympathies, of home. He enthroned love and preached the gospel of humanity like an angel. Then I saw him dip his brush in ink, and blot out the beautiful picture he had painted. I saw him stab love dead at his feet. I saw him blot out the stars and the sun, and leave humanity and the universe in eternal darkness, and eternal death. I saw him like the serpent of old, worm himself into the paradise of human hearts, and by his seductive eloquence and the subtle devices of his sophistry, inject his fatal venom, under whose blight its flowers faded, its music was hushed, its sunshine was darkened, and the soul was left a desert waste, with only the new-made graves of faith and hope. I saw him, like a lawless, erratic meteor without an orbit, sweep across the intellectual sky, brilliant only in his self-consuming fire, generated by friction with the indestructible and eternal truths of God.

That man was the archangel of modern infidelity; and I said: How true is holy writ which declares, “the fool hath said in his heart, there is no God.”

Tell me not, O Infidel, there is no God, no Heaven, no Hell!

Tell me not, O Infidel, there is no risen Christ!

It is in the desert of evil, where virtue trembles to tread, where hope falters, and where faith is crucified, that the infidel dreams. To him, all there is of heaven is bounded by this little span of life; all there is of pleasure and love is circumscribed by a few fleeting years; all there is of beauty is mortal; all there is of intelligence and wisdom is in the human brain; all there is of mystery and infinity is fathomable by human reason, and all there is of virtue is measured by the relations of man to man. To him, all must end in the “tongueless silence of the dreamless dust,” and all that lies beyond the grave is a voiceless shore and a starless sky. To him, there are no prints of deathless feet on its echoless sands, no thrill of immortal music in its joyless air.

He has lost his God, and like some fallen seraph flying in rayless night, he gropes his way on flagging pinions, searching for light where darkness reigns, for life where death is king.

What intelligence less than God could fashion the human body? What motive power is it, if it is not God, that drives that throbbing engine, the human heart, with ceaseless, tireless stroke, sending the crimson streams of life bounding and circling through every vein and artery? Whence, and what, if not of God, is this mystery we call the mind? What is this mystery we call the soul? What is it that thinks and feels and knows and acts? Oh, who can comprehend, who can deny, the Divinity that stirs within us!

I have wondered a thousand times if an infidel ever looked through a telescope. There is our mighty sun, robed in the brightness of his eternal fires, and with his planets forever wheeling around him. Yonder twinkle Mercury and Venus, and there is Mars, the ruddy globe whose poles are white with snow and whose other zones seem dotted with seas and continents. Who knows but that his roseate color is only the blush of his flowers? Who knows but that Mars may now be a paradise inhabited by a blessed race, unsullied by sin, untouched by death? There is the giant orb of Jupiter, the champion of the skies, belted and sashed with vapor and clouds; and Saturn, haloed with bands of light and jeweled with eight ruddy moons; and there is Uranus, another stupendous world, speeding on in the prodigious circle of his tireless journey around the sun. And yet another orbit cuts the outer rim of our system, and on his lonely pathway the gloomy Neptune walks the cold, dim solitudes of space. In the immeasurable depths beyond appear millions of suns, so distant that their light could not reach us in a thousand years. There, spangling the curtain of the black profundity, shine the constellations that sparkle like the crown jewels of God. There are double and triple and quadruple suns of different colors, commingling their gorgeous hues and flaming like archangels on the frontier of stellar space. If we look beyond the most distant star the black walls are flecked with innumerable patches of filmy light like the dewy gossamers of the spider’s loom that dot our fields at morn. What beautiful forms we trace among those phantoms of light! Circles, ellipses, crowns, shields and spiral wreaths of palest silver. And what are they? Did I say phantoms of light? The telescope resolves them into millions of suns, standing out from the oceans of white-hot matter that contain the germs of countless systems yet to be. And so far removed from us are these suns that the light which comes to us from them to-day has been speeding on its way for more than two million years.

What is that white belt we call the Milky Way, which spans the heavens and sparkles like a Sahara of diamonds? It is a river of stars, it is a Gulf Stream of suns; and if each of these suns holds in his grasp a mighty system of planets, as ours does, how many multiplied millions of worlds like our own are now circling in that innumerable concourse?

Oh, where are the bounds of this divine conception? Where ends this dream of God? And is there no life or intelligence in all this throng of spheres? Are there no sails on those far-away summer seas, no wings to cleave that crystal air, no forms divine to walk those radiant fields? Are there no eyes to see those floods of light, no hearts to share with ours that love which holds all these mighty orbs in place?

It cannot be! It cannot be! There is a God! “The heavens declare His glory and the firmament showeth His handiwork.”