The Mystery of Gravitation and of God.
By Editor
THE most incomprehensible things are accepted as facts, and on them science is built. Gravitation is believed in by the most skeptical people. There are people who talk about it as though they could see, handle, and taste it. But that is not the way a true scientist talks. In a recent lecture Prof. C. A. Young, of Princeton College, used the following language: "Do not understand me at all as saying that there is no mystery about the planets' motions. There is just the one single mystery—gravitation—and it is a very profound one. How it is that an atom of matter can attract another atom, no matter how great the distance, no matter what intervening substance there may be; how it will act upon it, or at least behave as if it acted upon it, I do not know; I cannot tell. Whether they are pushed together by means of an intervening ether, or what is the action, I cannot understand. It stands with me along with the fact that when I will that my arm shall rise it rises. It is inscrutable. All the explanations that have been given of it seem to me merely to darken counsel with words and no understanding. They do not remove the difficulty at all. If I were to say what I really believe, it would be that the motions of the spheres of the material universe stand in some such relation to Him in whom all things exist, the ever-present and omnipotent God, as the motions of my body do to my will—I do not know how, and never expect to know." We dare say there will be wiseacres to sneer at the Professor for introducing the name of God into an astronomical lecture, on the ground that God is incomprehensible. But why, then, should incomprehensible gravitation be in the lecture?—N. Y. Christian Advocate.