Chapter I: Part II: 470 (1)

Honesty in the C. L. S. C. 473
Outline and Programs 474
Local Circles 475
The C. L. S. C. Classes 481
Editor’s Outlook 483
Editor’s Note-Book 486
C. L. S. C. Notes on Required Readings for May 488
Talk About Books 491
Chautauqua, 1885 493
The Florida Chautauqua 496
Special Notes 496

REQUIRED READING FOR MAY.

ENGLISH AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE.

BY PRESIDENT D. H. WHEELER, D.D., LL.D.

At the beginning of this study we must determine as clearly as possible the meaning attached to the word _universal_ when it is applied to a language. For this purpose, the word is employed in a restricted sense. It is not meant that men are returning to the conditions of speech which prevailed before the building of Babel. To that condition men may or may not return in some far off century; so far as we can judge, that reunion of mankind is very distant. Max Müller[1] says that 900 languages are spoken by the human race; and if dialects are added the number may be three or four times as large. Most of our race speak dialects having no literature, and it is found to be a very slow task to substitute the language of a nation for the dialects of its people. Classical Greek was probably spoken by only a few of the Greeks. We know that the Latin of Cicero was not, not even in Rome, the speech of the people. At this day more than a score of dialects are spoken in Italy, and the majority of the population of that Peninsula can neither speak nor understand Italian. Public education and other unifying influences make very little progress against the diversity of speech in the various provinces. An Italian gentleman is bred in a nurse’s language (the dialect) and educated in Italian. He speaks two tongues, dialect and Italian; his servants speak but one, and that is the dialect. To break up the power of the nurse, and of the local influences which she represents, is a Herculean task which must be accomplished in every country except the United States, the Canadas, and a part of Great Britain, before mankind will speak _only_ 900 tongues; the time required to reduce nine hundred to one can only be guessed at. If the problem of a universal language were how to provide a common language to be exclusively used by all men, this problem would be one for pure speculation, in the solving of which the imagination would be more active than the reason.

There is another sense in which scholars speak of a universal language. (1) There has always been in our Aryan[2] tribe a leading literary language. Once it was Sanskrit;[3] perhaps at a later time it was Persian; later it was Greek; later it was Latin. This Aryan tribe of ours has made the greater part of the history of the last 3,000 years; to-day it is the history-making and literature-making tribe. Great tracts of older history—Babylonian, Arabian, Egyptian—lie outside of the Aryan movements; but Persian, Greek, Roman, German, French, Spanish, English and American history lie in the Aryan line. Now, then, within this line some one Aryan language has always enjoyed a literary predominance. (2) For other than literary purposes, some one of our family of languages has at one time or another had an extended currency. For something like two centuries French, for example, has been the language of diplomacy. We are probably passing out of a period which has lasted for half a century, of the predominance of German as a language of research, especially of metaphysical and grammatical study. These examples will suffice to show what is meant by our problem. In trade and practical invention English is, in this modified sense, a universal language. What I undertake to measure is this: the probability that, at a not distant time, English will be universal in more senses (used by people of many countries for more purposes) than any other Aryan language was ever before used. Some careful observers believe that this is the present position of the language—that it is now universal to an extent quite beyond all precedent. I think that as a literary, political and commercial language, English has a fair prospect of universal use within the Aryan tribe, and a better prospect than any other tongue of coming into use for these purposes all over the globe.

1. The mere arraying of numbers carries with it a kind of presumption in favor of English. Did 5,000,000 ever at one time use either classic Greek or the Hellenic form of that speech? I seriously doubt that at any time 5,000,000 of people could have understood each other in any one form of that tongue. Did ever at any one time 15,000,000 of people speak the Latin of our classic authors? I doubt it. Turn to English, and we find not less than 110,000,000 of people speaking it at the present time. And this comparison is made much stronger when we remember that, one hundred years ago, our number did not probably exceed fifteen millions. Our vast growth is related to forces and conditions still existing, and now giving us an accelerating progress in numbers. I shall return to these forces and conditions in a later paragraph. Looking at our competitors, we see that the Germans come next to us, with probably not more than 45,000,000. The German empire counts 45,000,000, and there are 5,000,000, perhaps, of Austrian Germans; but the empire envelops millions of non-Germans. They sometimes zealously claim the Low Dutch; but we could claim them for English with better right. Next come the French with 37,000,000, about one third only of our strength. I think it fair for these purposes to count the populations under the dominion of the several tongues. French, English and German are spoken all over the world. Among the three runs the competition for the first place in the Aryan tribe. I do not commit the folly of making race lines and speech lines the same; but it is a convenient mode of describing the field of this competition as that of the Aryan race, although there have been so many fusions of tribes that perhaps there is no Aryan race at this late day.

2. Another presumption in favor of our language arises from the history of the competition for the first place which has gone on since the rise of the modern European nations. After the Dark Ages,[4] Italian first came to prominence as a polished literary tongue. Its poets converted a dialect into a language, and from Italian literature our Chaucer, our Shakspere, and even our Milton drew inspiration as well as materials for English poetry. As a literary language, Italian was for two centuries a universal language. Spain had the next opportunity for the primacy. Her flag was first planted on the outposts of this continent; the conquests of her kings at one moment placed Europe and America in her hands. Her poets and philosophers made her language as honorable in literature as her sailors and soldiers made it in discovery and conquest. If Spain had retained her grasp on the Mississippi valley and on Mexico and South America, she, and not we, would now be supreme on this continent; and Spanish, not English, would be the dominant speech of North America. But Spain may be said to have retired voluntarily from the primacy of the Aryan tribe; a great language and a great literature descended to generations of Spaniards who had ceased to be great. Next, the French language took the lead. During the eighteenth century the language of France was undoubtedly the leading Aryan tongue. Since the beginning of this century German has come strongly into the competition, and English has gradually attained a preponderance in numbers over our two great competitors.

3. A third presumption in our favor arises from the diversity of great functions which English fills. It is a political, a literary, a common, and a commercial speech. In this brief space I can dwell only on the fact that it is, in a peculiar sense, a political language. The English race has led the way towards modern liberty and towards the political institutions and habits which are the safeguards of freedom. English words even are in use among the continental nations to describe political things which they have borrowed from us. The word _meeting_ is a good example. But the mere diffusion of political terms means comparatively little. The only really great universal language of the past was the language of Rome, and its preëminence grew from its political character. There are in modern Europe two sets of political ideas and juridical institutions; one is Roman, and the other is English; and the two face each other in the modern world, and are really in silent but effective competition with each other. Outside of England, Europe is Roman except as it has been made English. The continental nations have parliaments which are pale copies of the vigorous legislative bodies which cover the English-speaking world. Rome is mighty yet, for the juridical systems of the continent of Europe have their foundations in the Roman civil law. The greatness of Latin did not arise from the genius of the Roman poets and orators. It laid its vigorous hand on human society, and in some sort it is still administering civil society. English has a political and a judicial system of its own, and these systems are conquering mankind. The adoption of the parliament and the trial by jury by continental nations prove the high value of the English inventions in government and law. The French and the German are neither of them political languages. French is the language of a nation which will long command the respect of mankind; but its language counts for nothing in its political structure. German is the language of a great people who make good citizens, but have until recently shown little capacity for political affairs, and have yet to make a great national record. The genius of Bismarck has created a great empire out of a great people; but it remains to be seen whether any aggressive political ideas are to be born of this German empire. The English political system is aggressive. Englishmen are nation-builders; a shipload of them cast upon a desert island would form a government as instinctively and as easily as they would build themselves houses. In this respect English is like Latin; it is the language of a distinct, original political system, whose obvious advantages are enticing men to copy it all over the world.

4. Another presumption in favor of our speech arises from certain peculiarities of its grammar and of its enunciation. In its grammar, it has cast off more of the inflexional burdens than either of its competitors. Both of them retain the fictitious distinction of genders by terminations, and they are in other respects weighted with inflexional incumbrances. English has, unfortunately, a small inheritance of strong nouns and verbs; but it is far simpler in its grammar than either French or German. And it is not by any means a small matter that the grammarian has never obtained the control of the language. In this respect the Germans enjoy more freedom than the French; but in neither language is the grammarian so little powerful as he is among us. The reason is that English is spoken for all purposes by all our people. I do not forget the English dialects as an exception; but they are a very small exception in contrast with the fact that neither literary French nor literary German are used by the mass of either people for all purposes. There is “bad German” for daily life, and there is dialect French for the mass of Frenchmen outside of the great towns. In our language many efforts have been made to fix precise rules which would please the grammarian and render good English difficult, and therefore not common. These efforts have not prevented the progress of English toward simplicity, and the vigor which simplicity imparts; and the result is that children and foreigners readily learn and use the language which is employed in our books and periodicals. By flouting the grammarian we have dethroned the nurse, and have not one language for the home and another for the book.

The enunciation of English is characterized by a simplicity which has not been enjoyed by any other great language. The English word has but one vocal qualification, and that is the accent on a single syllable. And such is the simplicity of this accent that it may be heavy or light, and still the word is intelligible. The vowels all tend to a nearly common form in most situations; and if the accent be in the right place the word is usually understood. There are, of course, many exceptions, such as an Italian _a_ at the end of many words; but though one says _feyther_, _faather_, or _fauther_, we still know what he means. The force of this consideration will best appear by contrast. We do not know how classic Greek was enunciated; but we have reason to suppose that the vocalization was as elaborate and artificial as the music of light opera. It was, of course, easily spoken after one had learned it, but the learning of it must have been a great task for a foreigner. Latin was less elaborately artificial, but there was doubtless an intonation of the Latin sentence, and a marking of the varying lengths of vowels; and these features must have made good Latin difficult and rare. We know that Italian spreads slowly throughout Italy under a system of public instruction, and that it defies the foreigner’s industry and patience, on account of the demand it makes for well defined vowels and a certain sentence rhythm. French is hardly less, if at all less difficult, because it makes similar demands upon the attention and vocal skill of the speaker. A good illustration of all this is found in the fact that the English ear is pleased, while the French and Italian ears are displeased by a “brogue,” or a variation of the position of a word in a sentence. We all like to hear foreigners speak our tongue, precisely because they set it to a new music and show us the range of its grammatical simplicity. There is doubtless a _best_ arrangement of the words in any English sentence. If the grammarians had had their way, this best arrangement would have become the only proper arrangement. The fact that we allow the foreigner to put our words into a different order than the best, or even the second best—and are still pleased with his work—shows, I think, that English has in its vocal and syntactical systems a simplicity and a flexibility which adapt it to universal use.

5. There is also a presumption in favor of English which arises from its history and from certain results of that history. It was originally Teutonic, and made its first alliance with Scandinavian, and so by swallowing up the speech of “the Danes” it came to represent the northern branch of the Aryan race with more breadth than High German shows. Then came the Norman Conquest, by which other “Danes” who had conquered Normandy and adopted the French language became the masters of England. The contest between French and English ended as that between Scandinavian and English had ended—English swallowed French. This event gave us our composite English, and gave the world a language in which the northern and southern streams of Aryan speech mingle their waters and collect their far-gathered wealth. Ours is a composite and compromise speech. In the Danish and Norman struggles, our tongue proved its tenacity, its “holdfast.” In each struggle the conqueror adopted the dialect of the conquered. But in these conflicts, English showed itself to be not only stubbornly vital, but also remarkably charitable and catholic. It remained English, but it gave liberal hospitality to Danish and French words. And ever since, it has been a great borrower of foreign words. It is in this respect utterly unlike French, which will hardly tolerate even a foreign name, but translates these names whenever it is possible. I have sometimes wondered whether our speech might not become a world-speech by mere swallowing of the vocabularies of other languages. It is, of course, not a subject for rational conjecture; but neither would that great feast of French words have been a rational forecast in the eleventh century. We have borrowed from all the great tongues of our tribe, and from many other great and small dialects. We have always been borrowing; we borrow every year. It would be an entertaining and not unprofitable task to collect these harvests of the last fifty years. The readiness with which we naturalize a foreign word has made many a grammarian sick of his profession; but borrowing words is an English propensity which nothing can “reform” out of us. And this catholicity looks in several ways toward universality. Neither of our competitors has any corresponding merit. French is a grand speech, but it will not tolerate foreign words. German is a grand speech; but it is German, and nothing else, except as it has been infiltrated with literary and judicial Latin. I must pass hurriedly over some other important presumptions in our favor.

6. The primacy in commerce is freely conceded to our tongue. For such purposes it is spoken in all the great seaports of the world. In addition to this trade use, we may note that a great variety of practical inventions carry their English names and terms around the world.

7. We also have the great reading public of the world. Germans read; but their 45,000,000 do not consume more than one eighth as much literary food as England and America, the Canadas and Australia. The English literature market is not only the greatest in the world—exceeding in one year all the literary produce of antiquity which has come down to us—but it is a market which grows rapidly. If a German or a Frenchman wishes to reach the largest number of minds, he must write in the English language. We have made more than half the fame of German authors by translating their works into our tongue. Some of the German authors have been wise enough to learn and to use our speech in their books.

8. French and German each had a special advantage over English fifty years ago. Frenchmen have long had a rare power of popularizing knowledge—a power of which they have made much less use than would have been expected. French is very rich in the power of accurate and plain statement of scientific truth. This power Englishmen have been for some time borrowing, and the fruits of such copying appears in the good fame and liberal incomes of our Huxleys and Proctors. There is no reason to doubt that we shall overtake the French in this path of progress; for we have an inexhaustible demand for popularizations of science. Thirty years ago Germans had a primacy in research. They made the world come to their universities to study and master the German _method_ in investigation. I believe that, though this German primacy still exists, it has nearly reached its end. English students have not gone in droves to Germany to come back empty handed. Many of them have conquered the German method and transferred it to their own home and tongue.

9. France is already out of the race. She has but thirty-seven millions, and grows only at a snail’s pace. A Frenchman has recently described the stationary condition of his people in the _Révue des deux Mondes_ in stronger terms than I could use. German is our only serious rival for the primacy. Is it a serious rivalry? The Germans are a prolific race. They lose millions by emigration, and still increase to an extent which makes all Frenchmen sad. But how shall forty-five millions shut up in old Europe overtake the one hundred and ten millions who have the great open fields of the world? If North America were as thickly populated as Germany we should count our hosts as three or four hundred millions. They have room at home; but we have vastly more room. In a century our North American English population will number 250,000,000. The rest of the English speaking world can hardly fail to grow enough to make our grand total 400,000,000. The next doubling of our tribe—not more than one hundred and fifty years from now—would put us so far in front of all competition that no language would contest the primacy with us. Besides, we have great possibilities of gains outside of our own tribes. South America is more and more under the influence of English and American ideas; the East is being anglicised by the English dominion in India, and by American and English missionary schools. Africa is an open question; but a vast English speaking population on the Dark Continent is a far more probable addition to our numbers than this American-English population was in 1492, or even in 1700.

Such seems to be the outlook. In a recent letter forecasting the English-speaking primacy of the world, Mr. Gladstone said: “Mr. Barham Zincke, no incompetent calculator, reckons that the English-speaking peoples of the world one hundred years hence will probably count a thousand millions.… A century back I suppose they were not much, if at all, beyond fifteen millions.” This primacy, he adds, “would demand no propaganda, no superlative ingenuity or effort; it ought to be an orderly and natural growth.… To gain it will need no preterhuman strength; to miss it will require some portentous degeneracy.” I have made much more modest estimates than those quoted by Mr. Gladstone. I attach most importance to the political value of English and the nation-building instinct of our tribe. The great rush forward from fifteen to one hundred and ten millions _in a century_ is a result of our political facility.

SUNDAY READINGS.

SELECTED BY CHANCELLOR J. H. VINCENT, D.D.

[_May 3._]

The heart here, the Father yonder, and the universe of man and matter as the meeting place between them, is the whole scope and the whole poetry of the Sermon on the Mount. The preacher shears off all the superfluities and externals of worship and of action, that he may show, in its naked simplicity, the communion which takes place between the heart as worshiper and God as hearer. The righteousness he inculcates must exceed that “of the Scribes and the Pharisees.” The man who hates his brother, or calls him “Raca,” is a murderer in deed.… Oaths are but big sounds; the inner feelings are better represented by “yea, yea, nay, nay.” That love which resides within will walk through the world as men walk through a gallery of pictures, loving and admiring, and expecting no return. The giving of alms must be secret. The sweetest prayer will be solitary and short. One must fast, too, as if he fasted not. The enduring treasures must be laid up within. Righteousness must be sought before, and as inclusive of all things; life is more precious than all the means of it. The examination and correction of faults must begin at home. Prayer, if issuing from the heart, is all powerful. The essence of the law and the prophets lies in doing to others as we would have others do to us. Having neglected the inner life, the majority have gone to ruin, even while following fully and devotedly external forms of faith and worship. The heart must, at the same time, be known by its fruits. It is only the good worker that shall enter the heavenly kingdom. These truths, in fine, acted upon, these precepts from the Mount, heard and kept—become a rock of absolute safety, while all beside is sand now, and sea hereafter.

Such is, in substance, this sermon. It includes unconsciously all theology and all morals, and is invested, besides, with the beauty of imagery—theology, for what do we know, or can we ever know, of God, but that he is “our Father in heaven,” that he accepts our heart worship, forgives our debts, and hears our earnest prayers—morals, for all sin lies in selfishness, all virtue lies in losing our petty identity in the great river of the species, which flows into the ocean of God; and as to imagery, how many natural objects—the salt of the sea, the lilies of the valley, the thorns of the wilderness, the trees of the field, the hairs of the head, the rocks of the mountain, and the sand of the seashore—combine to explain and beautify the deep lessons conveyed! Here is, verily, the model—long sought elsewhere in vain—of a “perfect sermon,” which ought to speak of God and of man in words and figures borrowed from that beautiful creation, which lies between, which adumbrates the former to the latter, and enables the latter to glorify at once the works and the author.—_Gilfillan._[1]

[_May 10._]

The Hebrew poet was nothing if not sacred. To him the poetical and the religious were almost the same. Song was the form instinctively assumed by all the higher moods of his worship. He was not surprised into religious emotion and poetry by the influence of circumstances, nor stung into it by the pressure of remorse.… Religion was with him a habitual feeling, and from the joy or the agony of that feeling poetry broke out irrepressibly. To him, the question, “Are you in a religious mood to-day?” had been as absurd as “Are you alive to-day?” for all his moods— … whether wretched as the penitence of David, or triumphant as the rapture of Isaiah—were tinged with the religious element. From God he sank, or up to him he soared. The grand theocracy around ruled all the soul and all the song of the bard. Wherever he stood, under the silent starry canopy, or in the congregation of the faithful—musing in solitary spots, or smiting, with high, hot, rebounding hand, the loud cymbal—his feeling was, “How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.” In him, surrounded by sacred influences, haunted by sacred recollections, moving through a holy land, and overhung by a heavenly presence, religion became a passion, a patriotism, and a poetry. Hence the sacred song of the Hebrews stands alone, and hence we may draw the deduction that its equal we shall never see again, till again religion outshine the earth with an atmosphere as it then enshrined Palestine—till poets, not only as the organs of their personal belief, but of the general sentiment around them, have become the high priests in a vast sanctuary, where all shall be worshipers, because all is felt to be divine. How this high and solemn reference to the Supreme Intelligence and Great Whole comes forth in all the varied forms of Hebrew poetry! Is it the pastoral? The Lord is the shepherd. Is it elegy? It bewails his absence. Is it ode? It cries aloud for his return, or shouts his praise. Is it the historical ballad? It recounts his deeds. Is it the penitential psalm? Its climax is, “Against _thee_ only have I sinned.” Is it the didactic poem? Running down through the world, like a scythed chariot, and hewing down before it all things as vanity, it clears the way to the final conclusion, “Fear God, and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man.” Is it a burden, “tossed as from a midnight mountain, by the hand of lonely seer, toward the lands of Egypt and Babylon?” It is the burden of the Lord; his the handful of devouring fire flung by the fierce prophet. Is it apologue, or emblem? God’s meaning lies in the hollow of the parable; God’s eye glares in the “terrible crystal” over the rushing wheels. Even the love-canticle seems to rise above itself, and behold! a greater than Solomon, and a fairer than his Egyptian spouse, are here. Thus, from their poetry, as from a thousand mirrors, flashes back the one awful face of their God.—_Gilfillan._

[_May 17._]

They say it is an ill mason that refuseth any stone; and there is no knowledge but in a skillful hand serves, either positively as it is, or else to illustrate some other knowledge, … because people by what they understand, are best led to what they understand not.

But the chief and top of his knowledge consists in the Book of books, the storehouse and magazine of life and comfort, THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.… In the Scriptures he finds four things: precepts for life, doctrines for knowledge, examples for illustration, and promises for comfort. These he hath digested severally.

But for the understanding of these, the means he useth are: First, A HOLY LIFE; remembering what his Master saith, that _if any do God’s will he shall know of the doctrine_ (John viii), and assuring himself that wicked men, however learned, do not know the Scriptures, because they feel them not, and because they are not understood but with the same spirit that writ them. The second means is PRAYER; which, if it be necessary even in temporal things, how much more in things of another world, where _the well is deep, and we have nothing_ of ourselves _to draw with_! Wherefore he ever begins the reading of the Scripture with some short ejaculation, as _Lord, pen mine eyes, that I may see the wondrous things of thy law_. The third means is A DILIGENT COLLATION of Scripture with Scripture. For, all truth being consonant to itself, and all being penned by one and the self-same Spirit, it can not be, but that an industrious and judicious comparing of place with place must be a singular help for the right understanding of the Scriptures. To this may be added the consideration of any text with the coherence thereof, touching what goes before and what follows after; as also the scope of the Holy Ghost. When the apostles would have called down fire from heaven, they were reproved as ignorant of what spirit they were. For the law required one thing and the gospel another; yet as diverse, not as repugnant; therefore the spirit of both is to be considered and weighed. The fourth means are COMMENTERS AND FATHERS, who have handled the places controverted; which the parson by no means refuseth. As he doth not so study others as to neglect the grace of God in himself, and what the Holy Spirit teacheth him; so doth he assure himself, that God in all ages hath had his servants, to whom he hath revealed his truth, as well as to him; and that as one country doth not bear all things, that there may be a commerce, so neither hath God opened, or will open, all to one, that there may be a traffic in knowledge between the servants of God, for the planting both of love and humility. Wherefore he hath one comment, at least, upon every book of Scripture; and, plowing with this and his own meditations, he enters into the secrets of God treasured in the holy Scripture.—_Herbert._[2]

[_May 24._]

It is exceedingly important, therefore, that all the Christian gifts and graces should be possessed in purity of spirit, uncontaminated by any unholy mixtures of an earthly nature. The mere suggestion that they have merit of themselves and separate from the God who gives them, if it be received with the least complacency, necessarily inflicts a deep wound. They are accordingly held in purity of spirit, and with the divine approbation, only when their tendency is to separate the soul from everything inward and outward, considered as objects of complacency and of spiritual rest, and to unite it more closely to God.… We do not find the parent, who has that degree of affection for his child which may be called entire or perfect love, making his love a distinct object of his thoughts, and rejoicing in it as such a distinct object; that would not be the genuine operation of perfect love. If his love is perfect, he has no time and no disposition to think of anything but the beloved object toward which his affections are directed. His love is so deep, so pure, so fixed and centered upon one point, that the sight of self, and of his own personal exercises, is lost. It ought to be thus in the feelings which we exercise toward God; and undoubtedly such will be the result, when the religious feeling has reached a certain degree of intensity; that is to say, when the feeling is perfect, the mind is not occupied with the feeling itself, but with the object of the feeling. The heart, if we may so express it, seems to recede from us; it certainly does so as an object of distinct contemplation; and the object of its affections comes in and takes its place. O, the blessedness of the heart, that, free from self and its secret and pernicious influences, sees nothing but God; that recognizes, even in its highest gifts and graces, nothing but God; that would rather be infinitely miserable with God, if it were possible, than infinitely happy without him!

In connection with these remarks we are enabled to understand and appreciate the state of mind which is described in some primitive writers as a state of cessation from “reflex acts.” By REFLEX ACTS, as we employ the phrase here, and as it appears to be employed by the writers referred to, we mean those acts of the mind in which the soul turns inward upon itself, and, ceasing for a time to regard the mere will of God as the only good, takes a self-conscious satisfaction in its own exercises. Such acts, when they are indulged in, stand directly in the way of the highest results of the religious life. On the other hand, he who has entirely ceased to put forth acts of this kind, and loves God to the entire forgetfulness of self, losing sight even of his own exercises, in consequence of being fully occupied with an infinitely higher object, has reached the broad and calm position of spiritual rest, the region of inward and abiding peace—a region where there is no noisy clamor, no outcries and contests of the passions; no contrivances of prejudice, interest, and ambition; no rebellious sighing and tears of the natural spirit; but all is hushed and lost in the one deep conviction that there is nothing good, nothing permanently true, nothing desirable—no, not heaven itself—but pure and everlasting union with the will of God.—_Prof. Upham._[3]

[_May 31._]

All science is simply a perception of the laws of God—a discovery of what he designed when he spread out the heavens and gemmed the infinity of space with its myriad of worlds. The laws of light are simply the power with which the Creator invested it. All we can do is to find what he has written on its wings. The law of magnetism is the subtle power and the mode of action with which God has touched the loadstone. The laws of astronomy, what are they but the thoughts of God, as he projected worlds into space, and gave to them their orbits and their periods?… Of nature in all its expanse, of all created powers, visible and invisible, hath not God said, “All are yours?” Are we not “heirs of God and joint heirs of Jesus Christ?”

I can accord the scientist nearly all he can claim, without in the slightest degree affecting the foundations of my faith.… There are many things which are claimed in evolution, to which I must give the verdict of the Scotch jury, “Not proven.” Yet were I to admit them all, they would not affect my faith in the wisdom and skill and power of the great Father. I admire the skill of the watch-maker who produces an accurate timepiece; but how much more would I admire his skill if he so made one watch that it was capable not only of keeping time, but also of evolving a series of watches, each keeping better time than that which produced it, so that from the plainest, simplest form of a watch there should be eventually evolved a magnificent chronometer, with jeweled holes, whose time would not vary from the true time a second in a million of years! If the great Creator created but a germ, but in that germ were all possibilities of form, and motion, and magnitude, of atoms and of worlds, with their laws of motion so impressed on each that it should take its place in due time, my admiration for his wonderful skill would be only enhanced.… These men who talk of evolution claim an infinity of time. I ask, how long since this protoplasm developed into a turtle, the turtle into a monkey, the monkey into a man? They admit there is no positive record anywhere. Since human history began there is no instance of any animal ascending in the scale of man. If at all, it must have been far back in the distant ages. Then, I ask, why not give Christianity similar time? She is changing the face of creation; she is transforming sinners into saints, savages into enlightened men. She took them naked, rude and uncultured, and has clothed, taught, and refined them. She has taken man that bowed down to stocks and stones, and has elevated him until he uses the world as a workshop, and all elements as his instruments, until he feels that he is a son of God, and his vicegerent upon earth. Why shall Christianity be called a failure, because it has not yet reached all the sons of men, or transformed them into sons of science? Give her at least as much time to change millions of savages into enlightened humanity, millions of sinners into saints, as, according to their own asking, it takes to change one species into another. We promise that the whole world shall be brought to the foot of the cross before the evolutionist shall find even a single monkey transformed into a man.—_Bishop Simpson._

HOME STUDIES IN CHEMISTRY AND PHYSICS.

BY PROF. J. T. EDWARDS, D.D.

Director of the Chautauqua School of Experimental Science.

PHYSICS OF EARTH.

Our earth, as a whole, may be compared to a ship sailing on a smooth sea. Like the ship, it has its own motions with reference to other objects, and is affected by forces exterior to itself. The ship feels the influence of winds, currents and tides.

The earth also yields to forces outside of itself; to such an extent, indeed, that philosophers have more than once been led to look for an invisible power, which strangely affected it. For example, Adams[1] and Leverrier[2] were led to prophesy the existence of the planet Neptune, because the earth seemed to yield to the touch of some unknown body, which was afterward discovered at the enormous distance of 2,746,271,000 miles.

The ship, in addition to its motion in regard to distant points and susceptibility of being moved by outside forces, has its own peculiar construction, a complex adjustment of planks, timbers, bolts, spars, sails and ropes. It also has its inhabitants, living beings which move to and fro, quite independent, for the time being, of all other parts of the universe, save that on which they reside.

As it glides past some island we look from our cabin window and discover that the _island_ seems to be moving by us in an opposite direction. Even so, as our earth sweeps round its axis with a speed of a thousand miles an hour, it seems motionless, while the starry spheres above appear gliding westward.

In spite of the impassioned and reiterated exclamation of Galileo, “It does move!” men would not believe it, until his experiment at the leaning tower of Pisa; and the beautiful demonstration of Foucault[3] from the dome of the Pantheon in Paris, proved beyond question the earth’s rotation. Let us briefly outline these two experiments. If the world has no motion, a heavy weight dropped from the top of a tall shaft would strike exactly at its base. But if the earth were rotating, the top of the tower must move faster than the base. The weight at the top would have the same motion as the top of the shaft, and would keep it, in falling, in accordance with a well known law, and consequently would strike _beyond_ the base. The ball dropped by Galileo did thus strike. Foucault argued: If the earth does _not_ rotate, a pendulum suspended so that a needle fastened to its lowest point would trace a line in sand sprinkled on the surface beneath, would forever move along the same line. But if the earth is rotating, the needle will trace different lines on the sand. If the pendulum was suspended at one of the poles, it would, in twenty-four hours, trace a series of lines like the spokes of a carriage wheel about the pole. Foucault showed that the needle _did_ trace varying lines in the sand, therefore the earth moves. This experiment is repeated annually at Paris, and I have performed it in the Amphitheater at Chautauqua.

Sir Isaac Newton, as all the world knows, discovered the relation and mutual dependence of all matter in the universe. The law of gravitation has been called “Newton’s Darling Child.” It states, in brief, that every body attracts every other directly as the mass, and inversely as the square of the distance.

The sun has three hundred thousand times the amount of matter contained in our earth; its power of attraction is therefore proportional. A man on its surface would be crushed by his own weight, but even Brobdignag,[4] or any other giant, could live comfortably on an asteroid. Indeed, he would weigh so little _there_ that he could leap like the mountain goat.

As an illustration of the second part of the law: one body three times as far away as another from the attracting power, will be held by a force but one ninth as great. A body near the surface of the earth, or 4,000 miles from its center, will fall sixteen feet in a second. The moon is sixty times further from the center of the earth than such a body. Newton found that the moon fell toward the earth, or varied from a straight line, 1.36 of sixteen feet in a second. Now, the square of sixty is 3,600, therefore the moon proves that the force of gravity decreases as the square of the distance increases.

Nothing in nature is more beautiful than the adjustment of forces by which our earth is kept forever revolving in its appropriate orbit. In perihelion,[5] or its nearest approach to the sun, it is 3,000,000 miles nearer than in aphelion, when farthest away from it. Of course it will follow from the law that the attraction of the sun would then be greater. If there were no counteracting influence, there could be but one result—the earth would fly into the sun and be consumed. The very proximity of the earth to the sun, however, increases its speed, and therefore its tendency to fly off on a tangent. Kepler[6] has expressed this truth in one of his laws: “The radius vector (a line drawn from the sun to the earth) passes over equal areas in equal times.” The average speed of the earth in its orbit is 1,100 miles a minute—3,300 times that of the fastest steamship—but it varies throughout its course, and how wonderful that system of breaks by which its motion is regulated! Divine wisdom alone could invent such a plan.

TERRESTRIAL GRAVITY.

To the ordinary observer, our earth seems, in general, a flat surface, here and there varied by hills and valleys. In reality it is a sphere, with a curvature of eight inches to the mile. The equatorial diameter is twenty-six and five-elevenths miles greater than the polar. The irregularities of the earth’s surface are relatively far less than they seem. Very thin letter paper, spread over a globe sixteen inches in diameter, would by its thickness adequately represent the highest mountain ranges. The greatest ocean depth is about equal to the height of the highest mountain; we see by this that the earth is essentially a smooth, round body.

Its shape is proven in four ways: First, two different navigators may start from the same point, one sailing east and the other west, and reach the same destination. Second, navigators have sailed around the world, Magellan having first performed the task. Third, in moving toward elevated objects, their upper portion first strikes the eye. Fourth, the shadow of the earth, when it falls upon the moon, is round.

The enlargement of the equatorial diameter is supposed to be due to the fact that the earth was once in a plastic state, and the centrifugal force, which is directly proportioned to the rotating speed of a body, caused the matter in the equatorial region to bulge. This action can easily be shown by revolving rapidly a flexible steel hoop, or other mobile substance. All bodies tend to revolve around their shortest axis. A great variety of interesting experiments showing this can easily be performed, some of which are indicated in an accompanying picture.

There is no magical power in the center of our earth, as some have supposed from the fact that all bodies seek that point. Indeed, that is the one spot where there is no attraction, and where all substances would weigh nothing. The path described by a plummet, or any falling body, is simply a resultant motion produced by _opposite_ particles of the earth making it pass half way between their lines of attraction. This will ordinarily be toward the center of the earth. As attraction of gravity is in proportion to mass, a body suspended near a mountain will be deflected toward it.

This has been shown by an experiment performed by Dr. Maskelyne,[7] near Mt. Schehallien, in Wales. Upon suspending a light body on opposite sides of this mountain, he observed that it swerved from the perpendicular toward the mountain. The amount of this variation measured the attraction of the mountain, as compared with the attraction of the earth. As the geological structure of this eminence was known, it was not difficult to compute its mass, and a comparison was made between it and the earth. From this calculation the entire weight of the earth was obtained, proving its specific gravity to be five times that of an equal bulk of water. Dr. Cavendish[8] afterward arrived at precisely the same result by experimenting with a pendulum.

Terrestrial gravity is constantly affecting the motion of bodies. Motion is the act of changing place, and always indicates the presence of some force; force or energy being that which tends to produce motion or rest. Motion in curved lines is produced by two or more forces acting upon a body, one of which must be constant. Example: A cannon ball is acted upon by the sudden explosion of the powder, the resistance of air, and the constant downward attraction of gravity. Nature seems to delight in curved motion; the waves, the flight of birds, the running brooks, the clouds, even the waving trees and grasses, all furnish illustrations of this. A little reflection upon any such instances will show that they are _usually_ produced by the united action of an instantaneous and constant force.

The center of gravity is that point around which the opposite particles of a body balance each other. This point does not necessarily coincide with center of figure or center of motion, the former of which is a point equally distant from opposite parts of a regular body, while the latter is a point in a substance around which it revolves.

If the sun and all the planets could be strung on a rod passing through their centers, with the planets to the east, the center of gravity of the solar system would be somewhere in the sun, east of its center. As the planets assume various positions with reference to the sun, it must follow that the center of gravity in our system must vary accordingly.

The same is true of objects on the earth. The center of gravity may be elevated or depressed, moved to the right or left. We instinctively adjust our bodies so that a perpendicular let fall from the center of gravity will constantly fall within the base. The most surprising exhibition of this power of automatic adjustment was seen in Blondin, in his performances on the tight rope.

Stability in structures is usually secured by lowering the center of gravity in one of two ways: either by broadening the base or by making it of heavy materials.

_Specific_ gravity is the weight of a substance as compared with an equal bulk of something taken as a standard; _water_ having been selected as the standard for solids and liquids, and _air_ for gases.

Gravity furnishes more _units of measure_ of various kinds—weight, work, heat, tenacity—than any other force of nature.

It will be remembered that _Physics_ is that branch of science that considers the general properties of matter, and the character of those forces which affect matter without destroying its molecule. It includes many subdivisions. In addition to those already mentioned, we find Molecular Attraction, or the operation of forces that act at insensible distances; Hydrostatics, which treats of liquids at rest; Hydraulics, of liquids in motion; Pneumatics, of gases; Machines, of means for applying force; Acoustics, of the laws of sound; Heat; Light; and Electricity.

As many physical properties have been mentioned in the articles on Air, Water, and Fire, they will not now be considered. Our discussion here applies more especially to those substances which, at ordinary temperatures, are solid.

, ascertained while he was investigating the problem of the golden crown.]

The most characteristic properties of solid bodies are the following: Hardness, tenacity, malleability, ductility, and crystalline form. Hardness is the resistance which a body offers to being scratched. Tenacity is the resistance offered by a body to a separation of its parts. Malleability is that property of a body which makes it capable of being rolled into sheets. Ductility is capacity for being drawn into wire, and crystalline form is the property which causes it to assume regular shapes.

As will be observed, these peculiarities are closely dependent upon cohesion and adhesion. By the former we understand the force which holds together the similar molecules of a substance; and by the latter, the force which unites the surfaces of different materials. Familiar as we are with these two agencies, their nature is not yet understood. We can easily discover that they are very dependent upon heat, by the application of which most solids pass from the stable form, to one in which, instead of cohesive force between the molecules, there is repulsion; as in the conversion of ice into water, and then into steam.

This movement of molecules is also dependent upon pressure. The most interesting illustration of this is seen in the action of glaciers. It has been ascertained that the melting temperature of ice lowers one two hundred and fiftieth of a degree for every fifteen pounds of pressure to the square inch.

The immense superincumbent mass of ice must, in many places, set free so much latent heat that a portion of the ice melts, so that here and there cells and liquid veins would be opened in the interior of the glacier. But the particles which separate these thin layers of water would almost immediately close up. This is the brilliant demonstration of Prof. Tyndall, who has given the operation the name of “regelation.” It has been thus described: “This phenomenon takes place at every point in the thickness of the glacier. Particles of ice approach one another, and unite across little veins of water, which permeate it in every direction; fresh liquid films are formed under the pressure from above; fresh unions take place between the divided morsels of ice; and, by this continual process of change, the air contained in the mass of that which once was snow, is gradually expelled. Thus it happens that the whole mass ultimately assumes an almost perfect transparency and a beautiful azure color.”

CRYSTALLIZATION.

One of the most beautiful illustrations of cohesive attraction is seen in crystallization. In every instance in which substances pass into the form of a solid, they tend to assume regular shapes called crystals. Each material has its own characteristic form, so that a crystal is a type of a species in the mineral world, even as a plant or an animal is in the organic kingdom. A crystal is a substance bounded by plain surfaces and symmetrically arranged about imaginary lines called axes. The final form depends upon certain smaller forms in its interior structure. They possess lines of division, often in three directions, called “cleavage.”

While there are millions of crystals, they have all been classified under six systems, as follows: 1. Monometric, where the three axes are equal. 2. Dimetric, having one axis unequal to the other two, which are equal to each other. 3. Trimetric, having no two axes equal. 4. Monoclinic, having one axis inclined. 5. Triclinic, in which all the three intersections are oblique and the axes unequal. 6. Hexagonal, which has the form of a regular hexagonal prism.