Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith | Page 7

so far to bottle up a specimen of that gas and bring it back here to earth and analyze it, to find out whether it was pure and simple, or compound. So they felt quite safe in affirming that there was the genuine, simple, homogeneous gas, in the nebul?, with which Almighty God had nothing whatever to do, but which had first made itself and then had condensed into our present world. But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope opened windows into the nebul?, and showed very plainly that they were on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged simplicity of the nebul?. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No number of finite existences can be eternal. The universe, then, can not be eternal.
Suppose, however, that, for the sake of argument, we should grant our atheistic world-builder his materials, away off beyond the rings of Saturn, or the orbit of Uranus (since he seems to like to have his quarries a good way off from his building), would he be any nearer the completion of his world-making? As Cornwallis declared that the conquest of India resolved itself ultimately into a question of bullocks, the prime consideration in the construction of the world, after you have got your materials, is that of transportation. When one beholds the three great stones in the temple of Baalbec, each weighing eleven hundred tons, built into the wall twenty feet high, and a fourth in the quarry, a mile away, nearly ready for removal, he asks, "How did the builders move those immense stones, and raise them to their places?" And when we behold the quarry out of which these stones were taken, and all the other quarries of the world, and all the everlasting mountains, and the whole of this solid earth, and boundless sea, brought, as our theorists affirm, from far beyond the orbit of the most distant planet, we raise the question of transportation, and demand some account of the wagon and team which hauled them to their places. We can not get rid of the necessity for transportation by evaporating the building stones into gas, for a world of gas weighs just as many tons as the world made out of it. Before we can make a world we must have power; but we can never get power out of the world to build itself. The atheists' world is only a great machine. The first law of mechanics is that action and reaction are equal; consequently machinery can never create power. You will never lift yourself by pulling at your boot-straps; much less can a machine lift and carry itself.
It is no matter how big you make the wheels of your machine, as big as the orbits of the planets if you like, still it is only a machine, unless it has a mind in it; and your big machine can no more create power than a little machine as small as a lady's watch. Nor does it make the least difference in respect to making power, of what materials your perpetual motion peddler makes his machine--whether of a skein of silk on a reel in a bottle, or of steel and zinc electro magnets running upon diamond points, or whether he melts up his steel, and zinc, and diamonds into red hot fire mist; it is still only a machine, made of these materials, as destitute of power as the smaller machines made out of it. The atheists' universe is only a big machine, and no machine can create power, no more than a paving stone.
It has been, however, proposed to manufacture power by the law of gravitation, according to which all bodies attract each other, directly in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the square of their distances. This law appears to prevail as far as our observation extends through space; and our world builders affirm that it must have operated eternally, and that not only were the separate parts of our earth thus drawn together, but that all the orbs of heaven were caused to revolve under its influence.
Suppose, however, we grant that matter was eternal, and the force of gravitation eternally operating upon it, would that sufficiently account for the building up of even our own little planetary system? By no means.
The unresisted force of gravitation would, in far less than an eternity, draw all things together toward the center of gravity of the universe. We should not have separate stars, and suns, and planets, and moons, revolving in orderly orbits, but