IN TUNE WITH THE INFINITE.
By Edison Driver
MARCONI can talk across the ocean, Santos Dumont can fly over it, and John Holland can sail under it. So progress goes on, so intricate, so interesting, so absorbing in its present, that we hardly stop to size up its feeble past. The terrible cancer finds a cure in the X-ray, they tell us, and we pass it by as a common thing; for it is only one of many wonders. To-morrow it may be a cure for the great white plague of consumption, a fountain of beauty, or even the crystallizing of sunlight. But whatever it is, depend on it, it will elicit no wonder from us, for we are living in the age of4wonders. The century that has just gone out has certainly been a hundred times over the most remarkable century in history. Yes, remarkable for its progress and remarkable for its misery. Tho men have looked deep into the laws of God, and harnessed them in so many ways to move the wheels of their convenience, they have not chained the sorrow-tide of the earth, nor made captive the powers of joy to do their bidding. They would do it, they would harness their wagons to the stars, but the coupling will not hold. To-day’s misery, vice, crime, wretchedness, and despair in all its forms, have never been paralleled in the history of men. True, the world was filled with evil when the Flood came, but it was also young and strong, and knew nothing of the terribleness of weakness. The world finds its god in achievement, its pride in invention, and its boast in progress. But there is no achievement, no attainment, and no progress, where the highest elements of happiness are in retrogression, and where the onward course of invention and commerce serves but to blind men’s eyes to the needs and demands of eternal things. To-day nearly all the achievements in the realm of discovery are made ministers of pride, greed, and intoxication, and there is nothing in it. I tell you that He who spent whole nights in prayer on the mountains of Judea, a poor man with dusty clothes, who added nothing to the inventions and discoveries of the world—I tell you that beside what He accomplished, all that men to-day are doing is like a cloud passing over the mountain. What they have only dreamed of He accomplished for them. He did more than hitch His wagon to a star; He reached up and grasped the hand of the Infinite Maker of stars. He brought down an anchor chain of happiness, and safety, and eternal life for every individual in all the world, and what He did has become the song of the universe. It is only in this small world that its grandeur is drowned by the scream of the locomotive, the whir of wheels, and the echoing thunder of guns. EDISON DRIVER.