Stationary stationery

Littlething

2011-02-02T02:14:00.001+08:00

I (dreamed) till I just couldn't

Too late I understood

It was always half invented

But the other half was good.

If you ever wondered where I've been the last 6 months,

2011-01-23T23:23:00.000+08:00

www.zelpicness.tumblr.com

(Almost) apt.

2010-08-16T15:58:00.002+08:00

我會發著呆然後忘記妳
接著緊緊閉上眼
想著那一天會有人代替
讓我不再想念妳

我會發著呆然後微微笑
接著緊緊閉上眼
又想了一遍妳溫柔的臉
在我忘記之前

心裡的眼淚模糊了視線
妳已快看不見

(Nothing's) Better than Ezra

2010-07-13T00:17:00.002+08:00

Three more weeks.

I actually can't wait to leave.

Just for tonight

2010-05-01T00:49:00.004+08:00

I need to love what I'm doing.

I need to love what I have done.

For it is only then, I will be able

To love what I do in future.

These things I know I must do.

These things I know are right.

But for tonight, let me feel a little less

Than someone who's just not good enough.

I won't always love what I'll never have.

I won't always live in my regrets.

The world's stupidest tourist

2010-03-02T22:19:00.004+08:00

Yesterday we had a meeting in class and one of my classmates brought a book with him.

The name of the book was "Joke Collection" and we read it together.

One of the stories inside it was "The World's Stupidest Tourist".

It was about a world's stupidest person on a trip. And becouse he was so stupid, people cheated him wherever he went.
And during that time, all his money, clothes and his possessions were cheated away from him.
But the tourist was simply too stupid, so they just took all his things with a simple, "Thank you for your help".
He even cried at made up stories and just gave up everything he owned.
In the end he was completely naked and started feeling embarrassed.

So he went out into the forest to hide. But in the forest he met demons.
The demons wanted to eat him, so they came up with a skillful plan to cheat him.
Of course, the tourist fell for it and offered an arm and a leg.
Then at the very end, the tourist had only his head left. He even gave his eyes to the last of the demons.

The demon told him while eating his eyes, "Thank you very much, I've a present for you as well."
But that was a lie too; the so-called present was just a note that said "Idiot!".
The tourist was so touched that he cried at this.
"Thank you! Thank you so much!" he said,
"This is the first time I'm getting a present. I'm really happy, thank you so much!"
And tears just came endlessly out of his empty eye sockets.
And the tourist was left out in the wild where he silently died.

After finishing the story, everyone just laughed.
But then I closed my eyes. I deeply thought about the story of the tourist.
Deeply thinking about that story of how many times he was lied to.
Even when he had only his head left, he still thankfully cried.

And then, I understood it!
Ahh... That's love, isn't it.

Am I right?
Loss... All sorts of pain... He never thought of himself.
Even though he's an idiot to a lot of people, but to me he's not an idiot at all.
A lot of people would take a chance to cheat him, but I would never do that.
I want to make him happy. That's all.

What about you? Do you think of him as an idiot?
Close your eyes... What are you thinking about?

We can live like this

2010-02-18T02:35:00.004+08:00

But if you left it up to me

Everyday would be a holiday from real

We'd waste our weeks beneath the sun

We'd lie and tell our friends it's so much fun out here

But when it's all over

I'll come back for another year.

The Future Freaks Me Out

2010-02-11T16:02:00.005+08:00

Just submitted my application to Cornell's study program this Fall and I'm feeling eggcited and scared and lackluster at the same time. The process was rather half-hearted. On top of filling out particulars and submitting academic transcripts, I had to write a motivation letter (why Cornell?) and academic interest letter (what modules to take) and there were some issues with the referral letter that I can't mention here no matter how much I want to. In a nutshell, I was doing this alone. No one was really interested in applying because of the staggering cost (we have to pay a whopping USD 18,875 in tuition fee plus the regular SMU semester fee, and that's not even including lodging, food and transport) so I'm in this by myself.

It's not so much of going there alone that's scary, but the fact that everything about this is so unsure. Even my reasons for going aren't that fantastic. A friend asked me why I wanted to go even when it's so expensive. I could only reply "It's Cornelllllll." Now I know how my friends studying overseas felt some years ago, and that's only a tiny fraction of what they're going through and what I'll experience in time to come. If I even get in.

But really, am I doing the right thing here? I can give all the reasons in the world that would be convincing, like I want to experience the culture there, meet global Christians, learn in the kind of environment Cornell provides its students, and everything else I wrote in my motivation letter. But maybe I'm just trying to escape Singapore and my self here. Ever since this semester started, I'm just going for classes, handing up assignments every week, having four hours of sleep a night, studying for midterms, and worrying that everything I'm doing now isn't gonna match up to everything else. Yet isn't this how it's supposed to be? When I'm in Cornell, I'm a student too.

I feel so far away from myself. What I used to be like. Even leaving my assignments aside routinely to serve in ministry, go out with friends, shop for CNY clothes, watch concerts and performances etc. now seem like chores I have to do; to check off my list; to at least appear that I have a wholesome lifestyle. But my heart isn't in the things I do anymore.

And we can't always be doing stuff. We're called human beings for a reason right?

I am so tired. Had a midterm this morning. Twas alright, not expecting much. Next week, I have three midterms back-to-back and an assignment due. 新年快樂, seriously.

Anyway, I just went on a chocolate spree in Watson's and since nothing else goes better with chocolate than milk, I wanted to buy a carton in school. To my shock, there isn't a single tenant in SMU that sells milk. I went to Koufu, Screme, Treehouse; even Settler's Cafe to ask and no one could help me. WHY LIDDAT. :(

I really wish to drink milk now, but 7-11's too far away. Boohoo.

Sometimes, all you need is one

2010-01-25T23:28:00.007+08:00

So many challenges

Such little courage

So much burden

Such fleeting passion

So many things

Such little time

One big world

One small me

One amazing God.

Begin

2010-01-16T17:18:00.002+08:00

Nothing is aimless if you see its value and trust in God's faithfulness.

Not even waiting. :)

An interesting observation

2009-11-27T15:52:00.001+08:00

Taking one's birthday off FB this year does make quite a lot of difference in the number of wishes I got. Yesterday I was wondering if that was a good thing or not.

Today, I've decided that it is.

To those who remembered: Thank you, so much.

To those who forgot: It's alright, though I wish you didn't.

To those who didn't know: Well, now you do (haha Huixin).

Birthday wishes:

1) I won't always love what I'll never have.

2) I won't always live in my regrets.

Why I go for CG

2009-10-23T00:21:00.017+08:00

It's Week 10. And my plate is spilling over.

You don't have to be an SMU student to know how much shit we're dealing with every week. And this period's kinda the worst. You see either fuming faces pressed for time, marching at top speed and cursing under their breath at inefficient project mates or happy JC kids studying in the vicinity (WHY ARE WE PAYING $4.5K A MONTH FOR YOU TO SIT ON OUR BENCHES), or decaying zombies hanging by a thread, dragging their sorry self around unlike their Left 4 Dead brothers who are at least a tad more excitable.

They're everywhere.

And I was both these groups (though not at the same time) for quite a while. Until I decided to drop everything and come back to God at Fort Canning Park.

We sat in a circle facing each other for the first time in ages and pages. With an electric lamp in the middle, its light reflecting our exhausted faces (I don't think many of us have ever climbed a slope with food from Kopitiam in one hand and our laptops in the other). With carpet grass beneath our tired feet and trees embracing our huddled backs. All under one big sky with an even bigger God.

I guess I could always say, "Wellllll it's all good and refreshing cos I'll get to recharge and yadaayadaa but WHAT ABOUT MY ETHICS REPORT AND MPW READINGS AND MA PRESENTATION AND FT ASSIGNMENT?? I could've completed half the pile in that 3 hours."

And I guess I could always reply, "Wellllll it's all good and refreshing cos I get to sleep more and yadaayadaa but WHAT ABOUT MISSING OUT ON GOD'S PRESENCE AND HIS PEOPLE WHOM I NEED MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE?? I'll never get that experience at that point in time ever again."

Thank God I NEVER talk to myself.

Everyone needs a break once in a while. We're not machines. As a matter of fact, machines do break down and become obsolete. Or rust. Or explode. Or get out of point haha. So for some people, they choose to unwind with friends. For me, I choose to rest in God. Because I know when I get home, I won't.

And that's good enough a reason for me.

To end off a great day, I was greeted with a pint of Burnt Caramel ice cream from Island Creamery when I opened the freezer to satisfy my nightly ice-cube chewing habit. THANKS, MUM. You are damn awesome.

Now back to Management Accounting.

Don't bother translating.

2009-09-28T00:20:00.003+08:00

私は考えているものを私が知っていることを望む。私は暗闇で保たれたいと思わない。それはずっと1年既にである、けれどもそれはまだ時々傷つく。あるものがあなたの心に私に言いなさい。自由な私置かれる。お願いだから。

Whilst searching for my iPod cable,

2009-09-27T00:32:00.008+08:00

I came across a sermon notebook buried from almost 2 years ago. And on the last page it says:

Some people say that in this world, out of a population of 4 billion people, there exists only one person that loves you more than you love him/her; more than you love other people; and most importantly, more than you'll ever love yourself.

And since that chance is 1 in 4 billion, if you manage to met that person, you'll be really lucky right?

But I was thinking, if this statement is really true, aren't we all already the luckiest people in the world?

Cos we don't have to climb the highest mountains or swim the deepest seas to find that person. All we need to do is to look no further than our own Bibles to realize who that special someone is.

We love God cos He first loved us. Even when we sin and forget His love, take it for granted or even stop loving Him altogether, He will always love us faithfully, just like how the sun's rays will never fail to reach the ground no matter how many trees block it, or how deep the ground is. So it's up to the seed in the ground to find its way through the darkness and go towards the light. Of course, it will run into problems, like its roots may be caught under some rocks, or the ground may be too hard to break through. But as long as the sun continues to shine, that seed has a purpose to live on.

---

Now I understand why it's so important to journal your thoughts down. Because sometimes the only reminder you really need comes from within.

Okay back to cable hunting. Methinks my sister sneaked it off to Down Under. Rawrrr.

From here

2009-09-02T01:39:00.001+08:00

Uncommon amount of the time at home
Hardly a word on the telephone
Finally find the time to get to know you
Mapping it out like a master plan
Something to do with my idle hands
Write you a letter addressed from California

It's vivid and strong in my memory
An absence that smacks of abandoning
It led to the battle that ultimately destroyed us
I'm nothing if I don't know your mistakes
The pill is as bitter as I can take
It twists like a blade when I leave for California

I hope that you know this is killing me
It's all in the name of the family
We only can play the cards the dealer dealt us
The end of the cycle is closing in
With you I see new hope begin again
There suddenly seems to be promise in California

As heavy as all this is weighing me
Believe in the words I am promising
I'm still here for ~~her~~ you
The distance is only an obstacle
Hardly a match for a miracle
I'm finally ready to go to California

Quiet IS my loudest cry.

2009-08-07T01:59:00.001+08:00

The most important things are the hardest things to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for the want of a teller but for the want of an understanding ear.

TheManWhoFellAsleep

2009-07-03T01:42:00.000+08:00

I have my theories. I have my theories about life and people and all the other ephemera. They call me a fool. Well, talk is cheap. Show me the Benjamins.

Let me tell you about my friend Frank. Frank works for the local council, clearing up the borough. He is an enthusiastic and diligent employee: no piece of litter is too small to be spiked and collected by Frank. He has won numerous 'Employee of the month' awards because of his dedication to his work. And he loves his work. He feels he is making an active, worthwhile contribution to the community. Everyone knows him and appreciates what he does for the area.

Except... except when he is drunk. Not even drunk, merely when he has a drink. Whether a small glass of Merlot, a shot of Bell's whisky, even a half of shandy, he becomes a different person. His eyes glaze over. His voice lowers an octave and he acquires a different accent.

When he is in this state, he undoes all his good work. He rips apart rubbish bags and strews the contents across the streets. He takes empty cans of Coke and impales them upon railings. He tips ripped-up chairs over the fence into the scrubby foliage by Alexandra Palace station. He goes to the bottle bank and liberates the glass, smashing it across the pavement into the road.

When he awakens the next day, he has no recollection of his destructive actions.

Some people say that he bottles up his feelings, and that's why he screws things up when he is pissed. That is wrong. Frank is an agent of balance: he is subconsciously working to achieve cosmic alignment. He is an example of the forces that keep society in check. Sober, he is a force of order. Drunk, he is a force of chaos. To some degree we are all agents of balance: the doctor who treats his patients but beats up his wife, the accountant who fritters away her money in the pub, the comedian who wallows in sadness. We do and undo. Three steps forward, three steps back. It's like a nice dance. Only with more broken glass than the average dance floor.

Sunny Day

2009-06-18T02:52:00.000+08:00

What spilled out
Wasn’t a tear but a praying voice.
What I looked up at
Was the sun above the clouds.

I was living like I was asleep
I was always alone.
Until the day I met you
I was always, always here.

Even if there’s a love song
I could sing by myself,
This warmth from the touch of your arms
Can’t be found alone.

If I had put on a mask
Then I felt like I might have forgotten.
I shut away my memories
And locked them in a box.

Even in that dark place
I was able to find you.
Even if I can’t return
I’ll keep going farther, farther.

Even if there’s a love song
That recalls loneliness,
I can’t reach it alone.
So I’ll walk out once more
Toward the door to tomorrow
With you…

I’ll transform sadness
Into kindness
And someday
Once I’ve set my true self free,
The pain will disappear
I know it.

I don’t need a love song
I can sing by myself anymore.
I can’t find it alone
But with you I know
We can find a place where the sun shines
A tomorrow I’ve never seen.

Sweet Rain

2009-06-05T01:52:00.000+08:00

Tell me, what do you think about death?

That’s my line.

Answer me anyway.

Death is nothing special.

That’s right. Everyone dies someday, so it’s not special at all. But that’s easy for you to say. I mean you see lots of people as they die. But you don’t see any of them as they live. So you don’t really know life. That’s the reason you can say death is nothing special.

Is life special?

Against the whole world or all of history, one life is nothing special. But for those of us living it, it’s very important.

Not special, but important?

Yes. The sun in the sky is nothing unusual. But it’s important that it be there. Death’s like that, maybe.

The phrase that pays

2009-05-24T03:31:00.005+08:00

As happens sometimes, a moment settled and hovered and remained for much more than a moment. And sound stopped and movement stopped for much, much more than a moment. Then gradually time awakened again and moved sluggishly on.

Maybe that's the reason why I've stopped making sense of my thoughts altogether and filled these spaces with words not of my own.

Zelanie is dying.

thnks fr th mmrs

2009-05-12T03:04:00.007+08:00

Time: 26 April to 10 May
Venue: SilkAir MI 706, Elephant Nature Park; Hui Bak Bak village; Chiang Mai City

"Can we have another set please?"--Me, Qian Jin, Yee Siang
Green apple flavored ice lollies (2 for 5 baht)!
"It's because I don't know how to get to the Night Bazaar that I'm still here waiting for someone to bring us there. If I know, confirm cheong already."--Yee Chuan

Sleeping at 10pm every night and waking up at 6am without a care in the world (except worrying about whether I can shit today)
Squatting down to bathe for all 14 days cos water pressure from the shower head was just too pathetic
Top 40 by Daniel and Diyana
Charging elephants
Random dogs (especially Mr Wisely a.k.a. Mookie)
Random dog fights during debriefs
Bathing with bugs the size of 2 dollar notes
"Why are we still here?!"--Yuan Zhi
Han Yang the mahout
Asshole daidee (with Revolution!)
"Hey guys we go!"--Jack
Cutting corn(ers)

Riding on pickup trucks with Chom the insane driver
Listening to the same 8 songs on loop for 2 hours up to Hui Bak Bak cos Chom had only that one CD
Tissue paper tennis!
Almost buying a yoghurt drink which expired 5 years ago
Building a well = Wading helplessly in waist-deep mud
"Look into my eyes: I am The Guru!"--Yee Chuan
BBQ Man!
Anaeroxic pigs
Pelican burger
Powder baths + Slumber parties
Getting owned by a chicken (thanks Edmund)
CHANNEL 7 (Y)
Walk With Me After Debrief by The Chuai Duais
"You wait awhile; 3 minute."--Sak
~~Grocery shopping~~ Collecting bricks with Sak
Stubborn cows that didn't let us cross the bridge
Starry starry nights

Impromptu KTV session on the way back to ENP
Awesome Thai massages
"You bid 4 hearts ah? If you win I will eat this table plus the tablecloth."--Edmund.
I won.
Green tea that doesn't taste like green tea
Fries with ketchup and mayo
MAGGI MEE
Mango sticky rice!
"My first memory was of my sister feeding me fried rice."--Jacob
Trekking to waterfalls (and peeing in one with Huixin)
Tubing down ENP river
First (and last) drinking session with Grant
Skipping stones
Bamboo rafting!!

Jacob: Those school years were fun.. Especially rugby
Everyone (in awe): You play rugby??
Jacob: No, I just supported their matches

Walking some 20 km to Elephant Haven with elephants and random dogs
Sleeping with everyone under one roof in Elephant Haven
Walking some 20 km back to ENP
"Cannot, cannot, cannot. Seriously cannot."--Me, Sab, Yee Chuan and everyone else
Weeding and digging with Sab
Cleaning erephant and buffro poo
Sleeping on the observation deck before lunch
"Oh VOW"; "Go to the hell"; "Watchew say?"--Chom/Edmund. No one really knows.
iPod sessions + random moments + heart-to-heart talks with Huixin
Life Journeys

Walking into a private function by accident (omg this was hilarious)
Watching a live band and its members get high for an audience of.. ten?
Making this list over the days I was there so I won't forget what should be remembered

And most of all..
Seeing God's greatness in His creations half an hour before dinner every single day

Life is like (Starbucks) Hot Chocolate

2009-04-18T00:06:00.006+08:00

A group of graduates, well established in their careers, were talking at a reunion and decided to go visit their old university professor, now retired. During their visit, the conversation turned to complaints about stress in their work and lives.

Offering his guests hot chocolate, the professor went into the kitchen and returned with a large pot of hot chocolate and an assortment of cups--porcelain, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite--telling them to help themselves to the hot chocolate.

When they all had a cup of hot chocolate in hand, the professor said:

"Notice that all the nice looking, expensive cups were taken, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. The cup that you're drinking from adds nothing to the quality of the hot chocolate. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was hot chocolate, not the cup; but you consciously went for the best cups... And then you began eyeing each other's cups.

Now consider this: Life is the hot chocolate; your job, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain life. The cup you have does not define, nor change the quality of life you have. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the hot chocolate God has provided us.

God makes the hot chocolate, man chooses the cups. The happiest people don't have the best of everything. They just make the best of everything that they have."

Live simply.
Love generously.
Care deeply.
Speak kindly.

And enjoy your hot chocolate.

The world You love

2009-04-12T02:46:00.006+08:00

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won.

It exists.
It is real.
It is possible.

It's yours.

Note to self

2009-04-02T16:42:00.001+08:00

Why don't you come to your senses?
Come down from your fences, open the gate
It may be raining, but there's a rainbow above you

You better let somebody love you, before it's too late.

Excuse the incoherence

2009-03-08T02:44:00.009+08:00

I've been watching Boys Before Flowers for some time now and in the recent episodes Kim Hyun Joong cut his hair. WHICH MAKES HIM LOOK LIKE YAMAPI omgomgomgomgomg.

Kim Hyun Joong as Yoon Ji Hoo, Boys Before Flowers

Yamashita Tomohisa as Iwase Ken, Proposal Daisakusen

This is so scary.

I know probably 99% of you don't know what I'm talking about, or don't even care. In fact the only person I wanted to tell this to is Fuiyi, but she's not in Singapore and not online. Hence this post.

But somehow, it's not as electrifying as it would've felt if I was talking to Fuiyi now. This chain of events, it's mind-boggling...

I gasp in shock when Kim Hyun Joong first appears with his new hairdo in episode 15.
I almost dial Fuiyi's SG number (haha what a loser).
I look for her online (and fail in the process).
I think of people I know who know Yamapi and Kim Jyun Hoong (and fail in the process).
I contemplate shouting this out loud with my MSN nick (and fail in the process).
I blog this down in a somewhat lackluster attempt to quell my unsettled nerves (and fail in the process).

And in that mere 20 minutes, the thrill of discovering something amazing just dwindled into an anti-climatic blob; pushed bitterly to the back of my mind and forgotten. And it happened so fast...

If only there was someone out there whom I can tell this piece of news to.

If only I put in this much effort for every person who still doesn't know.

If only I could feel this desperate for every friend that I didn't share Christ with.

If only...

Firefight

2009-03-06T23:38:00.002+08:00

Is there an answer?
And if it's an honest one, honestly worth its question?
There's no question
The city as my witness
I am who I wanna be, but you could be anything
Just be anything here with me

Love is quartz and breath the secondhand
If you let go then that's where time will stand

It's firefight, and I, I won't run
There is spit and spite all through my blood
For you and me, there's nowhere left to hide
Except you and me, there's no one else alive.

There is a light that never goes out

2009-02-17T03:01:00.007+08:00

But

For every bulb that glows with a click
There is always one with a faulty switch.
A secret reject from General Electric
The one thing Bob the Builder can't fix.

Maybe the sun will shine on my side tomorrow.

Maybe.

23

2009-02-04T01:50:00.003+08:00

You'll sit alone forever
If you wait for the right time
What are you hoping for?

I'm here
I'm now
I'm ready

Holding on tight
Don't give away the end
The one thing that stays mine.

Leonard Cohen

2009-01-10T00:08:00.000+08:00

Like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.
Like a worm on a hook,
like a knight from some old fashioned book
I have saved all my ribbons for thee.
If I, if I have been unkind,
I hope that you can just let it go by.
If I, if I have been untrue
I hope you know it was never to you.

Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.
But I swear by this song
and by all that I have done wrong
I will make it all up to thee.
I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
he said to me, "Don't ask for so much."
And a young man leaning in his darkened door,
she cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh like a bird on the wire,
like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free.

Breath

2009-01-06T00:20:00.005+08:00

It's funny, but you never think much about breathing.

Until it's all you ever think about.

(A)typical Birthday-Story

2008-11-26T01:56:00.000+08:00

It's tragic to realize this relapsing trend of not updating my blog during school term. Even more so when I read past entries and learn that my daily enlightenments have plummeted to virtually zero as an SMU student (oh the irony!).

Nevertheless, I've been blessed much the past 4 months with a great CG, really good friends, and hopefully, God-glorifying results to come.

So here's to being a year older, wiser, and closer with God. :)

---

The Happy Prince

by Oscar Wilde

High above the city, on a tall column, stood the statue of the Happy Prince. He was gilded all over with thin leaves of fine gold, for eyes he had two bright sapphires, and a large red ruby glowed on his sword-hilt.

He was very much admired indeed. "He is as beautiful as a weathercock," remarked one of the Town Councillors who wished to gain a reputation for having artistic tastes; "only not quite so useful," he added, fearing lest people should think him unpractical, which he really was not.

"Why can't you be like the Happy Prince?" asked a sensible mother of her little boy who was crying for the moon. "The Happy Prince never dreams of crying for anything."

"I am glad there is some one in the world who is quite happy," muttered a disappointed man as he gazed at the wonderful statue.

"He looks just like an angel," said the Charity Children as they came out of the cathedral in their bright scarlet cloaks and their clean white pinafores.

"How do you know?" said the Mathematical Master, "you have never seen one."

"Ah! but we have, in our dreams," answered the children; and the Mathematical Master frowned and looked very severe, for he did not approve of children dreaming.

One night there flew over the city a little Swallow. His friends had gone away to Egypt six weeks before, but he had stayed behind, for he was in love with the most beautiful Reed. He had met her early in the spring as he was flying down the river after a big yellow moth, and had been so attracted by her slender waist that he had stopped to talk to her.

"Shall I love you?" said the Swallow, who liked to come to the point at once, and the Reed made him a low bow. So he flew round and round her, touching the water with his wings, and making silver ripples. This was his courtship, and it lasted all through the summer.

"It is a ridiculous attachment," twittered the other Swallows; "she has no money, and far too many relations"; and indeed the river was quite full of Reeds. Then, when the autumn came they all flew away.

After they had gone he felt lonely, and began to tire of his lady- love. "She has no conversation," he said, "and I am afraid that she is a coquette, for she is always flirting with the wind." And certainly, whenever the wind blew, the Reed made the most graceful curtseys. "I admit that she is domestic," he continued, "but I love travelling, and my wife, consequently, should love travelling also."

"Will you come away with me?" he said finally to her; but the Reed shook her head, she was so attached to her home.

"You have been trifling with me," he cried. "I am off to the Pyramids. Good-bye!" and he flew away.

All day long he flew, and at night-time he arrived at the city. "Where shall I put up?" he said; "I hope the town has made preparations."

Then he saw the statue on the tall column.

"I will put up there," he cried; "it is a fine position, with plenty of fresh air." So he alighted just between the feet of the Happy Prince.

"I have a golden bedroom," he said softly to himself as he looked round, and he prepared to go to sleep; but just as he was putting his head under his wing a large drop of water fell on him. "What a curious thing!" he cried; "there is not a single cloud in the sky, the stars are quite clear and bright, and yet it is raining. The climate in the north of Europe is really dreadful. The Reed used to like the rain, but that was merely her selfishness."

Then another drop fell.

"What is the use of a statue if it cannot keep the rain off?" he said; "I must look for a good chimney-pot," and he determined to fly away.

But before he had opened his wings, a third drop fell, and he looked up, and saw - Ah! what did he see?

The eyes of the Happy Prince were filled with tears, and tears were running down his golden cheeks. His face was so beautiful in the moonlight that the little Swallow was filled with pity.

"Who are you?" he said.

"I am the Happy Prince."

"Why are you weeping then?" asked the Swallow; "you have quite drenched me."

"When I was alive and had a human heart," answered the statue, "I did not know what tears were, for I lived in the Palace of Sans- Souci, where sorrow is not allowed to enter. In the daytime I played with my companions in the garden, and in the evening I led the dance in the Great Hall. Round the garden ran a very lofty wall, but I never cared to ask what lay beyond it, everything about me was so beautiful. My courtiers called me the Happy Prince, and happy indeed I was, if pleasure be happiness. So I lived, and so I died. And now that I am dead they have set me up here so high that I can see all the ugliness and all the misery of my city, and though my heart is made of lead yet I cannot chose but weep."

"What! is he not solid gold?" said the Swallow to himself. He was too polite to make any personal remarks out loud.

"Far away," continued the statue in a low musical voice, "far away in a little street there is a poor house. One of the windows is open, and through it I can see a woman seated at a table. Her face is thin and worn, and she has coarse, red hands, all pricked by the needle, for she is a seamstress. She is embroidering passion- flowers on a satin gown for the loveliest of the Queen's maids-of- honour to wear at the next Court-ball. In a bed in the corner of the room her little boy is lying ill. He has a fever, and is asking for oranges. His mother has nothing to give him but river water, so he is crying. Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow, will you not bring her the ruby out of my sword-hilt? My feet are fastened to this pedestal and I cannot move."

"I am waited for in Egypt," said the Swallow. "My friends are flying up and down the Nile, and talking to the large lotus- flowers. Soon they will go to sleep in the tomb of the great King. The King is there himself in his painted coffin. He is wrapped in yellow linen, and embalmed with spices. Round his neck is a chain of pale green jade, and his hands are like withered leaves."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me for one night, and be my messenger? The boy is so thirsty, and the mother so sad."

"I don't think I like boys," answered the Swallow. "Last summer, when I was staying on the river, there were two rude boys, the miller's sons, who were always throwing stones at me. They never hit me, of course; we swallows fly far too well for that, and besides, I come of a family famous for its agility; but still, it was a mark of disrespect."

But the Happy Prince looked so sad that the little Swallow was sorry. "It is very cold here," he said; "but I will stay with you for one night, and be your messenger."

"Thank you, little Swallow," said the Prince.

So the Swallow picked out the great ruby from the Prince's sword, and flew away with it in his beak over the roofs of the town.

He passed by the cathedral tower, where the white marble angels were sculptured. He passed by the palace and heard the sound of dancing. A beautiful girl came out on the balcony with her lover. "How wonderful the stars are," he said to her, "and how wonderful is the power of love!"

"I hope my dress will be ready in time for the State-ball," she answered; "I have ordered passion-flowers to be embroidered on it; but the seamstresses are so lazy."

He passed over the river, and saw the lanterns hanging to the masts of the ships. He passed over the Ghetto, and saw the old Jews bargaining with each other, and weighing out money in copper scales. At last he came to the poor house and looked in. The boy was tossing feverishly on his bed, and the mother had fallen asleep, she was so tired. In he hopped, and laid the great ruby on the table beside the woman's thimble. Then he flew gently round the bed, fanning the boy's forehead with his wings. "How cool I feel," said the boy, "I must be getting better"; and he sank into a delicious slumber.

Then the Swallow flew back to the Happy Prince, and told him what he had done. "It is curious," he remarked, "but I feel quite warm now, although it is so cold."

"That is because you have done a good action," said the Prince. And the little Swallow began to think, and then he fell asleep. Thinking always made him sleepy.

When day broke he flew down to the river and had a bath. "What a remarkable phenomenon," said the Professor of Ornithology as he was passing over the bridge. "A swallow in winter!" And he wrote a long letter about it to the local newspaper. Every one quoted it, it was full of so many words that they could not understand.

"To-night I go to Egypt," said the Swallow, and he was in high spirits at the prospect. He visited all the public monuments, and sat a long time on top of the church steeple. Wherever he went the Sparrows chirruped, and said to each other, "What a distinguished stranger!" so he enjoyed himself very much.

When the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince. "Have you any commissions for Egypt?" he cried; "I am just starting."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"I am waited for in Egypt," answered the Swallow. "To-morrow my friends will fly up to the Second Cataract. The river-horse couches there among the bulrushes, and on a great granite throne sits the God Memnon. All night long he watches the stars, and when the morning star shines he utters one cry of joy, and then he is silent. At noon the yellow lions come down to the water's edge to drink. They have eyes like green beryls, and their roar is louder than the roar of the cataract."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "far away across the city I see a young man in a garret. He is leaning over a desk covered with papers, and in a tumbler by his side there is a bunch of withered violets. His hair is brown and crisp, and his lips are red as a pomegranate, and he has large and dreamy eyes. He is trying to finish a play for the Director of the Theatre, but he is too cold to write any more. There is no fire in the grate, and hunger has made him faint."

"I will wait with you one night longer," said the Swallow, who really had a good heart. "Shall I take him another ruby?"

"Alas! I have no ruby now," said the Prince; "my eyes are all that I have left. They are made of rare sapphires, which were brought out of India a thousand years ago. Pluck out one of them and take it to him. He will sell it to the jeweller, and buy food and firewood, and finish his play."

"Dear Prince," said the Swallow, "I cannot do that"; and he began to weep.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So the Swallow plucked out the Prince's eye, and flew away to the student's garret. It was easy enough to get in, as there was a hole in the roof. Through this he darted, and came into the room. The young man had his head buried in his hands, so he did not hear the flutter of the bird's wings, and when he looked up he found the beautiful sapphire lying on the withered violets.

"I am beginning to be appreciated," he cried; "this is from some great admirer. Now I can finish my play," and he looked quite happy.

The next day the Swallow flew down to the harbour. He sat on the mast of a large vessel and watched the sailors hauling big chests out of the hold with ropes. "Heave a-hoy!" they shouted as each chest came up. "I am going to Egypt"! cried the Swallow, but nobody minded, and when the moon rose he flew back to the Happy Prince.

"I am come to bid you good-bye," he cried.

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "will you not stay with me one night longer?"

"It is winter," answered the Swallow, "and the chill snow will soon be here. In Egypt the sun is warm on the green palm-trees, and the crocodiles lie in the mud and look lazily about them. My companions are building a nest in the Temple of Baalbec, and the pink and white doves are watching them, and cooing to each other. Dear Prince, I must leave you, but I will never forget you, and next spring I will bring you back two beautiful jewels in place of those you have given away. The ruby shall be redder than a red rose, and the sapphire shall be as blue as the great sea."

"In the square below," said the Happy Prince, "there stands a little match-girl. She has let her matches fall in the gutter, and they are all spoiled. Her father will beat her if she does not bring home some money, and she is crying. She has no shoes or stockings, and her little head is bare. Pluck out my other eye, and give it to her, and her father will not beat her."

"I will stay with you one night longer," said the Swallow, "but I cannot pluck out your eye. You would be quite blind then."

"Swallow, Swallow, little Swallow," said the Prince, "do as I command you."

So he plucked out the Prince's other eye, and darted down with it. He swooped past the match-girl, and slipped the jewel into the palm of her hand. "What a lovely bit of glass," cried the little girl; and she ran home, laughing.

Then the Swallow came back to the Prince. "You are blind now," he said, "so I will stay with you always."

"No, little Swallow," said the poor Prince, "you must go away to Egypt."

"I will stay with you always," said the Swallow, and he slept at the Prince's feet.

All the next day he sat on the Prince's shoulder, and told him stories of what he had seen in strange lands. He told him of the red ibises, who stand in long rows on the banks of the Nile, and catch gold-fish in their beaks; of the Sphinx, who is as old as the world itself, and lives in the desert, and knows everything; of the merchants, who walk slowly by the side of their camels, and carry amber beads in their hands; of the King of the Mountains of the Moon, who is as black as ebony, and worships a large crystal; of the great green snake that sleeps in a palm-tree, and has twenty priests to feed it with honey-cakes; and of the pygmies who sail over a big lake on large flat leaves, and are always at war with the butterflies.

"Dear little Swallow," said the Prince, "you tell me of marvellous things, but more marvellous than anything is the suffering of men and of women. There is no Mystery so great as Misery. Fly over my city, little Swallow, and tell me what you see there."

So the Swallow flew over the great city, and saw the rich making merry in their beautiful houses, while the beggars were sitting at the gates. He flew into dark lanes, and saw the white faces of starving children looking out listlessly at the black streets. Under the archway of a bridge two little boys were lying in one another's arms to try and keep themselves warm. "How hungry we are!" they said. "You must not lie here," shouted the Watchman, and they wandered out into the rain.

Then he flew back and told the Prince what he had seen.

"I am covered with fine gold," said the Prince, "you must take it off, leaf by leaf, and give it to my poor; the living always think that gold can make them happy."

Leaf after leaf of the fine gold the Swallow picked off, till the Happy Prince looked quite dull and grey. Leaf after leaf of the fine gold he brought to the poor, and the children's faces grew rosier, and they laughed and played games in the street. "We have bread now!" they cried.

Then the snow came, and after the snow came the frost. The streets looked as if they were made of silver, they were so bright and glistening; long icicles like crystal daggers hung down from the eaves of the houses, everybody went about in furs, and the little boys wore scarlet caps and skated on the ice.

The poor little Swallow grew colder and colder, but he would not leave the Prince, he loved him too well. He picked up crumbs outside the baker's door when the baker was not looking and tried to keep himself warm by flapping his wings.

But at last he knew that he was going to die. He had just strength to fly up to the Prince's shoulder once more. "Good-bye, dear Prince!" he murmured, "will you let me kiss your hand?"

"I am glad that you are going to Egypt at last, little Swallow," said the Prince, "you have stayed too long here; but you must kiss me on the lips, for I love you."

"It is not to Egypt that I am going," said the Swallow. "I am going to the House of Death. Death is the brother of Sleep, is he not?"

And he kissed the Happy Prince on the lips, and fell down dead at his feet.

At that moment a curious crack sounded inside the statue, as if something had broken. The fact is that the leaden heart had snapped right in two. It certainly was a dreadfully hard frost.

Early the next morning the Mayor was walking in the square below in company with the Town Councillors. As they passed the column he looked up at the statue: "Dear me! how shabby the Happy Prince looks!" he said.

"How shabby indeed!" cried the Town Councillors, who always agreed with the Mayor; and they went up to look at it.

"The ruby has fallen out of his sword, his eyes are gone, and he is golden no longer," said the Mayor in fact, "he is litttle beter than a beggar!"

"Little better than a beggar," said the Town Councillors.

"And here is actually a dead bird at his feet!" continued the Mayor. "We must really issue a proclamation that birds are not to be allowed to die here." And the Town Clerk made a note of the suggestion.

So they pulled down the statue of the Happy Prince. "As he is no longer beautiful he is no longer useful," said the Art Professor at the University.

Then they melted the statue in a furnace, and the Mayor held a meeting of the Corporation to decide what was to be done with the metal. "We must have another statue, of course," he said, "and it shall be a statue of myself."

"Of myself," said each of the Town Councillors, and they quarrelled. When I last heard of them they were quarrelling still.

"What a strange thing!" said the overseer of the workmen at the foundry. "This broken lead heart will not melt in the furnace. We must throw it away." So they threw it on a dust-heap where the dead Swallow was also lying.

"Bring me the two most precious things in the city," said God to one of His Angels; and the Angel brought Him the leaden heart and the dead bird.

"You have rightly chosen," said God, "for in my garden of Paradise this little bird shall sing for evermore, and in my city of gold the Happy Prince shall praise me."

#32. When this World is Not (The Very Last)

2008-11-25T22:29:00.000+08:00

"The day of the Lord will come...; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

What is there after that?

To this question there are three answers:

I. There are left all of what may be called natural forces that there were before the world was created. They are not dependent on it. The sea is not lost when one bubble or a thousand break on the rocky shore. The world is not the main thing in the universe. It is only a temporary contrivance, a mere scaffolding for a special purpose. When that purpose is fulfilled it is natural that it should pass away. The time then comes when the voice that shook the earth should signify the removal of "those things that are shaken, as of things that are made, that those things which cannot be shaken may remain." We already have a kingdom that cannot be moved. "The things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal."

It should not be supposed that the space away from the world is an empty desert. God is everywhere, and creative energy is omnipresent. Not merely is a millionth of space occupied where the worlds are, but all space is full of God and his manifestations of wisdom and power. David could think of no place of hiding from that presence. The first word of revelation is, "In the beginning God created the heaven." And the great angel, standing on sea and land when time is to be no longer, swears by Him who "created heaven, and the things that therein are," in distinction from the earth and its things that are to be removed. What God created with things that are therein is not empty. Poets, the true seers, recognize this. When Longfellow died one of them, remembering the heartbreaking hunt of Gabriel for Evangeline, and their passing each other on opposite sides of an island in the Mississippi, makes him say of his wife long since gone before:

And now I shall seek her once more,
On some Mississippi's vast tide
That flows the whole universe through,
Than earth's widest rivers more wide.

Evangeline I shall not miss
Though we wander the dim starry sheen,
On opposite sides of rivers so vast
That islands of worlds intervene.

But what is there in space? There is the great ceaseless force of gravitation. Though the weakest of natural forces, yet when displayed in world-masses its might is measureless by man's arithmetic. Tie an apple or a stone to one end of a string, and taking the other end whirl it around your finger, noting its pull. That depends on the weight of the whirling ball, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. The stone let loose from David's finger flies crashing into the head of Goliath. But suppose the stone is eight thousand miles in diameter, the string ninety-two million five hundred thousand miles long, and the swiftness one thousand miles a minute, what needs be the tensile strength of the string? If we covered the whole side of the earth next the sun, from pole to pole and from side to side, with steel wires attaching the earth to the sun, thus representing the tension of gravitation, the wires would need to be so many that a mouse could not run around among them.

There swings the moon above us. Its best service is not its light, though lovers prize that highly. Its gravitative work is its best. It lifts the sea and pours it into every river and fiord of the coast. Our universal tug-boat is in the sky. It saves millions of dollars in towage to London alone every year. And this world would not be habitable without the moon to wash out every festering swamp and deposit of sewage along the shore.

Gravitation reaches every place, whether worlds be there or not. This force is universally present and effective. In the possibilities of a no-world condition a spirit may be able to so relate itself to matter that gravitation would impart its incredible swiftness of transference to a soul thus temporarily relating itself to matter. What gravitation does in the absence of the kind of matter we know it is difficult to assert. But as will be seen in our second division there is still ample room for its exercise when worlds as such have ceased to be.

In space empty of worlds there is light. It flies or runs one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles a second. There must be somewhat on which its wing-beat shall fall, stepping stones for its hurrying feet. We call it ether, not knowing what we mean. But in this space is the play of intensest force and quickest activity. There are hundreds of millions of millions of wing-beats or footfalls in a second. Mathematical necessities surpass mental conceptions. In a cubic mile of space there are demonstrably seventy millions of foot tons of power. Steam and lightning have nothing comparable to the activity and power of the celestial ether. Sir William Thompson thinks he has proved that a cubic mile of celestial ether may have as little as one billionth of a pound of ponderable matter. It is too fine for our experimentation, too strong for our measurement. We must get rid of our thumby fingers first.

What is light doing in space? That has greatly puzzled all philosophers. Without question there is inexpressible power. It is seen in velocity. But what is it doing? The law of conservation of force forbids the thought that it can be wasted. On the earth its power long ages ago was turned into coal. The power was reservoired in mountains ready for man. It is so great that a piece of coal that weighs the same as a silver dollar carries a ton's weight a mile at sea. But what is the thousand million times more light than ever struck the earth doing in space? That is among the things we want to find out when we get there. There will be ample opportunity, space, time, and light enough.

It is biblically asserted and scientifically demonstrable that space is full of causes of sound. To anyone capable of turning these causes to effects this sound is not dull and monotonous, but richly varied into songful music. Light makes its impression of color by its different number of vibrations. So music sounds its keys. We know the number of vibrations necessary for the note C of the soprano scale, and the number that runs the pitch up to inaudibility. We know the number of vibrations of light necessary to give us a sensation of red or violet. These, apprehended by a sufficiently sensitive ear, pour not only light to one organ, but tuneful harmonies to another. The morning stars do sing together, and when worlds are gone, and heavy ears of clay laid down, we may be able to hear them

Singing as they shine,
"The hand that made us is divine."

There are places where this music is so fine that the soft and soul-like sounds of a zephyr in the pines would be like a storm in comparison, and places where the fierce intensity of light in a congeries of suns would make it seem as if all the stops of being from piccolo to sub-bass had been drawn. No angel flying interstellar spaces, no soul fallen overboard and left behind by a swift-sailing world, need fear being left in awful silences.

There seems to be good evidence that electrical disturbances in the sun are almost instantly reported and effective on the earth. It is evident that the destructive force in cyclones is not wind, but electricity. It is altogether likely that it is generated in the sun, and that all the space between it and us thrills with this unknown power.[1] All astronomers except Faye admit the connection between sun spots and the condition of the earth's magnetic elements. The parallelism between auroral and sun-spot frequency is almost perfect. That between sun spots and cyclones is as confidently asserted, but not quite so demonstrable. Enough proof exists to make this clear, that space may be full of higher Andes and Alps, rivers broader than Gulf Streams, skies brighter than the Milky Way, more beautiful than the rainbow. Occasionally some scoffer who thinks he is smart and does not know that he is mistaken asks with an air of a Socrates putting his last question: "You say that 'heaven is above us.' But if one dies at noon and another at midnight, one goes toward Orion and the other toward Hercules; or an Eskimo goes toward Polaris and a Patagonian toward the coal-black hole in the sky near the south pole. Where is your heaven anyhow?" O sapient, sapient questioner! Heaven is above us, you especially; but going in different directions from such a little world as this is no more than a bee's leaving different sides of a bruised pear exuding honey. Up or down he is in the same fragrant garden, warm, light, redolent of roses, tremulous with bird song, amid a thousand caves of honeysuckles, "illuminate seclusions swung in air" to which his open sesame gives entrance at will.

II. But there will be in space what the world has become. It is nowhere intimated that matter had been annihilated. Worlds shall perish as worlds. They shall wax old as doth a garment. They will be folded up as a vesture, and they "shall be changed." The motto with which this article began says heavens pass away, elements melt, earth and its works are burned up. But always after the heaven and earth pass away we are to look for "new heavens and a new earth." On all that God has made he has stamped the great principle of progress, refinement, development--rock to soil, soil to vegetable life, to insect, bird, and man. Each dies as to what it is, that it may have resurrection or may feed something higher. So, in the light of revelation, earth is not lost. Science comes, after ages of creeping, up to the same position. It, too, asserts that matter is indestructible. Burn a candle in a great jar hermetically sealed. The weight of the jar and contents is just the same after the burning as before. A burned-up candle as big as the world will not be annihilated. It will be "changed."

It is necessary for us to get familiar with some of the protean metamorphoses of matter. Up at New Almaden, above the writer, is a vast mass of porous lava rock into which has been infiltrated a great deal of mercury. How shall we get it out? You can jar out numberless minute globules by hand. This metal, be it remembered, is liquid, and so heavy that solid iron floats in it as cork does in water. Now, to get it out of the rock we apply fire, and the mercury exhales away in the smoke. The real task of scientific painstaking is to get that heavy stuff out of the smoke again. It is changed, volatilized, and it likes that state so well that it is very difficult to persuade it to come back to heaviness again.

Take a great mass of marble. It was not always a mountain. It floated invisibly in the sea. Invisible animals took it up, particle by particle, to build a testudo, a traveling house, for themselves. The ephemeral life departing, there was a rain of dead shells to make limestone masses at the bottom of the sea. It will not always remain rock. Air and water disintegrate it once more. Little rootlets seize upon it and it goes coursing in the veins of plants. It becomes fiber to the tree, color to the rose, and fragrance to the violet. But, whether floating invisibly in the water, shell of infusoria in the seas, marble asleep in the Pentelican hills, constituting the sparkle and fizz of soda water, claiming the world's admiration as the Venus de Milo, or giving beauty and meaning to the most fitting symbol that goes between lovers, it is still the same matter. It may be diffused as gas or concentrated as a world, but it is still the same matter.

Matter is worthy of God's creation. Astronomy is awe-full; microscopy is no less so. Astronomy means immensity, bulk; atoms mean individuality. The essence of matter seems to be spirit, personality. It seems to be able to count, or at least to be cognizant of certain exact quantities. An atom of bromine will combine with one of hydrogen; one of oxygen with two of hydrogen; one of nitrogen with three of hydrogen; one of silicon with four of hydrogen, etc. They marry without thought of divorce. A group of atoms married by affinity is called a molecule. Two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen make water. They are like three marbles laid near together on the ground, not close together; for we well know that water does not fill all the space it occupies. We can put eight or ten similar bulks of other substances into a glass of water without greatly increasing its bulk, some actually diminishing it. Water molecules are like a mass of shot, with large interstices between. Drive the atoms of water apart by heat till the water becomes steam, till they are as three marbles a larger distance apart, yet the molecule is not destroyed, the union is still indissoluble. One physicist has declared that the atoms of oxygen and hydrogen are probably not nearer to each other in water than one hundred and fifty men would be if scattered over the surface of England--one man for each four hundred square miles.[2] What must the distance be in steam? what the greater distance in the more extreme rarefactions? It is asserted that millions of cubic miles of some comets tails would not make a cubic inch of matter solid as iron. Now, when earth and oceans are "changed" to this sort of tenuity creations will be more easy. We shall not be obliged to hew out our material with broadaxes, nor blast it out with dynamite. Let us not fear that these creations will not be permanent; they will be enough so for our purpose. We can then afford to waste more worlds in a day than dull stupidity can count in a lifetime.

We are getting used to this sort of work already. When we reduce common air in a bulb to one one-thousandth of its normal density at the sea we get the possibility of continuous incandescent electric light by the vibration of platinum wire. When we reduce it to a tenuity of one millionth of the normal density we get the possibility of the X rays by vibrations of itself without any platinum wire. The greater the tenuity the greater the creative results. For example, water in freezing exerts an expansive, thrusting force of thirty thousand pounds to the square inch, over two thousand tons to the square foot; an incomprehensible force, but applicable in nature to little besides splitting rocks. On the other hand, when water is rarefied into steam its power is vastly more versatile, tractable, and serviceable in a thousand ways. Take a bit of metal called zinc. It is heavy, subject to gravitation, solid, subject to cohesion. But cause it to be burned, to pass away, and be changed. To do this we use fire, not the ordinary kind, but liquid that we keep in a bottle and call acid. The zinc is burned up. What becomes of it? It becomes electricity. How changed! It is no longer solid, but is a live fire that rings bells in our houses, picks up our thought and pours it into the ear of a friend miles away by the telephone, or thousands of miles away by the telegraph. Burning up is only the means of a new and higher life. Ah, delicate Ariel, tricksy sprite, the only way to get you is to burn up the solid body.

The possibility of rare creation depends on rare material, on spirit-like tenuity. And that is what the world goes into. There is a substance called nitrite of amyl, known to many as a medicine for heart disease. It is applied by inhaling its odor--a style of very much rarefied application. Fill a tube with its vapor. It is invisible as ordinary air in daylight. But pour a beam of direct sunlight from end to end along its major axis. A dense cloud forms along the path of the sunbeam; creation is going on. What the sun may do in the thinner vapors the world goes into when burned up will be for us to find out when we get there. Standing on Popocatepetl we have seen a sea of clouds below, white as the light of transfiguration, tossed into waves a mile high by the touch of the sunbeam. Creative ordering was observed in actual process. It is done under our eyes to show us how easy it is. Would it be any less glorious if there were no Popocatepetl? A thrush among vines outside is just now showing us how easy it is to create an ecstasy of music out of silence. She has only to open her mouth and the innate aptitudes of air rush in to actualize her creative wish. Not only is it easy for the bird, but she is even provoked to this love and good works by the creation of a rainbow on the retreating blackness of a storm yonder. Thunder is the sub-bass nature furnishes her, and thus invites her to add the complementary notes.

Some one may think that all this tenuity is as vaporous as the stuff that dreams are made of, and call for solid rocks for foundations. Perhaps we may so call while we have material bodies of two hundred pounds' weight. Yet even these bodies are delicate enough to be valuable to us solely because they have the utmost chemical stability. We are burning up their substance with every breath in order to have delicacy of feeling and thought. What were a wooden body worth? Substances are valuable to us according to their fineness and facility of change. Even iron is mobile in all its particles. We call it solid, but it is not. We lift our eyes from this writing and behold the tumbling surf of the great Pacific sea. Line after line of its billows are charging on the shore and tumbling in utmost confusion and roar of advancing and refluent waves. So the iron of the telephone wire. You often hold the receiver to your ear listening, not to the voice of business or friendship of men, but to the gentle hum of the rolling surf in the wire's own substance. And, in order that we may know the essential stability of things that are fine, we are told that the city which hath enduring foundations is in the spirit world, not this kind of material. The whole new Jerusalem to come down "out of heaven, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband," is as movable as a train of cars is movable here. There may still be rainbows and rivers of life if there are no more rocks. There is a real realm of "scientific imagination." But all our imaginings fall far short of realities. Some men do not desire this realm, and demand solid rocks to walk on. But a bird does not. He oars himself along the upper fields and rides on air. So does a bicyclist and balloonist. Some men have a sort of contempt for aeronauts and workers at flying machines. That feeling is a testimony to their depravity and groveling tendencies. Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood. Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and we shall take to them with zest, if we are not too much of the earth earthy. We were designed for this finer life. We do take to it even now in the days of our deterioration, not to say depravity. The great marvels of the world are not so much in matter as in man. We were meant to be more sensitive to finer influences than we are. We are far more so than we think. Take your child into the street. Another child coughs at a window on the other side, and your child has three months of terrific whooping-cough. All such diseases are taken by homeopathic doses of the millionth dilution. Many people feel "in their bones" the coming of storms days before their arrival. We knew a man who ate honey with delight till he was twenty-five years old, and then could do so no more. This peculiarity he inherited from his father. One man has an insatiable desire for drink because some ancestor of his, back in the third or fourth generation, bequeathed him that curse. In the South you can go a mile in the face of the wind and find that peerless blossom of a magnolia by following the drift of its far-reaching odor. Who has not received a letter and knew before opening it that it had violets within? It had atmosphered itself with rich perfume, and something far richer, for three thousand miles. The first influences which came over the Atlantic cable were so feeble that a sleeping infant's breath were a whirlwind in comparison. But they were read. It is no wonder that the old astrologers thought that men's whole lives were influenced by the stars. Every vegetable life, from the meanest flower that blows to the largest tree, has its whole existence shaped by the sun. Doubtless man's body was meant to be an Aeolian (how the vowels and liquids flow into the very name!) harp of a thousand strings over which a thousand delicate influences might breathe. Soul was meant to be sensitive to the influences of the Spirit. This capability has been somewhat lost in our deterioration. To recover these finer faculties men are required to die. And for the field of exercising them the world must be changed. Paul understood this. He associated some sort of perfection with the resurrection, with the buying back of the powers of the body. And the whole creation waiteth for the apocalypse of the full-sized sons of God.

Does one fear the change from gross to fine, from force of freezing to the winged energy of steam, from solid zinc to lightning? Our whole desire for education is a desire for refining influences. We know there is a higher love for country than that begotten by the fanfare of the Fourth of July. There is a smile of joy at our country's education and purity finer than the guffaws provoked by hearing the howls of a dog and the explosions of firecrackers when the two are inextricably mixed. There is a flame of religious love when the heart sacrifices itself in humble realization of the joy of its adorable love purer than the fierce fire of the hating heart that applies the torch to the martyr's pyre. We give our lives to seeking these higher refinements because they are stronger and more like God.

Does one fear to leave bodily appetites and passions for spiritual aptitudes fitted to finer surroundings? He should not. Man has had two modes of life already--one, slightly conscious, closely confined, peculiarly nourished, in the dark, without the possible exercise of any one of the five senses. That is prenatal. He comes into the next life. At once he breathes, often vociferously, looks about with eyes of wonder, nourishes himself with avidity, is fitted to his new surroundings, his immensely wider life, and finds his superior companions and surroundings fitted to him, even to his finest need for love. Why hesitate for a third mode of life? He loses modes of nourishment; so he has before. He loses relations to former life; so he has before. He comes into new companionships and surroundings; so he has before. But each time and in every respect his powers, possibilities, and field have been immensely enlarged.

O the hour when this material
Shall have vanished like a cloud,
When amid the wide ethereal
All the invisible shall crowd.
In that sudden, strange transition,
By what new and finer sense
Shall we grasp the mighty vision,
And receive the influence?

Knowledge of the third state of man is not so difficult to attain in the second as knowledge of the second was in the first. If a fit intelligence should study a specimen of man about to emerge from its first stage of existence, it could judge much of the conditions of the second. Feet suggest solid land; lungs suggest liquid air; eyes, light; hands, acquisitiveness, and hence dominion; tongue, talk, and hence companions, etc. What fore-gleams have we of the future life? They are from two sources--revelation and present aptitudes not yet realized. What feet have we for undiscovered continents, what wings for wider and finer airs, what eyes for diviner light? Everything tells us that such aptitudes have fit field for development. The water fowl flies through night and storm, lone wandering but not lost, straight to the south with instinct for mild airs, food, and a nest among the rushes. It is not disappointed.

Man has an instinct for dominion which cannot be gratified here. He weeps for more worlds to conquer. He is only a boy yet, getting a grip on the hilt of the sword of conquest, feeling for some Prospero's wand that is able to command the tempest. When he gets the proper pitch of power, take away his body, and he is, as Richter says, no more afraid, and he is also free from the binding effect of gravitation. Then there are worlds enough, and every one a lighthouse to guide him to its harbor. They all seek a Columbus with more allurements than America did hers. Dominion over ten cities is the reward for faithfulness in the use of a single talent.

Man has an instinct for travel and speed. To travel a couple of months is a sufficient reward for a thousand toilful days. He earnestly desires speed, develops race horses and bicycles to surpass them, yachts, and engines. Not satisfied with this, he harnesses lightning that takes his mind, his thought, to the ends of the earth in a twinkling. But he is stopped there. How he yearns to go to the moon, the sun, and stars! But he could not take his present body through the temperatures of space three or four hundred degrees below zero. So he must find a way of disembodying and of attachment to some force swift as lightning, of which there are plenty in the spaces when the world has ceased to be a world. It is all provided for by death.

Man has an instinct for knowledge not gratified nor gratifiable in the present narrow bounds that hedge him in like walls of hewn stone. A thousand questions he cannot solve about himself, his relations to others and to the world about him, beset him here. There he shall know even as he is known by perfect intelligence.

Here he has an instinct for love that is unsunderable. But the wails of separation have filled the air since Eve shrieked over Abel. Husbands and fathers are ever crying:

Immortal? I feel it and know it.
Who doubts of such as she?
But that's the pang's very essence,
Immortal away from me.

But there, in finer realms, shall be a knitting of severed friendships up to be sundered no more forever.

Specially has man sought in this stage of being to know God. Job, in his pain and loss, assailed by the cruel rebukes of his friends and desolate by the desertion of his wife, says, "O that I knew where I might find him." David cries out while his tears are flowing day and night, "As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God: when shall I come and appear before God?" Moses, in the broadest of visions, material, historic, prophetic, says to God, "Show me thy glory." And common men have always turned the high places of earth to altar piles, and blackened the heavens with the smoke of their sacrifices. But the means of knowing God are to be increased. The very essence of life eternal is to know the true God, and Jesus Christ whom he has sent. Great pains have been taken to manifest forth God to dull senses and to oxlike thoughts here; greater pains, with better results, shall be taken there. Every reader of the Apocalypse notices with joy, if not rapture, that when the book that was sealed with seven seals, which no man in heaven, nor earth, was able to reveal, nor open, nor even look upon, was finally opened by the Lamb, and its marvelous panoramas, charades, and symbolic significances had to be carefully explained to John, the man best able of any to understand them--we observe with rapture that the regular inhabitants of that hitherto unseen world understood all at once, and broke into shouts like the sound of these many waters in a storm. Above all these superior manifestations in finer realms the pure in heart shall see God.

III. But there is in space what there was before the world began. Philosophy asserts that the invisible universe is a perfect fluid in which not even atoms exist, and atoms are produced therefrom by the First Great Cause by creation, not by development. This conception is full of difficulties to thought. We cannot even agree whether creation was in time or eternity. But all agree in this, that the invisible is rapidly absorbing all the force at least of the visible universe, and that when force is gone the corpse will not remain unburied. Indeed, when the range of seeing puts the size of an atom at less than one two-hundred-and-twenty-four-thousandth of an inch, and when the range of thinking puts it at less than one six-millionth of an inch, many prefer to consider an atom as a center of force and not as a material entity at all. But, amid uncertainties, this is certain, that the forces of the visible worlds are extraneous. They come out of the invisible. They are all also returning to the invisible; that is what light is doing in space, previously referred to. This incredibly high-class energy is not banking up coal in the celestial ether as it did on the earth, but is returning to the quick, mobile forces of the invisible worlds. One thing more is certain, that the origin of all the forces of the invisible is in personality; for the atom, it is agreed, bears all the marks of being a manufactured article. Different-sized shot could not have greater uniformity of structure and constitution. And their whole behavior shows that they are controlled by an admirable wisdom past finding out.

That these forces exist and are necessarily active there are three proofs. Worlds have been made, not of things and forces that do appear. They were abundantly displayed in the physical miracles of Christ and others; and these forces, independently of the physical miracles at various times, have continuously helped men.

(1) Concerning the first fact--that worlds have been made--nothing need be said except that these forces, being personal, cannot be supposed to be exhausted, and hence creations can go on continuously. We are assured that they do. And the personal element more and more relates itself to personalities. "I go to prepare a place for you," to fit up a mansion according to tastes, needs, and enjoyments of the future occupant.

(2) This is the place to assert, not to prove, that this visible world has always been subject to the forces of the invisible world. It does not matter whether these forces are personal or personally directed. Its waters divide, gravitation at that point being overcome; they harden for a path, or bodies are levitated; they burn by a fire as fierce as that which plays between two electric poles. These forces are not the ordinary endowments of matter; they step out of the realm of the greater invisible, execute their mission, and, like an angel's sudden appearance, disappear. Who knows how frequently they come? We, for whose sake all nature stands "and stars their courses move," may need more frequent motherly attentions than the infant knows of. They will not be lacking, even if not sufficiently evident to the infant to be cried for. "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things."

(3) It is here designed to be asserted that the forces of the invisible seek to be continually in full play on the intellectual and moral natures of man. Our unique Christian Scriptures have this thought for their whole significance. It begins with God's walking with Adam in the garden, and goes on till it is said, "Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you," in the invisible, and by the invisible, from before the foundation of the visible world. It includes all time and opportunity between and after; we need specify only to intensify the conception of the fact. Paul says, "Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day," when otherwise oppressive circumstances and hate of men seeking to kill him would have prevented his continuing in life. It is possible for all who believe to be given power, out of the invisible, to become sons of God. It has been said that there is power and continuousness enough in the tides, winds, rotating and revolving worlds for man to make a machine for perpetual motion. The only difficulty is to belt on. The great object of life in the visible should be to belt on to the invisible. Our great Example who did this made his ordinary doing better than common men's best, his parentheses of thought richer than other men's paragraphs and volumes. And he left on record for us promises of greater works than these, at which we stagger through unbelief. We should not; for men who have lived by the evidence of things not seen, and sought a city that received Jesus out of sight, have found that "God is not ashamed to be called their God." They have wrought marvels that men tell over like a rosary of what is possible to men. It is beyond the belief of all who have not been touched by the power of an endless life. But what they do is chiefly valuable as evidence of what they are. It is little that men quench the violence of fire, and receive their dead raised to life again. It is great that they are able to do it. That they hold the hand that holds the world is something. But that they have eyes to see, a wisdom to choose, and will to execute the best, is more. Fire may kindle again and the resurrected die, but the great personality survives.

These forces are not discontinuous, connected with this temporary world, and liable to cease when it fails. They belong to the permanent, invisible order of things. Suppose one loses his body. Then there is no force whereby earth can hold its child any longer to its breast. It flies on at terrific speed, dwindling to a speck in unknown distances, and leaving the man amid infinitudes alone. But there are other attractions. There was One uplifted on a cross to draw all men unto him. Love has finer attraction for souls than gravitation has for bodies.

Then all his being thrills with Joy. And past
The comets' sweep, the choral stars above,
With multiplying raptures drawn more swift
He flies into the very heart of love.

It is hoped that the object of this writing is accomplished--to widen our view of the great principle of continuity in the universe. It is not sought to dwarf the earth, but to fit it rightly into its place as a part of a great whole. It is better for a state to be a part of a glorious union than to be independent; better for a man to belong to the entirety of creation than to be Robinson Crusoe on his island. We belong to more than this earth. It is not of the greatest importance whether we lose it or it lose itself. We look for a "new heavens and a new earth." We are, or should be, used to their forces, and at home among their personalities. This universe is a unity. It is not made up of separate, catastrophic movements, but it all flows on like the sweetly blended notes of a psalm. "Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea;" though the heavens be "rolled together as a scroll," the stars fall, "even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs," when it is shaken with the wind, and though our bodies are whelmed in the removal of things that can be shaken. For even then we may find the calm force that shakes the earth is the force that is from everlasting to everlasting; may find that it is personal and loving. It says, "Lo, it is I; be not afraid."

Whatever comes, whether one sail the spaces in the great ship we call the world, or fall overboard into Mississippis and Amazons of power in which worlds are mere drifting islands, he will be at peace and at home anywhere. He will ever say:

"The winds that o'er my ocean run
Blow from all worlds, beyond the sun;
Through life, through death, through faith, through time,
Great breaths of God, they sweep sublime,
Eternal trades that cannot veer,
And blowing, teach us how to steer;
And well for him whose joy, whose care,
Is but to keep before them fair.

"O thou, God's mariner, heart of mine,
Spread canvas to these airs divine.
Spread sail and let thy past life be
Forgotten in thy destiny."

#31. Spiritual Dynamics

2008-11-24T23:27:00.000+08:00

Will God indeed dwell upon the earth? asked Solomon. Will God indeed work with man on the earth? asks the pushing, working spirit of to-day. Has man a right to expect a special lending of the infinite power to help out his human endeavors? Does God put special forces to open some doors, close others, influence some men to come to his help, hinder others, bring to bear influences benign, restrain those malign, and invigorate a man's own powers so that his arm has the strength of ten, because his heart is pure enough for God to work in it and through it? If this is so, in what fields, under what conditions, to what extent, and in accordance with what laws may we expect aid?

First, it is evident that there is power not ourselves. We did not make this world. We did not put into it even the lowest force, gravitation. It is more than our minds can compass to measure its power. We have no arithmetic to tell its power on every mote in the sunbeam, or flower, or grain-head bowing toward the earth, tree brought down with a crash, or avalanche with thunder. Much less can we measure the power that holds the earth to the sun spite of its measureless centrifugal force. We did not make the next highest force, cohesion. The particles of rock and iron cohere with so great an energy that gravitation cannot overcome it. But it is not by our energy. We did not make the next highest force, chemical affinity, that masters both gravitation and cohesion. Water, the result of chemical affinity between oxygen and hydrogen, can be rent into its constituent elements with nothing less than a stream of lightning. We did not make the next highest force, vegetative life. That masters gravitation, and lifts up the tree in spite of it; masters cohesion--the tree's rootlets tear asunder the particles of stone; masters chemical affinity--it takes the oxygen from air and water. We did not create that force, measureless to our minds. We say it must have come out of some omnipotence greater than all of them. The conclusion of all minds is, there is a power not ourselves.

It is unthinkable that these forces before mentioned should have originated themselves. It is equally so that they could maintain and continue themselves. There must be some continual upholding by a word of power.

It is equally plain that there is intelligence, thought, and plan behind these forces. They are not blind Samsons grinding in a prison-house, and liable at any moment to bring down in utter ruin every pillar of the universe on which they can put their hands.

If intelligent and planful, there must be personality. We may as well call it by the name by which it is universally known, God.

Now does this intelligent and powerful personality know our plans and lend his powers to the accomplishment of our purposes? It is better to put it the other way. Mr. Lincoln taught us the truer statement when one said to him, in the awful anxiety of the war, "I think God is on our side;" he answered, "My great concern is to know if we are on God's side." So our question is better thus: Does this intelligent, powerful personality accept and use our energy in the accomplishment of his plans?

That will depend on what he wants done. If he only wants mountains lifted, he can put the shoulder of an earthquake under the strata of a continent and tilt them up edgewise, or toss up a hundred miles of strata and let them come down the other side up. If he wants mountains carried hence and cast into the sea, he can bring rivers to carry for thousands of years numberless tons. If he wants worlds held in rhythmic relations to their sun, he can take gravitation. Man is of no use; he cannot reach so far.

But if this being has anything to do that he cannot do, he will gladly welcome man's aid. Has he? Yes. Obviously he wants things done he cannot do alone. Worlds are dead. Trees do not think. Morning stars may sing together, but they cannot love. None of them have character. None of them have conscious responsiveness to the full tides of power and love that flush the universe. None of them are permanent, or worth keeping forever. They are only scaffolding. He wants something greater than he can make; something as great as God and man and angels together can make. He wants not mere matter acted upon from without, but intelligences active in themselves; wants not mere miles of granite, but hearts responsive to love, and character that is sturdier than granite, more enduring than the hills that seem to be everlasting, and of so great a price that a whole world is of less value than a single soul, and of such permanence that it shall flourish in immortal youth when worlds, short-lived in comparison, shall have passed away. God can make worlds in plenty, but he wants something so much better that they shall be mere parade-grounds for the training of his armies.

Are there proofs that God's forces are cooperating with ours? Many. Gravitation holds us to the earth. We do not drift, all sides up successively, in space or chaos. We never want a breath but there are oceans of it rushing to answer our hunger for it.

But especially do we undertake all our more definite efforts with a full expectation of the aid of the forces without us. Man takes to agriculture with a relish that indicates that the soil and he are akin. He expects all its energies to cooperate with him. He plants the grain or seed expecting that all its vegetative forces will cowork with his plans. Every energy of earth, air, water, and the far-off sun work into his plans as if they had no other end in all their being. If a man wants a house, he expects the solidity of the rock, all the adaptations of wood that has been growing for a century, expects the beauty of the fir tree, the pine, and the box to come together to beautify the place of his dwelling.

There are other forces into which man can put his scepter of power and hand of mastery. They all work for and with him. Does he want his burdens carried? The river will convey the Indian on a log or the armaments of the greatest nations. The wind fits itself into the shoulder of his sail on the sea, and steam does more work on the land than all the human race together. Does he want swiftness? The lightning comes and goes between the ends of the earth saying, "Here am I." Obviously all these kinds of forces are always on hand to work into man's plans.

Is not our whole question settled? If these fundamental forces, these oceans of air and energy, forces so great that man cannot measure them, so delicate and fine that man does not discover them in thousands of years, are all waiting and palpitating to rush into the service of man to advance his plans, and hint of plans larger than he ever dreamed, until he grows great by handling these ineffable factors, how can it be otherwise than that the energies, thoughts, and loves back of these forces, and out of which they come, and of which they are the visible signs and exponents, are working together with man? Then, in all probability, nay in all certainty, all other forces, whether they be thrones or dominions, principalities or powers, things present or things to come, will also lend all their energies to the help of man. God does not aid in the lowest and leave us to ourselves in the highest. He does not feed the body and let the soul famish, does not help us to the meat that perishes and let us starve for the bread of eternal life.

Scripture passages, literally thousands in number, proclaim God's control of the regular operations of nature, his sovereignty over birth, life, death, disease, afflictions, and prosperity, over what we call accident, his execution of righteous retributions, bringing of deliverance, setting up thrones, and casting down princes. He upholds all things by the direct exercise of his power. "The uniformities of nature are his ordinary method of working; its irregularities his method upon occasional condition; its interferences his method under the pressure of a higher law." There can be no general providence which is not special, no care for the whole which does not include care for all the parts, no provided safety for the head which does not number all the hairs. The Old Testament doctrine of a special and minute providence over the chosen nation is expanded by Christ's loving teaching and ministrations into an equal care for the personal individual (Matt. vii, 11; xviii, 19; Heb. iv, 16). The cold glacial period of human fear that poured its ice floe over the mind of man, making him feel like an orphaned race in a godless world, has retired before the gentle beams of the Sun of Righteousness, and the winter is past, the flowers appear on the earth, the time of the singing of birds and hearts has commenced.

It is everywhere recognized that the great outcome of a man's life is not the title to a thousand acres. He is soon dispossessed. It is not all the bonds and money he can hold. A dead man's hands are empty. It is not reputation that the winds blow away. But it is character that he acquires and carries with him. He has a fidelity to principle that is like Abdiel's. He is faithful among the faithless. He has allegiance to right that the lure of all the kingdoms of the earth cannot swerve for a moment. He counts soul so much above the body that no fiery furnaces, heated seven times hotter than they are wont, sway him for a moment from adherence to the interests of soul as against even the existence of the body.

Now, how has such an eminence of character been attained? Not altogether by individual evolution. Ancestral tendencies, parental example, the great force of strong, eternal principles, the moral muscle acquired in the gymnasium of temptation, and confessedly and especially a spiritual force vouchsafed from without, have wrought out this greatest result of heaven and earth. Of some men you expect nothing but goodness and greatness. They would belie all the tendencies of their blood to be otherwise than good. Some are constantly trained under the mighty influences of great principles that sway men as much as gravitation sways the worlds. What could be expected of the men of '76 when the air was electric with patriotism? What could be expected of men whose childhood was filled with the sacrifices of men who made themselves pilgrims and strangers over the earth, from England to Holland and thence over the drear and inhospitable sea to America, for the sake of liberty? What could be expected of men whose whole ancestry was cut off by the slaughter following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and they themselves exiled for liberty to worship God? What can be expected of men who have been tried in the furnace of temptation till they are pure gold? Nay, more, what can be expected of men who have in these temptations been strengthened out of God? Besides the strength of development by the resistance of evil, they have found that God made a way of escape, that he strengthened, them and that they were thus by supernal power able to bear it. Nay, rather, what may not be expected of such men?

But we will not forget that this great outcome is precisely the plan of God for every man's life, and that when man works he finds that there are forces outside of him thoroughly cooperative with him. He starts a rock down the mountain side, but gravitation reaches out ready fingers and hurls it a thousand times faster and faster. He launches his ship on the sea and the wind and steam carry it thousands of miles. He speaks his quiet breath into the ear of the phone and electricity carries it in every tone and inflection of personal quality a thousand miles. He vows, and works for purity and greatness of personal character, and a thousand gravitations of love, a thousand great winds of Pentecost, a thousand vital principles on which all greatness hangs, a thousand influences of other men, and especially a thousand personal aids of a present God, cooperate with his plans and works.

Of course every man who believes in a new type so high that good birth, wealth, culture, education, and broad opportunity cannot attain it believes in the divine co-operation to that end. It must be born of the Spirit. God sends forth his Spirit into our hearts crying, Abba, Father! It pleases the Father himself to reveal his Son in us.

Not only is this cooperation true in regard to the beginning of this higher life, but especially so in regard to the development and perfection of that life into the stature of perfect manhood in Christ Jesus. By continuous effort to lead into all truth, by intensity of endeavor that can only be represented by groanings that cannot be worded in human speech, the perfection of saints is sought.

And in the final glorification of those saints every man will say nothing of his own efforts, but all the praise will be unto him who hath redeemed us unto God, and washed us in his blood.

To what extent, then, may we expect God will lend his forces to work out our plans? First, in so far as those forces have to do with the maturing and perfecting of our character they become his plans. No energy will be withheld. All our plans should be such. The end in character may often be attained as well by failure of our plans as by success. God has to choose the poor in this world's things, rich in faith, to do his great work. And he has to make "the best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft a-gley" to get the desired outcome of character. He is then working with, not against, us. He would rather have any star for his crown of glory than tons of perishable gold.

But outside of our plans and work for ourselves what cooperation may we expect in our plans and work for others?

Every preacher knows that for spiritual work in saving others the word of the Lord is true, "Without me ye can do nothing." There must be an outpouring of the Spirit or there is no Pentecost. Over against that settled conviction is the thrice-blessed command and assurance of the Master, "Go preach my Gospel; and lo, I am with you alway" (blessed iteration), "unto the end of the world." That has not yet come.

But there are other enterprises men must push--mines to be dug, railroads to be surveyed and built, slaves to be emancipated, farms to be cultivated, mischiefs framed by a law to be averted, charities to be exercised, schools to be founded, and generally a living to be gotten. To what extent may we expect divine aid?

First, all these things are his purposes and plans. But since it is necessary for our development that we do our level best, he will not do what we can. We can plant and water, but God only can give the increase. Even the fable maker says that a teamster, whose wagon was stuck in the mud, seeing Jupiter Omnipotens riding by on the chariot of the clouds, dropped on his knees and implored his help. "Get up, O lazy one!" said Jupiter; "clear away the mud, put your shoulder to the wheel, and whip up your horses." We may call on God to open the rock in the dry and thirsty land where no water is, but not to lift our teacups. It is no use to ask God for a special shower when deep plowing is all that is needed. It is no use to ask God to build churches, send missionaries, endow schools, and convert the world, till we have done our best.

But when we have done our best what may we expect? All things. They shall work together for good to those who love God enough to do their best for him in any plane of work. One could preach fifty sermons on the great works done by men, obviously too great for man's accomplishment. Time would fail me to tell of Moses, Gideon, Paul, Luther, Wesley, Wilberforce, William of Orange, Washington, John Brown, Abe Lincoln, and thousands more of whom this world was not worthy, who, undeniably by divine aid, wrought righteousness. One of the great sins of our age is that men do not see God immanent in all things. We have found so many ways of his working that we call laws, so many segments of his power, that we have forgotten him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will. A sustainer is as necessary as a creator. There are diversities of operations, but it is the same God who worketh all in all. The next great service to be done by human philosophy is to bring back God in human thought into his own world. Since these things are so, what are the conditions under which we may work the works of God by his power?

First, they must be his works, not ours as opposed to his, but ours as included in his. All our works may be wrought in God, if we do his works, follow his plans, and are aided by his strength.

Second, they must be attempted with the right motive of glorifying God. Christ is the pattern. He came not to do his own will, but the will of him who sent him. And he did always the things that pleased him. In our fervid desires for the accomplishment of some great thing we should be as willing it should be accomplished by another as by ourselves. The personal pride is often a fly in the sweet-smelling savor. God would rather have a given work not done, or done by another, than to have one of his dear ones puffed up with sinful pride. Great Saul must often be removed and the work be left undone, or be done by some humble David.

"Inaudible voices call us, and we go;
Invisible hands restrain us, and we stay;
Forces, unfelt by our dull senses, sway
Our wavering wills, and hedge us in the way
We call our own, because we do not know.

"Are we, then, slaves of ignorant circumstance?
Nay, God forbid!
God holds the world, not blind, unreasoning chance!"

How shall we secure the cooperative power? There is power of every kind everywhere in plenty. All the Niagaras and Mississippis have run to waste since they began to thunder and flow. Greater power is in the wind everywhere. One can rake up enough electricity to turn all the wheels of a great city whenever he chooses to start his rake. The sky is full of Pentecosts. Power enough, but how shall we belt on? By fasting, prayer, and by willing to do the will of God. We have so much haste that we do not tarry at Jerusalem for fullness of power. Moses was forty years in the wilderness: Daniel fasted and prayed for one and twenty days. We are told to pray without ceasing, and that there are kinds of devils that go not out except at the command of those who fast and pray.

"More things are wrought by prayer than
This world dreams of."

The Bible is a record of achievements impossible to man. They are achievements of leaderships, emancipations, governments, getting money for building God's houses, making strong the weak, waxing valiant in fight, and turning the world upside down. The trouble with many of our modern saints is that they seek for purity only instead of power, ecstasy instead of excellence, self-satisfaction in a garden of spices instead of a baptism that straightens them out in a garden of agony. They are seekers of spiritual joys instead of good governments, cities well policed and sewered, with every street safe for the feet of innocence. The next revelation of new possibilities of grace that will break out of the old Word will be that of power.

How will this divine aid manifest itself? In the giving of wisdom for our plans and their execution. God will not help in any foolish plans. He wants no St. Peter's built in a village of six hundred people, no temple, except on a Moriah to which a whole nation goes up. Due proportion is a law of all his creations. The disciples planned not only to begin at Jerusalem, but to stay there. Their plans were wrong, and they had to be driven out by persecutions and martyrdoms (Acts viii, 4). But Africa, Europe, and Asia eagerly received the light which Jerusalem resisted. Some ministers to-day stay by their fine Jerusalems when the kitchens of the surrounding country wait to welcome them. The Spirit suffered not Paul to go into Bithynia, but sent him to Macedonia. Had he then persisted in going to Asia his work would have been in vain.

We may expect wisdom in the choice of the human agents we select. Half a general's success lies in his choice of lieutenants. No class leader should be appointed nor steward nominated till after prayer for divine guidance. God has more efficient men for his Church than we know of. He is thinking of Paul when we see only Matthias (Acts i, 26). When Paul had to depart asunder from Barnabas God sent him Silas, the fellow-singer in the dungeon, and Timothy, who was dearer to him than any other man.

We may expect opposition to be diminished or thwarted. Let Hezekiah spread every letter of Rab-shakeh before the Lord and pray (2 Kings xix, 14). The answer will be, "I have heard" (v. 20). Let the answer to every slander that Gashmu repeateth among the heathen be, "O Lord, strengthen my hands" (Neh. vi, 9); "My God, think thou upon Tobiah and Sanballat according to these their works" (v. 14). Then all the heathen and enemies will "perceive that this work was wrought of our God" (v. l6). "When a man's ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him." The purpose of the manifestation of the Son of God was "that he might destroy the works of the devil" (1 John iii, 8).

Lastly, we may expect actual help. These plans are all dear to God. He wishes them all accomplished. They have been wisely made. Opposition has been diminished. It only remains that our hearts be open to guidance and strengthening. Moses was sure I AM had sent him. Elijah had the very words to be uttered to Ahab put into his mouth. Nehemiah told the people that for building a city "the joy of the Lord is your strength." God strengthened the right hand of Cyrus. The three Hebrew children and Daniel knew that God was able to deliver them from fire and lions. "Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thy heart." And the great promise of the Lord to be with his disciples to the end is not so much a promise for comfort as for the accomplishment of their mission. Paul said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me." And all great doers for God, in all ages, have gladly testified that they have been girded for their work by the Almighty.

The designed outcome of this paper is that every reader should get a fresh revelation of the immanency of God in the kingdom of nature and grace; that the reader is more intimately related to him and his plans than is gravitation; that there are laws as imperative, exact, and sure to yield results in the mental and spiritual realms as in the material; that he is a part of God's agencies, and that all of God's forces are a part of his; that he may sing with new meaning,

"We for whose sakes all nature stands
And stars their courses move;"

that in the burning vividness of this new conception each man may boldly undertake things for God--conversions, purifications, missionary enlargements, business enterprises--that he knows are too great for himself; that he may find new helps for spiritual victories as great as this age has found for material triumphs in steam and electricity; and that in all things man may be uplifted and God thereby glorified.

How shall it be done?

First, by a vivid conception that cooperation is designed, provided for, and expected. We are children of God; there can be but one great end through the ages in the universe. There should be cooperation of every force. There have been thousands of evident cooperations--waters divided and burned by celestial fire, Pharaohs rebuked, Ninevehs warned, exiles recalled, Jerusalems rebuilded, Luthers upheld, preachers of today changed from waning, not desired, half-over-the-dead-line ministers into vigorous, flaming heralds of the Gospel, who possessed tenfold power to what they had before; we ourselves personally helped in manifest and undeniable instances, and so have come to believe that God can do anything, anywhere, if he can get the right kind of a man. Promises of aid are abundant. Heaven and earth shall pass away sooner than one jot or tittle of these words fail. We are invited to test them: "Come now, and prove me herewith, and see if I will not open the windows of heaven once more, as at the deluge, and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it."

Second, select some definite work too great for us to do alone, as the preparation of a sermon that shall have unusual power of persuasion to change action, the conduct of a prayer meeting of remarkable interest, the casting out of some devil of evil speech or action, the conversion of one individual, the raising of more money for some of God's purposes, and then go about the work, not alone, but in such a way that God can lead and we help. Let the fasting and prayer not be lacking. When the right direction comes let Jonathan take his armor-bearer and climb up on his hands and knees against the Philistines, let Paul go to Macedonia, Peter to Cornelius, Wesley send help to America. Bishop Foss said, in regard to several crises in a most serious sickness, that Christ always arrived before it came. So in regard to work to be done. The Lord was in Nineveh before Jonah, in Caesarea before Peter, and will be in the heart of every sinner we seek to get converted before we arrive. Any man who wants to do an immense business should seek a good partner. We are workers together with God. What is being done worthy of the copartnership?

#30. The Power of Vegetable Life

2008-11-23T00:22:00.000+08:00

I have a great variety of little masses of matter--some small as a pin's blunt point, and none of them bigger than a pin's head. They are smooth, glossy, hard, exceedingly beautiful under the microscope, and clearly distinguishable one from another. They have such intense individuality, are so self-assertive, that by no process can those of one kind be made to look or act like those of another. These little masses of matter are centers of incredible power. They are seeds.

Select two for examination, and, unfolding, one becomes grass--soft, succulent, a carpet for dainty feet, a rest for weary eyes, part food, but mostly drink, for hungry beasts. It exhausts all its energy quickly. Grass today is, and to-morrow is cut down and withered, ready for the oven.

Try the other seed. It is of the pin head size. It is dark brown, hard-shelled, dry, of resinous smell to nostrils sensitive as a bird's. The bird drops it in the soil, where the dews fall and where the sun kisses the sleeping princesses into life.

Now the latent powers of that little center of force begin to play. They first open the hard shell from the inside, then build out an arm white and tender as a nerve fiber, but which shall become great and tough as an oak. This arm shuns the light and goes down into the dark ground, pushing aside the pebbles and earth. Soon after the seed thrusts out of the same crevice another arm that has an instinct to go upward to the light. Neither of these arms is yet solid and strong. They are beyond expression tender, delicate, and porous, but the one is to become great roots that reach all over an acre, and the other one of California's big trees, thirty feet in diameter and four hundred feet high.

How is it to be done? By powers latent in the seed developing and expanding for a thousand years. What a power it must be!

First, it is a power of selection--might we not say discrimination? That little seed can never by any power of persuasion or environment be made to produce grass or any other kind of a tree, as manzanita, mango, banyan, catalpa, etc., but simply and only sequoia gigantea.

There are hundreds of shapes and kinds of leaves with names it gives one a headache to remember. But this seed never makes a single mistake. It produces millions of leaves, but every one is awl-shaped--subulate. Woods have many odors--sickening, aromatic, balsamic, medicinal. We go to the other side of the world to bring the odor of sandal or camphor to our nostrils. But amid so many odors our seed will make but one. It is resinous, like some of those odors the Lord enjoyed when they bathed with their delicious fragrance the cruel saw that cut their substance, and atmosphered with new delights the one who destroyed their life. The big tree, with subtle chemistry no man can imitate, always makes its fragrance with unerring exactness.

[Illustration: The Big Trees.]

There are thousands of seeds finished with a perfectness and beauty we are hardly acute enough to discover. The microscopist revels in the forms of the dainty scales of its armor and the opalescent tints of its color. The sunset is not more delicate and exquisite. But the big tree never makes but one kind of seed, and leaves no one of its thousands unfinished.

The same is true of bark, grain of wood, method of putting out limbs, outline of the mass, reach of roots, and every other peculiarity. It discriminates.

But how does it build itself? Myriads of rootlets search the surrounding country for elements it needs for making bark, wood, leaf, flower, and seed. They often find what they want in other organizations or other chemical compounds. But with a power of analytical chemistry they separate what they want and appropriate it to their majestic growths. But how is material conveyed from rootlet to veinlet of leaf hundreds of feet away? The great tree is more full of channels of communication than Venice or Stockholm is of canals, and it is along these watery ways of commerce that the material is conveyed. These channels are a succession of cells that act like locks, set for the perpendicular elevation of the freight. The tiny boats run day and night in the season, and though it is dark within, and though there are a thousand piers, no freight that starts underground for a leaf is ever landed on the way for bark or woody fiber. Freight never goes astray, nor are express packages miscarried. What starts for bark, leaf, fiber, seed, is deposited as bark, leaf, fiber, seed, and nothing else. There are hundreds of miles of canals, but every boat knows where to land its unmarked freight. Curious as is this work underground, that in the upper air is more so. The tree builds most of its solid substance from the mobile and tenuous air. Trees are largely condensed air. By the magic chemistry of the sunshine and vegetable life the tree breathes through its myriad leaves and extracts carbon to be built into wood. Had we the same power to extract fuel from the air we need not dig for coal.

In doing this work the power of life in the tree has to overcome many other kinds of force. There is the power of cohesion. How it holds the particles of stone or iron together! You can hardly break its force with a great sledge. But the power of life in the tree, or even grass, must master the power of cohesion and take out of the disintegrating rock what it wants. So it must overcome the power of chemical affinity in water and air. The substances it wants are in other combinations, the power of which must be overcome.

Gravitation is a great power, but the thousand tons of this tree's vast weight must be lifted and sustained in defiance of it. So for a thousand years gravitation sees the tree rise higher and higher, till the great lesson is taught that it is a weakling compared with the power of life. There is not a place where one can put his finger that there are not a dozen forces in full play, every one of which is plastic, elastic, and ready to yield to any force that is higher. So the tree stands, not mere lumber and cordwood, or an obstacle to be gotten rid of by fire, but an embodiment of life unexhausted for a thousand years. The fairy-fingered breeze plays through its myriad harp strings. It makes wide miles of air aromatic. Animal life feeds on the quintessence of life in its seeds. But most of all it is an object lesson that power triumphs over lesser power, and that the highest power has dominion over all other power.

The great power of vegetable life was shown under circumstances that seemed the least favorable in the following experiment:

In the Agricultural College at Amherst, Mass., a squash of the yellow Chili variety was put in harness in 1874 to see how much it would lift by its power of growth.

[Illustration: Yellow Chili Squash in Harness.]

It was not an oak or mahogany tree, but a soft, pulpy, squashy squash that one could poke his finger into, nourished through a soft, succulent vine that one could mash between finger and thumb. A good idea of the harness is given by the illustration. The squash was confined in an open harness of iron and wood, and the amount lifted was indicated by weights on the lever over the top. There were, including seventy nodal roots, more than eighty thousand feet of roots and rootlets. These roots increased one thousand feet in twenty-four hours. They were afforded every advantage by being grown in a hot bed. On August 21 it lifted sixty pounds. By September 30 it lifted a ton. On October 24 it carried over two tons. The squash grew gnarled like an oak, and its substance was almost as compact as mahogany. Its inner cavity was very small, but it perfectly elaborated its seeds, as usual.

The lever to indicate the weight had to be changed for stronger ones from time to time. More weights were sought. They scurried through the town and got an anvil and pieces of railroad iron and hung them at varying distances, as shown in the cut. By the 31st of October it was carrying a weight of five thousand pounds. Then owing to defects of the new contrivance the rind was broken through without showing what might have been done under better conditions. Every particle of the squash had to be added and find itself elbow room under this enormous pressure. But life will assert itself.

[Illustration: Squash in Cage.]

No wonder that the Lord, seeking some form of speech to represent his power in human souls, says, "I am the vine, ye are the branches." The tremendous life of infinite strength surges up through the vine and out into all branches that are really vitally attached. No wonder that much fruit is expected, and that one who knew most of this imparted power said, "I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me."

#29. Sea Sculpture

2008-11-22T02:08:00.001+08:00

When the Russians charged on the Grivitza redoubt at Plevna they first launched one column of men that they knew would be all shot down long before they could reach it. But they made a cloud of smoke under the cover of which a second column was launched. They would all be shot down. But they carried the covering cloud so far that a third column broke out of it and successfully carried the redoubt. They carried it, but ten thousand men lay on the death-smitten slope.

So the great ocean sends eight or ten thousand columns a day to charge with flying banners of spray on the rocky ramparts of the shore at Santa Cruz, California.

There are not many things in the material world more sublime than a thousand miles of crested waves rushing with terrible might against the rocky shore. While they are yet some distance from the land a small boat can ride their foaming billows, but as they approach the shallower places they seem to take on sudden rage and irresistible force. Those roaring waves rear up two or three times as high. They have great perpendicular fronts down which Niagaras are pouring. The spray flies from their tops like the mane of a thousand wild horses charging in the wind. No ship can hold anchor in the breakers. They may dare a thousand storms outside, but once let them fall into the clutch of this resistless power and they are doomed. The waves seem frantic with rage, resistless in force; they rush with fury, smite the cliffs with thunder, and are flung fifty feet into the air; with what effect on the rocks we will try to relate.

[Illustration: "The Breakers," Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 1 of our illustrations shows "The Breakers," a two-story house of that name where hospitality, grace, and beauty abide; where hundreds of roses bloom in a day, and where flowers, prodigal as creative processes, abound. The breakers from which the house is named are not seen in the picture. When the wind has been blowing hard, maybe one hundred miles out at sea, they come racing in from the point, feather-crested, a dozen at once, to show how rolls the far Wairoa at some other world's end. All these pictures are taken in the calm weather, or there would be little seen besides the great leaps of spray, often fifty feet high. At the bottom of the cliff appear the nodules and bowlders that were too hard to be bitten into dust and have fallen out of the cliff, which is fifty feet high, as the sea eats it away. Some of these are sculptured into the likeness effaces and figures, solemn and grotesque. It is easy to find Pharaoh, Cleopatra, Tantalus, represented here.

This house is at the beginning of the famous Cliff Drive that rounds the lighthouse at the point and stretches away for miles above the ever-changing, now beautiful, now sublime, and always great Pacific, that rolls its six thousand miles of billows toward us from Hong Kong. Occasionally the road must be set back, and once the lighthouse was moved back from the cliffs, eaten away by the edacious tooth of the sea.

As Emerson says, "I never count the hours I spend in wandering by the sea; like God it useth me." There is a wideness like his mercy, a power like his omnipotence, a persistence like his patience, a length of work like his eternity.

The rocks of Santa Cruz, as in many other places, were laid in regular order, like the leaves of a book on its side. But by various forces they have been crumbled, some torn out, and in many places piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial cold snap; (7) alluvium soil deposited in fresh water and composed partly of organic matter. In our second illustration some of these layers, or strata, may be distinguished.

[Illustration: The Work and the Worker, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

When the awful blows of the sea smite the rock, if it finds a place less hard than others, it wears into it a slight depression, after half a hundred thousand strokes, more or less, and ever after, as the years go by, it drives its wedges home in that place. A shallow cave results. Then the waters converge on the sides of the cave and meet with awful force in the middle. Thus a tunnel is excavated, like a drift in a mine, each wave making the tremendous charge and the reflowing surges bringing away all the detritus. This tunnel may be driven or excavated two hundred feet inland, under the shore. At each inrush of the wave the air is terribly condensed before it. It seeks outlet. And so it happens that the air is driven up through some crack in the rock and the superincumbent earth, one or two hundred feet from the shore, and a great hole appears in the ground from twenty to seventy feet deep. Then the water spouts fiercely up and returning carries back the earth and broken rock into the sea.

No. 3 of the illustrations here given represents such a great excavation one hundred feet back from the shore. It is one hundred and fifty feet long by ninety wide and over fifty feet deep. All the material had been carried out to sea by the refluent wave. On the natural bridge seen in front the great crowd in Broadway, New York, might pass or a troop of cavalry could be maneuvered. Through the arch a ship with masts thirty feet high might enter at high tide. Through the abutment of the arch where the afternoon sun pours its brightness the waves have cut other arches not visible in the picture. When the arches become too many or too wide the natural bridge will fall and be carried out to sea like many another.

[Illustration: A Natural Bridge, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

But what does the sea do with the harder parts of the cliff? Its waves wear away the rock on each side and leave one or more long fingers reaching out into the sea. The wear and tear on such a projection is immense. A strong swimmer may play with the breakers away from the cliff. At exactly the right moment he may dive headlong through the pearly green Niagara that has not yet fallen quite to his head and may sport in the comparatively quiet water beyond, while the wild ruin falls with a sound of thunder on the beach. But let him once be caught and dashed against the rocks and there is no more life or wholeness of bones within him.

In the swirl of converging currents between two rocky projections, as the coarse sand and gravel is surged around a few hundred thousand times, there is a great tendency to wear through the wall of the projecting finger. It is often done. Illustration No. 4 shows at low tide such a projection cut through. Since the picture was taken the bridge has fallen, the detritus been carted away by the waves, and the pier stands lonely in the sea.

[Illustration: An Excavated Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 5 shows one bridge exceedingly frail and another more substantial nearer the famous Cliff Drive. I go to the frail one every year with anxiety lest I shall find it has been carried away. How I wish I could show my readers the delicate sculpture and carving further back, nearer yet to the drive. But note the various strata, the rocks worn to a point as even the milder waves run over them; note the cracks that tell of the awful push and stress of the titanic struggle.

[Illustration: A Double Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

Illustration No. 6 shows three such under-hewn arches. The long projection of rock is so curved as to prevent the arches being fully seen in any one view. I have waded and swam through these rocky vistas, and there, where any more than moderate waves would have mangled me against the tusks of the cruel rocks, I have found little specimens of aquatic life by the millions, clinging fast to the rocks that were home to them and protecting themselves by taking lime out of the water and building such a solid wall of shell that no fierceness of the wildest storm could work them harm. All these seek their food from Him who feeds all life, and he heaves the ocean up to their mouths that they may drink.

[Illustration: A Triple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

No. 7 shows what has been a quadruple arch, only one part of which is still standing. Out in the sea, lonely and by itself, appears a pier, scarcely emergent from the waves, which once supported an arch parallel to the one now standing and also one at right angles to the shore. The one now standing makes the fourth. But the ever-working sea carves and carries away arch and shore alike. At some points a careful and even admiring observer sees little change for years, but the remorseless tooth gnaws on unceasingly.

[Illustration: Remains of a Quadruple Natural Arch, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

On the right near the point is seen a board sign. It says here, as in many other places, "Danger." Sometimes two converging waves meet at the land, rise unexpectedly, sweep over the point irresistibly, and carry away anyone who stands there. One large and two small shreds of skin now gone from the palm of my left hand give proof of an experience there that did not result quite so disastrously.

The illustration facing page 188 is another example of an arch cut through the rocky barrier of the shore. But in this case the trend of the less hard rock was at such an angle to the shore that the sea broke into the channel once more, and then the combined waves from the two entrances forced the passage one hundred and forty paces inland. It terminates in another natural bridge and deep excavation beyond, which are not shown in the picture.

[Illustration: Arch Remains Side Wall Broken, Santa Cruz, Cal.]

What becomes of this comminuted rock, cleft by wedges of water, scoured over by hundreds of tons of sharp sand? It is carried out by gentle undercurrents into the bay and ocean, and laid down where winds never blow nor waves ever beat, as gently as dust falls through the summer air. It incloses fossils of the plant and animal life of to-day. There rest in nature's own sepulcher the skeletons of sharks and whales of to-day and possibly of man. Sometime, if the depths become heights, as they have in a thousand places in the past, a fit intelligence may read therein much of the present history of the world. We say to that coming age, as a past age has said to us, "Speak to the earth and it shall teach thee, and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee."

#28. The Yellowstone Park Geysers

2008-08-25T15:26:00.000+08:00

THEIR ESSENTIAL FACTS AND CAUSES

I have been to school. Dame Nature is a most kind and skillful teacher. She first put me into the ABC class, and advanced me through conic sections. The first thing in the geyser line she showed me was a mound of rock, large as a small cock of hay, with a projection on top large as a shallow pint bowl turned upside down. In the center of this was a half-inch hole, and from it every two seconds, with a musical chuckle of steam, a handful of diamond drops of water was ejected to a height of from two to five feet. I sat down with it half an hour, compelled to continuous laughter by its own musical cachinnations. There were all the essentials of a geyser. There was a mound, not always existent, built up by deposits from the water supersaturated with mineral. It might be three feet high; it might be thirty. There was the jet of water ejected by subterranean forces. It might be half an inch in diameter; it might be three hundred feet, as in the case of the Excelsior geyser. It might rise six inches; it might rise two hundred and fifty feet. There was the interval between the jets. It might be two seconds; it might be weeks or years.

[Illustration: Formation of the Grotto Geyser.]

A subsequent lesson in my Progressive Geyser Reader was the "Economic." Here was a round basin ten feet in diameter, very shallow, with a hole in the middle about one foot across. The water was perfectly calm. But every six minutes a sudden spurt of water and steam would rise about thirty feet, for thirty seconds, and then settle economically, without waste of water, into the pool, sinking with pulsations as on an elastic cushion a foot below the bottom of the pool. One could stride the opening like a colossus for five and one half minutes without fear. He might be using the calm depth for a mirror. But stay a moment too long and he is scalded to death by the sudden outburst.

The next lesson required more patience and gave more abundant reward. I found a great raised platform on which stood a castellated rock, more than twenty feet square, that had been built up particle by particle into a perfect solid by deposits from the fiery flood. In the center was a brilliant orange-colored throat that went down into the bowels of the earth. That was not the geyser - it was only the trump through which the archangel was to blow. I had heard the preliminary tuning of the instrument.

The guide book said the grand play of this "Castle" geyser began from eight to thirty hours after a previous exhibition, and was preceded by jets of water fifteen to twenty feet high, and that these continued five or six hours before the grand eruption. I hovered near the grand stand till the full thirty hours and the six predictive hours were over, and then, as the thunder above roared threateningly and the rain fell suggestively, I took a rubber coat and camped on the trail of that famous spouter.

Geysers are more than a trifle freaky. "Old Faithful" is a notable exception. Every sixty-five minutes, with almost the regularity of star time, he throws his column of hissing water one hundred and fifty feet high. Others are irregular, sometimes playing every three hours for a few times, and then taking a rest for three or more days. This Castle geyser is not registered to be quiet more than thirty hours, nor to indulge in preparatory spouts for more than six hours. When I finally camped to watch it out all these premonitory symptoms had been duly exhibited. I first carefully noted the frequency and height of the spouts, that any change might foretell the grand finale. There were ten spouts to the minute, and an average height of twenty feet. Hours went by with no hint of a change: ten to the minute, twenty feet in height. People by the dozen came and asked when it would go off. I said, "Liable to go any minute; it is long past due now." Stage loads of tourists, scheduled to run on time, drove up, waited a few minutes, and drove on, as if the grand object of the trip was to make time - not to see the grandeur they had come a thousand miles to enjoy. A photographer set up his camera to catch a shadow of the great display. He stood, sometimes air-bulb in hand, an hour or two, then folded his camera tent and stole away. Five hours had passed and night was near. Everybody was gone. I lay down on the ground to convince myself that I was perfectly patient. I attained so nearly to Nirvana that a little ground squirrel came and ran over me, kissing my hand in a most friendly way.

Six hours of waiting were nearly over when, without a single previous hint of change, one descending spout was met by an ascending one, and a vast column of hissing water rose, with a sound of continuous thunder, one hundred feet in air; and stood there like a pillar of cloud in the desert. The air throbbed as in a cannonade, and the sun brushed away all clouds as if he could not bear to miss a sight he had seen perhaps a million times. Then the top of this upward Niagara bent over like the calyx of a calla, and the downward Niagara covered all that elevated masonry with a rushing cascade. Shifting my position a little, I could see that the sun was thrilling the whole glorious outpour with rainbows. At such times one can neither measure nor express emotions by words. In the thunder which anyone can hear there is always, for all who can receive it, the ineffably sweet voice of the Father saying, "Thou art my beloved son, and all this grand display is for thy precious sake."

In sixteen minutes the flow of waters ceased, and a rush of saturated steam succeeded. At the same time the fierce swish of ascending waters and of descending cascades ceased, and a clear, definite note, as of a trumpet, exceeding long and loud, was blown. No archangel could have done better. As the steam rolled skyward it was condensed, and a very heavy rain fell on about an acre at the east as it was drifted by the air. It looked more like lines of water than separated drops. I found it thoroughly cooled by its flight in the upper air.

I climbed the huge natural masonry, and stood on the top. I could have put my hand into the hot rushing of measureless power. What a sight it was! There were the brilliant colors of the throat, open, three feet wide, and the dazzling whiteness of the steam. At thirty-two minutes from the beginning the steam suddenly became drier, like that close to the spout of a kettle, or close to the whistle of an engine. All pure steam is invisible. At the same time the note of the trumpet distinctly changed. The heavy rain at the east as suddenly stopped. The air could absorb the present amount of moisture. One could see farther down the terrible throat that seemed about to be rent asunder. The awful grandeur was becoming too much for human endurance. The contorted forms of rocks on the summit began to take the forms and heads of dragons, such as the Chinese carve on their monuments. The awful column began to change its effect from terror to fascination, and I knew how Empedocles felt when he flung himself into the burning Aetna. It was time to get down and stand further off.

[Illustration: Bee-Hive Geyser.]

The long waiting had been rewarded. "To patient faith the prize is sure." The grand tumult began to subside. It was beyond all my expectations. Nature never disappoints, for she is of God and in her He yet immanently abides. The next day the sky and all the air were full of falling rain. How could it be otherwise? It was the geyser returning to earth. I sought the place. The awful trumpet was silent, and the steam exhaled as gently as a sleeping baby's breath.

Only one more lesson will be recited at present. I had just arrived in camp when they told me that the Splendid geyser, after two days of quiet, was showing signs of uneasiness. I immediately went out to study my lesson. There was a little hill of very gentle slopes, a little pool at the top, three holes at the west side of it, with a dozen sputtering hot springs scattered about, while in a direct line at the east, within one hundred and forty feet, were the Comet, the Daisy, and another geyser. The Daisy was a beauty, playing forty feet high every two or four hours. All the slopes were constantly flowing with hot water. This general survey was no sooner taken than our glorious Splendid began to play. The roaring column, tinted with the sunset glories, gradually climbed to a height of two hundred feet, leaned a little to the southeast, and bent like a glorious arch of triumph to the earth, almost as solid on its descending as on its ascending side. No wonder it is named "Splendid."

Whoever has studied waterfalls of great height - I have seen nearly forty justly famous falls - has noticed that when a column or mass of water makes the fearful plunge smaller masses of water are constantly feathered off at the sides and delayed by the resistance of the air, while the central mass hurries downward by its concentrated weight. The general appearance is that of numerous spearheads with serrated edges, feathered with light, thrust from some celestial armory into the writhing pool of agonized waters below. In the geyser one gets this effect both in the ascending and in the descending flood. Four times that first night dear old Splendid lured me from my bed to watch her Titanic play in the full light of the moon. During all this time not a hot spring ceased its boiling, nor a smaller geyser its wondrous play, for this gigantic outburst of power that might well have absorbed every energy for a mile around. Obviously they have no connection. Then my beloved Splendid settled into a three-days' rest.

These are the essential facts of geyser display. There are very many variations of performance in every respect, I have seen over twenty geysers in almost jocular, and certainly in overwhelmingly magnificent, activity.

"To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language."

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES?

What is the power that can throw a stream of water two by six feet over the tops of the highest skyscrapers of Chicago? It is heat manifested in the expansive power of steam. Scientists have theorized long and experimented patiently to read the open book of this tremendous manifestation of uncontrollable energy. At first the form and action of a teakettle was supposed to be explanatory. Everyone knows that when steam accumulates under the lid it forces a gentle stream of water from the higher nozzle. This fact was made the basis of a theory to account for geysers by Sir George Mackenzie in 1811. But to suppose that nature has gone into the teakettle manufacturing business to the extent of thirty such kettles in a space of four square miles was seen to be preposterous. So the construction theory was given up.

But suppose a tube (how it is made will be explained later), large or small, regular or irregular, to extend far into the earth, near or through any great source of heat resulting from condensation, combustion, chemical action, or central fire. Now suppose this tube to be filled with water from surface or subterranean sources. Heat converts water, under the pressure of one atmosphere, or fifteen pounds to the square inch, into steam at a temperature of two hundred and twelve degrees. But under greater pressure more heat is required to make steam. The water never leaps and bubbles in an engine boiler. The awful pressure compels it to be quiet. A cubic inch of water will make a cubic foot - one thousand seven hundred and twenty-eight times as much - of steam under the pressure of one atmosphere. But under the pressure of a column of water one thousand feet high, giving a pressure of four hundred and thirty-two pounds to the square inch at the bottom, water becomes steam, if at all, only by great heat. Every engineer knows that the pressure exerted by steam increases by great geometrical ratios as the heat increases by small arithmetical ratios. Steam made by two hundred and twelve degrees exerts a pressure, as we have said, of fifteen pounds.

To simply double the two hundred and twelve degrees of heat increases the steam pressure twenty-three times.

Now suppose the subterranean tube or lake of Old Faithful to be freshly filled with its million gallons of water. Sufficient heat makes steam under any pressure. It rises up the tube and is condensed to water again by the colder water above. Hence no commotion. But the whole volume of water grows hotter for an hour. When it is too hot to absorb the steam, and the tube is too narrow to let the amount made bubble up through the water, it lifts the whole mass with a sudden jerk. The instant the pressure of the water is taken off in any degree, the water below, that was kept water by the pressure, breaks into steam most voluminously, and the measureless power floods the earth and sky with water and steam.

It is also known that superheated steam suddenly takes on such great power that no boiler can hold it. Once let the water in a boiler get very low and no boiler can hold the force of the resultant superheated steam. The same heat that, applied to water, gives perfect safety, applied to steam gives utter destruction. Hence the amazing force of the vast jets of the geyser that follow the first spurts.

As soon as the steam is blown off the subterranean waterworks fill the tube and the process is repeated.

This modus operandi was first proposed as a theory by Bunsen in 1846, and later was demonstrated by the artificial geyser of Professor J. H. J. Muller, of Freiburg.

[Illustration: Pulpit Terrace and Bunsen Peak.]

MOUNTS OF MINERAL DEPOSITS

I have the extremely difficult task of representing emotions by words - glories of color and form seen by the eye by symbols meant to be addressed to the ear. Before seeking to describe the diverse colors made largely by one substance, let us remember that while silica, the principal part of these water-built mounds, is one of the three parts of granite, namely, the white crystal quartz, it is also the substance of the beautifully variegated jasper, the lapis lazuli, the green malachite, and the opal, with its cloudy milk-whiteness through which flashes its heart of fire. Silica and alumina combine to make common clay, but alumina forms itself into the red ruby, the golden-tinted topaz, the violet oriental amethyst, the red, white, yellow, and violet sapphire, and the beautiful green emerald. With substances of such rare capabilities we may expect rich results in color and form.

We turn now to deposits from water of these two substances, especially the first. About the Old Faithful geyser is a mound about one hundred and forty-five feet broad at the base, twelve feet high, jeweled over with pools of beauty of every shape, beaded and fretted with glories of color never seen before except in the sky. How were they made?

Water is a general solvent. It can take into its substance several similar bulks of other substances without greatly increasing its own, some actually diminishing it. Hot alkaline water will dissolve even silica rock. When water is saturated with sugar, salt, or other substance, if a little or much water is evaporated some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. All crystals, as quartz or diamonds, have been made by deposits from water. Hot water can hold in solution much more of a solid than cold water. Therefore, when hot water comes out of the earth and is cooled, some of the saturating substance must be deposited as a solid. It is done in various ways, especially two.

Suppose a little pool with perpendicular sides, say twenty feet across. It leaps and boils two feet high. It deposits nothing till the water comes to the cooling edge. Then it builds up a wall where it overflows, and wherever it flows it builds. The result is that you walk up the gentle slopes of a broad flat cone, and find the little lakelet in a gorgeous setting, perfectly full at every point of the circumference. If there is but little overflow, the result may be to deposit all the matter where it first cools, and make a perpendicular wall around the cup two or ten feet high. If the overflow is too much to be cooled at once, the deposit may still be made fifty or one hundred feet from the point of issue. If the overflow is sufficient, it may be building up every inch of a vast cone at once, every foot being wet.

[Illustration: The Punch Bowl, Yellowstone Geysers.]

Many minerals are held in solution and are deposited at various stages of evaporation. Let us suppose the lake to have the bottom sloping toward the abysmal center; the different minerals will be assorted as if with a sieve. At the Sunlight Basin the edge is as flaming red as one ever sees in the sunlit sky. And every color ever seen in a sunset flames almost as brilliantly in the varying depths. Suppose a low cone to be flooded only occasionally, as in the case of the Old Faithful geyser. The cooled water falling from the upper air builds up, under the terrible drench of the cataract, walls three or four inches high, making pools of every conceivable shape, a few inches deep, in which are the most exquisite and varied colors ever seen by mortal eye. You walk about on these dividing walls and gaze into the beaded and impearled pools of a hundred shades of different colors, never equaled except by that perpetual glory of the sunset.

Consider the case of a pool that does not overflow. Just as lakes that have no outlet must grow more and more salt till some have become solid salt beds, so must this pool, tossing its hot waves two or three feet high, evaporate its water and deposit its solids. Where? First, against the cooler sides of the rock under the water, tending to reduce the opening to a mere throat. Second, each wavelet tossed in air is cooled, and deposits on the edge, solid as quartz, a crust that overhangs the pool and tends to close it over as with hot ice. It may build thus a mound fifteen feet high with an open throat in the middle. Thus the pool has constructed an intermittent geyser. If the water supply continues, it also destroys itself. The throat closes up by its own deposits. It is a case of geyseral membranous croup.

I exceedingly longed to try vivisection on a geyser, or at least take one of half a hundred, drain it off, and make a post-mortem examination. On my very last day I found opportunity. I found a dead geyser, though not by any means yet cold. It was still so hot that people had given it an infernal name. I squeezed myself down through its hot throat, which seemed a veritable open sepulcher, and found a cave about twenty-five feet deep, twelve feet wide, and about sixty feet long. It was elliptical in form, the sides coming together at a sharp angle at the ends, bottom, and top. The way down to the fiery heart of the earth had simply grown up by deposits of silex on the sides and at the bottom. The water had evaporated by the intense heat, and I was in the hot hollow that had once held an earthquake and volcano. When I squeezed up to the blessed upper air I was glad there was no help from below.

I could tell of mounds that grew so fast as to inclose the limbs of a tree, making the firmest kind of a ladder by which I climbed to the top; of floods that overflowed acres of forest, leaving every tree firmly planted in solid rock; of mounds hundreds of feet high, covering twenty acres with forms of indescribable beauty - but I despair. The half has not been told. It cannot be. Great and marvelous are all Your works, Lord God Almighty! In wisdom have You made them all.

Emerson says: "Whilst common sense looks at things or visible nature as real and final facts, poetry, or the imagination which dictates it, is a second sight, looking through these, and using them as types or words for thoughts which they signify." Using these faculties and not mere eyesight, one must surely say: "Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are."

#27. The Grand Canon of the Colorado River

2008-08-24T17:12:00.000+08:00

Before me lies a thin bit of red rock, rippled as delicately as a woman's hair, bearing marks of raindrops that came from the south. It was once soft clay. It was laid down close to the igneous Archaean rocks when Mother Earth was in her girlhood and water first began to flow. More clay flowed over, and all was hardened into rock. Many strata, variously colored and composed, were deposited, till our bit of beauty was buried thousands of feet deep. The strata were tilted variously and abraded wondrously, for our earth has been treated very much as the fair-armed bread-maker treats the lump of dough she doubles and kneads on the molding board. Other rocks of a much harder nature, composed in part of the shells of inexpressible multitudes of Ocean's infusoria, were laid down from the superincumbent sea. Still the delicate ripple marks were preserved. Nature's vast library was being formed, and on this scrap of a leaf not a letter was lost.

Beside this stone now lies another of the purest white. It once flowed as water impregnated with lime, and clung to the lower side of a rock now as high above the sea as many a famous mountain. The water gradually evaporated, and the lime still hung like tiny drops. Between the two stones now so near together was once a perpendicular distance of more than a mile of impenetrable rock. How did they ever get together? Let us see.

After the rock making, by the deposit of clay, limestone, etc., this vast plain was lifted seven thousand feet above the sea and rimmed round with mountains. Perhaps in being afterward volcanically tossed in one of this old world's spasms an irregular crack ripped its way along a few hundred miles. Into this crack rushed a great river, perhaps also an inland ocean or vast Lake Superior, of which Salt Lake may be a little remnant puddle. These tumultuous waters proceeded to pulverize, dissolve, and carry away these six thousand feet of rock deposited between the two stones. There was fall enough to make forty Niagaras.

I was once where a deluge of rain had fallen a few days before in a mountain valley. It tore loose some huge rocks and plunged down a precipice of one thousand feet. The rock at the bottom was crushed under the frightful weight of the tumbling superincumbent mass, and every few minutes the top became the bottom. In one hour millions of tons of rock were crushed to pebbles and spread for miles over the plain, filling up a whole village to the roofs of the houses. I knew three villages utterly destroyed by a rush of water only ten feet deep. Water and gravitation make a frightful plow. Here some prehistoric Mississippi turned its mighty furrows.

The Colorado River is one of our great rivers. It is over two thousand miles long, reaches from near our northern to beyond our southern border, and drains three hundred thousand square miles of the west side of the Rocky Mountains. Great as it remains, it is a mere thread to what it once was. It is easy to see that there were several epochs of work. Suppose the first one took off the upper limestone rock to the depth of several thousand feet. This cutting is of various widths. Just here it is eighteen miles wide; but as such rocks are of varying hardness there are many promontories that distinctly project out, say, half a mile from the general rim line, and rising in the center are various Catskill and Holyoke mountains, with defiantly perpendicular sides, that persisted in resisting the mighty rush of waters. The outer portions of their foundations were cut away by the mighty flood and, as the ages went by, occasionally the sides thundered into the chasm, leaving the wall positively perpendicular.

We may now suppose the ocean waters nearly exhausted and only the mighty rivers that had made that ocean were left to flow; indeed, the rising Sierras of some range unknown at the present may have shut off whole oceans of rain. The rivers that remained began to cut a much narrower channel into the softer sand and clay-rock below. From the great mountain-rimmed plateau rivers poured in at the sides, cutting lateral cañons down to the central flow. Between these stand the little Holyokes aforesaid, with greatly narrowed base.

I go down with most reverent awe and pick the little ripple-rain-marked leaf out of its place in the book of nature, a veritable table of stone written by the finger of God, and bring it up and lay it alongside of one formed, eons after, at the top. They be brothers both, formed by the same forces and for the same end.

Standing by this stupendous work of nature day after day, I try to stretch my mind to some large computation of the work done. A whole day is taken to go down the gorge to the river. It takes seven miles of zigzag trail, sometimes frightfully steep, along shelves not over two feet wide, under rock thousands of feet above and going down thousands of feet below, to get down that perpendicular mile. It was an immense day's work.

The day was full of perceptions of the grandeur of vast rock masses never before suggested, except by the mighty mass of the Matterhorn seen close by from its Hörnli shoulder.

There was the river - a regular freight train, running day and night, the track unincumbered with returning cars (they were returned by the elevated road of the upper air) - burdened with dissolved rock and earth.

A slip into this river scarcely seemed to wet the foot; it seemed rather to coat it thickly with mud rescued from its plunge toward the sea. What unimaginable amounts the larger river must have carried in uncounted ages! In the short time the Mississippi has been at work it has built out the land at its mouth one hundred miles into the Gulf.

In the side cañon down which we worked our sublime and toilful way it was easy to see the work done. Sometimes the fierce torrent would pile the bottom of a side cañon with every variety of stone, from the wall a mile high, into one tremendous heap of conglomerate. The next rush of waters would tear a channel through this and pour millions of tons into the main river. For years Boston toiled, in feeble imitation of Milton's angels, to bring the Milton Hills into the back Bay and South Boston Flats. Boston made more land than the city originally contained, but it did not move a teaspoonful compared with these excavations.

The section traversed that day seemed while we were in it like a mighty chasm, a world half rent asunder, full of vast sublimities, but the next day, seen from the rim as a part of the mighty whole, it appeared comparatively little. One gets new meanings of the words almighty, eternity, infinity, in the presence of things done that seem to require them all.

In 1869 Major J. W. Powell, aided by nine men, attempted to pass down this tumultuous river with four boats specially constructed for the purpose. In ninety-eight days he had made one thousand miles, much of it in extremest peril. For weeks there was no possibility of climbing to the plateau above.

Any great scene in nature is like the woman you fall in love with at first sight for some pose of head, queenly carriage, auroral flush of color, penetrative music of voice, or a glance of soul through its illumined windows. You do not know much about her, but in long years of heroic endurance of trials, in the great dignity of motherhood, in the unspeakable comfortings that are scarcely short of godlike, and in the supernal, ineffable beauty and loveliness that cover it all, you find a richness and worth of which the most ardent lover never dreamed. The first sight of the cañon often brings strong men to their knees in awe and adoration. The gorge at Niagara is one hundred and fifty feet deep; it is far short of this, which is six thousand six hundred and forty. Great is the first impression, but in the longer and closer acquaintance every sense of beauty is flooded to the utmost.

The next morning I was out before "jocund day stood tiptoe on the breezy mountain tops." I have seen many sunrises In this world and one other: I have watched the moon slowly rolling its deep valleys for weeks into its morning sunlight. I knew what to expect. But nature always surpasses expectations. The sinuosities of the rim sent back their various colors. A hundred domes and spires, wind sculptured and water sculptured, reached up like Memnon to catch the first light of the sun, and seemed to me to break out into Memnonian music. As the world rolled the steady light penetrated deeper, shadows diminished, light spaces broadened and multiplied, till it seemed as if a new creation were veritably going forward and a new "Let there be light" had been uttered. I had seen it for the first time the night before in the mellow light of a nearly full moon, but the sunlight really seemed to make, in respect to breadth, depth, and definiteness, a new creation.

One peculiar effect I never noticed elsewhere. It is well known that the blue sky is not blue and there is no sky. Blue is the color of the atmosphere, and when seen in the miles deep overhead, or condensed in a jar, it shows its own true color. So, looking into this inconceivable cañon, the true color came out most beauteously. There was a background of red and yellowish rocks. These made the cold blue blush with warm color. The sapphire was backed with sardonyx, and the bluish white of the chalcedony was half pellucid to the gold chrysolite behind it. God was laying the foundation of His perfect city there, and the light of it seemed fit for the redeemed to walk in, and to have been made by the luminousness of Him who is light.

One great purpose of this world is its use as significant symbol and hint of the world to come. The communication of ideas and feelings there is not by slow, clumsy speech, often misunderstood, originally made to express low physical wants, but it is by charade, panorama, parable, and music rolling like the voice of many waters in a storm. The greatest things and relations of earth are as hintful of greater things as a bit of float ore in the plains is suggestive of boundless mines in the upper hills. So the joy of finding one lost lamb in the wilderness tells of the joy of finding and saving a human soul. One should never go to any of God's great wonders to see sights, but to live life; to read in them the figures, symbols, and types of the more wonderful things in the new heavens and the new earth.

The old Hebrew prophets and poets saw God everywhere in nature. The floods clap their hands and the hills are joyful together before the Lord. Miss Proctor, in the Yosemite, caught the same lofty spirit, and sang:

"Perpetual masses here intone,
Uncounted censers swing,
A psalm on every breeze is blown;
The echoing peaks from throne to throne
Greet the indwelling King;
The Lord, the Lord is everywhere,
And seraph-tongued are earth and air."

#26. The Matterhorn

2008-08-23T00:20:00.000+08:00

The Matterhorn is peculiar. I do not know of another mountain like it on the earth. There are such splintered and precipitous spires on the moon. How it came to be such I treated of fully in Sights and Insights. It is approximately a three-sided mountain, fourteen thousand seven hundred and eighteen feet high, whose sides are so steep as to be unassailable. Approach can be made only along the angle at the junction of the planes.

[Illustration: The Matterhorn.]

It was long supposed to be inaccessible. Assault after assault was made on it by the best and most ambitious Alp climbers, but it kept its virgin height untrodden. However, in 1864, seven men, almost unexpectedly, achieved the victory; but in descending four of them were precipitated, down an almost perpendicular declivity, four thousand feet. They had achieved the summit after hundreds of others had failed. They had reveled in the upper glories, deposited proof of their visit, and started to return. According to law, they were roped together. According to custom, in a difficult place all remain still, holding the rope, except one who carefully moves on. Croz, the first guide, was reaching up to take the feet of Mr. Haddow and help him down to where he stood. Suddenly Haddow's strength failed, or he slipped and struck Croz on the shoulders, knocking him off his narrow footing. They two immediately jerked off Rev. Mr. Hudson. The three falling jerked off Lord Francis Douglas. Four were loose and falling; only three left on the rocks. Just then the rope somehow parted, and all four dropped that great fraction of a mile. The mountain climber makes a sad pilgrimage to the graves of three of them in Zermatt; the fourth probably fell in a crevasse of the glacier at the foot, and may be brought to the sight of friends in perhaps two score years, when the river of ice shall have moved down into the valleys where the sun has power to melt away the ice. This accident gave the mountain a reputation for danger to which an occasional death on it since has added.

Each of these later unfortunate occurrences is attributable to personal perversity or deficiency. Peril depends more on the man than on circumstances. One is in danger on a wall twenty feet high, another safe on a precipice of a thousand feet. No man has a right to peril his life in mere mountain climbing; that great sacrifice must be reserved for saving others, or for establishing moral principle.

The morning after coming from Monte Rosa myself and son left Zermatt at half past seven for the top of the Matterhorn, twelve hours distant, under the guidance of Peter Knubel, his brother, and Peter Truffer, three of the best guides for this work in the country. In an hour the dwellings of the mountain-loving people are left behind, the tree limit is passed soon after, the grass cheers us for three hours, when we enter on the wide desolation of the moraines. Here is a little chapel. I entered it as reverently and prayed as earnestly for God's will, not mine, to be done as I ever did in my life, and I am confident that amid the unutterable grandeur that succeeded I felt his presence and help as fully as at any other time.

At ten minutes of two we were roped together and feeling our way carefully in the cut steps on a glacier so steep that, standing erect, one could put his hand upon it. We were on this nearly an hour. Just as we left it for the rocks a great noise above, and a little to the south, attracted attention. A vast mass of stone had detached itself from the overhanging cliff at the top, and falling on the steep slope had broken into a hundred pieces. These went bounding down the side in long leaps. Wherever one struck a cloud of powdered stone leaped into the air, till the whole mountain side smoked and thundered with the grand cannonade. The omen augured to me that the mountain was going to do its best for our reception and entertainment. Fortunately these rock avalanches occur on the steep, unapproachable sides, and not at the angle where men climb.

How the mountain grew upon us as we clung to its sides! When the great objects below had changed to littleness the heights above seemed greater than ever. At half past four we came to a perpendicular height of twenty feet, with a slight slope above. Down this precipice hung a rope; there was also an occasional projection of an inch or two of stone for the mailed foot. At the top, on a little shelf, under hundreds of feet of overhanging rock, some stones had been built round and over a little space for passing the night. The rude cabin occupied all the width of the shelf, so that passing to its other end there was not room to walk without holding on by one's hands in the crevices of the wall. We were now at home; had taken nine hours to do what could be done in eight. What an eyrie in which to sleep! Below us was a sheer descent, of a thousand or two feet, to the glacier. Above us towered the crest of the mountain, seemingly higher than ever. The sharp shadow of the lofty pyramid lengthened toward Monte Rosa. Italy lifted up its mountains tipped with sunshine to cheer us. The Obernese Alps, beyond the Rhone, answered with numerous torches to light us to our sleep. According to prearrangement, at eight o'clock we kindled a light on our crag to tell our friends in Zermatt that we had accomplished the first stage of our journey. They answered instantly with a cheery blaze, and we lay down to sleep.

When four of us lay together I was so crowded against the wall that I thought if it should give way I could fall two thousand feet out of bed without possibility of stopping on the way. The ice was two feet thick on the floor, and by reason of the scarcity of bedding I was reminded of the damp, chilly sheets of some unaired guest-chambers. I do not think I slept a moment, but I passed the night in a most happy, thoughtful, and exultant frame of mind.

At half past three in the morning we were roped together - fifteen feet of rope between each two men - for the final three or four hours' work. It is everywhere steep; it is every minute hands and feet on the rocks; sometimes you cling with fingers, elbows, knees, and feet, and are tempted to add the nose and chin. Where it is least steep the guide's heels are right in your face; when it is precipitous you only see a line of rope before you. We make the final pause an hour before the top. Here every weight and the fear that so easily besets one must be laid aside. No part of the way has seemed so difficult; not even that just past--when we rounded a shoulder on the ice for sixty feet, sometimes not over twenty inches wide, on the verge of a precipice four thousand feet high. To this day I can see the wrinkled form of that far-down glacier below, though I took care not to make more than one glance at it.

The rocks become smoother and steeper, if possible. A chain or rope trails from above in four places. You have good hope that it is well secured, and wish you were lighter, as you go up hand over hand. Then a beautiful slope for hands, knees, and feet for half an hour, and the top is reached at half past six.

The view is sublime. Moses on Pisgah could have had no such vision. He had knowledge added of the future grandeur of his people, but such a revelation as this tells so clearly what God can do for his people hereafter that that element of Moses's enjoyment can be perceived, if not fully appreciated. All the well-known mountains stand up like friends to cheer us. Mont Blanc has the smile of the morning sun to greet us withal. Monte Rosa chides us for not partaking of her prepared visions. The kingdoms of the world - France, Switzerland, Italy - are at our feet. One hundred and twenty snow-peaks flame like huge altar piles in the morning sun. The exhilarant air gives ecstasy to body, the new visions intensity of feeling to soul. The Old World has sunk out of sight. This is Mount Zion, the city of God. New Jerusalem has come down out of heaven adorned as a bride for her husband. The pavements are like glass mingled with fire. The gates of the morning are pearl. The walls, near or far according to your thought, are like jasper and sapphire. The glory of God and of the Lamb lightens it.

But we must descend, though it is good to be here. It is even more difficult and tedious than the ascent. Non facilis descensus. With your face to the mountain you have only the present surface and the effort for that instant. But when you turn your back on the mountain the imminent danger appears. It is not merely ahead, but the sides are much more dangerous. On the way down we had more cannonades. In six hours we were off the cliffs, and by half past three we had let ourselves down, inch by inch, to Zermatt, a distance of nine thousand four hundred feet.

Looking up to the Matterhorn this next morning after the climb, I feel for it a personal affection. It has put more pictures of grandeur into my being than ever entered in such a way before. It is grand enough to bear acquaintance. People who view it from a distance must be strangers. It has been, and ever will be, a great example and lofty monument of my Father's power. He takes up the isles as a very little thing; He touches the mountains and they smoke. The strength of the hills is His also; and He has made all things for His children, and waits to do greater things than these.

#25. The Monte Rosa

2008-08-22T03:01:00.000+08:00

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. Oh, that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

#24. Our Enjoyment of Nature's Forces

2008-08-05T11:06:00.000+08:00

We are a fighting race; not because we enjoy fights, but we enjoy the exercise of force. In early times when we knew of no forces to handle but our own, and no object to exercise them on but our fellow-men, there were feuds, tyrannies, wars, and general desolation. In the Thirty Years' War the population of Germany was starved and murdered down from sixteen millions to less than five millions.

But since we have found field, room, and ample verge for the play of our forces in material realms, and have acquired mastery of the superb forces of nature, we have come to an era of peace. We can now use our forces and those of nature with as real a sense of dominion and mastery on material things, resulting in comfort, as formerly on our fellow-men, resulting in ruin. We now devote to the conquest of nature what we once devoted to the conquest of men. There is a fascination in looking on force and its results. Some men never stand in the presence of an engine in full play without a feeling of reverence, as if they stood in the presence of God - and they do.

The turning to these forces is a characteristic of our age that makes it an age of adventure and discovery. The heart of equatorial Africa has been explored, and soon the poles will hold no undiscovered secrets.

Among the great monuments of power the mountains stand supreme. All the cohesions, chemical affinities, affections of metals, liquids, and gases are in full play, and the measureless power of gravitation. And yet higher forces have chasmed, veined, infiltrated, disintegrated, molded, bent the rocky strata like sheets of paper, and lifted the whole mass miles in air as if it were a mere bubble of gas.

The study of these powers is one of the fascinations of our time. Let me ask you to enjoy with me several of the greatest manifestations of force on this world of ours.

The Monte Rosa

Many of us in America know little of one of the great subjects of thought and endeavor in Europe. We are occasionally surprised by hearing that such a man fell into a crevasse, or that four men were killed on the Matterhorn, or five on the Lyskamm, and others elsewhere, and we wonder why they went there. The Alps are a great object of interest to all Europe. I have now before me a catalogue of 1,478 works on the Alps for sale by one bookseller. It seems incredible. In this list are over a dozen volumes describing different ascents of a single mountain, and that not the most difficult. There are publications of learned societies on geology, entomology, paleontology, botany, and one volume of Philosophical and Religious Walks about Mont Blanc. The geology of the Alps is a most perplexing problem. The summit of the Jungfrau, for example, consists of gneiss granite, but two masses of Jura limestone have been thrust into it, and their ends folded over.

It is the habit, of the Germans especially, to send students into the Alps with a case for flowers, a net for butterflies, and a box for bugs. Every rod is a schoolhouse. They speak of the "snow mountains" with ardent affection. Every Englishman, having no mountains at home, speaks and feels as if he owned the Alps. He, however, cares less for their flowers, bugs, and butterflies than for their qualities as a gymnasium and a measure of his physical ability. The name of every mountain or pass he has climbed is duly burnt into his Alpenstock, and the said stock, well burnt over, is his pride in travel and a grand testimonial of his ability at home.

There are numerous Alpine clubs in England, France, and Italy. In the grand exhibition of the nation at Milan the Alpine clubs have one of the most interesting exhibits. This general interest in the Alps is a testimony to man's admiration of the grandest work of God within reach, and to his continued devotion to physical hardihood in the midst of the enervating influences of civilization. There is one place in the world devoted by divine decree to pure air. You are obliged to use it. Toiling up these steeps the breathing quickens fourfold, till every particle of the blood has been bathed again and again in the perfect air. Tyndall records that he once staggered out of the murks and disease of London, fearing that his lifework was done. He crawled out of the hotel on the Bell Alp and, feeling new life, breasted the mountain, hour after hour, till every acrid humor had oozed away, and every part of his body had become so renewed that he was well from that time. In such a sanitarium, school of every department of knowledge, training-place for hardihood, and monument of Nature's grandest work, man does well to be interested.

You want to ascend these mountains? Come to Zermatt. With a wand ten miles long you can touch twenty snow-peaks. Europe has but one higher. Twenty glaciers cling to the mountain sides and send their torrents into the little green valley. Try yourself on Monte Rosa, more difficult to ascend than Mont Blanc; try the Matterhorn, vastly more difficult than either or both. A plumbline dropped from the summit of Monte Rosa through the mountain would be seven miles from Zermatt. You first have your feet shod with a preparation of nearly one hundred double-pointed hobnails driven into the heels and soles. In the afternoon you go up three thousand one hundred and sixteen feet to the Riffelhouse. It is equal to going up three hundred flights of stairs of ten feet each; that is, you go up three hundred stories of your house - only there are no stairs, and the path is on the outside of the house. This takes three hours - an hour to each hundred stories; after the custom of the hotels of this country, you find that you have reached the first floor. The next day you go up and down the Görner Grat, equal to one hundred and seventy more stories, for practice and a view unequaled in Europe. Ordering the guide to be ready and the porter to call you at one o'clock, you lie down to dream of the glorious revelations of the morrow.

The porter's rap came unexpectedly soon, and in response to the question, "What is the weather?" he said, "Not utterly bad." There is plenty of starlight; there had been through the night plenty of live thunder leaping among the rattling crags, some of it very interestingly near. We rose; there were three parties ready to make the ascent. The lightning still glimmered behind the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn, and the sound of the tumbling cataracts was ominously distinct. Was the storm over? The guides would give no opinion. It was their interest to go, it was ours to go only in good weather. By three o'clock I noticed that the pointer on the aneroid barometer, that instrument that has a kind of spiritual fineness of feeling, had moved a tenth of an inch upward. I gave the order to start. The other parties said, "Good for your pluck! Bon voyage, gute reise," and went to bed. In an hour we had ascended one thousand feet and down again to the glacier. The sky was brilliant. Hopes were high. The glacier with its vast medial moraines, shoving along rocks from twenty to fifty feet long, was crossed in the dawn. The sun rose clear, touching the snow-peaks with glory, and we shouted victory. But in a moment the sun was clouded, and so were we. Soon it came out again, and continued clear. But the guide said, "Only the good God knows if we shall have clear weather." Men get pious amid perils. I thought of the aneroid, and felt that the good God had confided his knowledge to one of his servants.

Leaving the glacier, we came to the real mountain. Six hours and a half will put one on the top, but he ought to take eight. I have no fondness for men who come to the Alps to see how quickly they can do the ascents. They simply proclaim that their object is not to see and enjoy, but to boast. We go up the lateral moraine, a huge ridge fifty feet high, with rocks in it ten feet square turned by the mighty plow of ice below. We scramble up the rocks of the mountain. Hour after hour we toil upward. At length we come to the snow-slopes, and are all four roped together. There are great crevasses, fifty or a hundred feet deep, with slight bridges of snow over them. If a man drops in the rest must pull him out. Being heavier than any other man of the party I thrust a leg through one snow-bridge, but I had just fixed my ice ax in the firm abutment and was saved the inconvenience and delay of dangling by a rope in a chasm. The beauty of these cold blue ice vaults cannot be described. They are often fringed with icicles. In one place they had formed from an overhanging shelf, reached the bottom, and then the shelf had melted away, leaving the icicles in an apparently reversed condition. We passed one place where vast masses of ice had rolled down from above, and we saw how a breath might start a new avalanche. We were up in one of nature's grandest workshops.

How the view widened! How the fleeting cloud and sunshine heightened the effect in the valley below! The glorious air made us know what the man meant who every morning thanked God that he was alive. Some have little occasion to be thankful in that respect.

Here we learned the use of a guide. Having carefully chosen him, by testimony of persons having experience, we were to follow him; not only generally, but step by step. Put each foot in his track. He had trodden the snow to firmness. But being heavier than he it often gave way under my pressure. One such slump and recovery takes more strength than ten regular steps. Not so in following the Guide to the fairer and greater heights of the next world. He who carried this world and its burden of sin on his heart trod the quicksands of time into such firmness that no man walking in his steps, however great his sins, ever breaks down the track. And just so in that upward way, one fall and recovery takes more strength than ten rising steps.

Meanwhile, what of the weather? Uncertainty. Avalanches thundered from the Breithorn and Lyskamm, telling of a penetrative moisture in the air. The Matterhorn refused to take in its signal flags of storm. Still the sun shone clear. We had put in six of the eight hours' work of ascent when snow began to fall. Soon it was too thick to see far. We came to a chasm that looked vast in the deception of the storm. It was only twenty feet wide. Getting round this the storm deepened till we could scarcely see one another. There was no mountain, no sky. We halted of necessity. The guide said, "Go back." I said, "Wait." We waited in wind, hail, and snow till all vestige of the track by which we had come - our only guide back if the storm continued - was lost except the holes made by the Alpenstocks. The snow drifted over, and did not fill these so quickly.

Not knowing but that the storm might last two days, as is frequently the case, I reluctantly gave the order to go down. In an hour we got below the storm. The valley into which we looked was full of brightest sunshine; the mountain above us looked like a cowled monk. In another hour the whole sky was perfectly clear. O that I had kept my faith in my aneroid! Had I held to the faith that started me in the morning - endured the storm, not wavered at suggestions of peril, defied apparent knowledge of local guides - and then been able to surmount the difficulty of the new-fallen snow, I should have been favored with such a view as is not enjoyed once in ten years; for men cannot go up all the way in storm, nor soon enough after to get all the benefit of the cleared air. Better things were prepared for me than I knew; indications of them offered to my faith; they were firmly grasped, and held almost long enough for realization, and then let go in an hour of darkness and storm.

I reached the Riffelhouse after eleven hours' struggle with rocks and softened snow, and said to the guide, "Tomorrow I start for the Matterhorn." To do this we go down the three hundred stories to Zermatt.

Every mountain excursion I ever made has been in the highest degree profitable. Even this one, though robbed of its hoped-for culmination, has been one of the richest I have ever enjoyed.

#23. The Next World to Conquer

2008-08-04T00:51:00.000+08:00

Man's next realm of conquest is the celestial ether. It has higher powers, greater intensities, and quicker activities than any realm he has yet attempted.

When the emissory or corpuscular theory of light had to be abandoned a medium for light's interplay between worlds had to be conceived. The existence of an all-pervasive medium called the luminiferous ether was launched as a theory. Its reality has been so far demonstrated that but very few doubters remain.

What facts of its conditions and powers can be known? It differs almost totally from our conceptions of matter. Of the eighteen necessary properties of matter perhaps only one, extension, can be predicated of it. It is unlimited, all-pervasive; even where worlds are non-attractive, does not accumulate about suns or other bodies; has no structure, chemical relations, nor inertia; is not heatable, and is not cognizable by any of our present senses. Does it not take us one step toward an apprehension of the revealed condition of spirit?

Recall its actual activities. Two hundred and fifty-eight vibrations of air per second produce on the ear the sensation we call do, or C of the soprano scale; five hundred and sixteen give the upper C, or an octave above. So the sound runs up in air till, above, say, thirty-five thousand vibrations per second, there is plenty of sound inaudible to our ears. But not inaudible to finer ears. To them the morning stars sing together in mighty chorus:

"Forever singing as they shine,
'The hand that made us is divine.'"

Electricity has as great a variety of vibrations as sound. Since some kinds of electricity do not readily pass through space devoid of air, though light and heat do, it seems likely that some of the lower intensities and slower vibrations of electricity are not in ether but in air. Certainly some of the higher intensities are in ether. Between two hundred and four hundred millions of millions of vibrations of ether per second are the different sorts of heat. Between four hundred and eight hundred vibrations are the different colors of light. Beyond eight hundred vibrations there is plenty of light, invisible to our eyes, known as chemical rays and probably the Roentgen rays. Beyond these are there vibrations for thought-transference? Who knoweth?

These familiar facts are called up to show the almost infinite capacities and intensities of the ether. Matter is more forceful, as it is less dense. Rock is solid, and has little force except obstinate resistance. Steam is rarer and more forceful. Gases suddenly born of dynamite touched by fire in the rock under a mountain have the tremendous pressure of eighty thousand pounds to the square inch. Ether is so rare that its density, compared with water, is represented by a decimal fraction with twenty-seven ciphers before it.

When the worlds navigate this sea, do they plow through it as a ship through the waves, forcing them aside, or as a sieve letting the water through it? Doubtless the sieve is the better symbol. Certainly the vibrations flow through solid glass and most solid diamond. To be sure, they are a little hampered by the solid substance. The speed of light is reduced from one hundred and eighty thousand miles a second in space to one hundred and twenty thousand in glass. If ether can so readily go through such solids, no wonder that a spirit body could appear to the disciples, "the doors being shut."

Marvelous discoveries in the capacities of ether have been made lately. In 1842 Joseph Henry found that electric waves in the top of his house provoked action in a wire circuit in the cellar, through two floors and ceilings, without wire connections. More than twenty years ago Professor Loomis, of the United States coast survey, telegraphed twenty miles between mountains by electric impulses sent from kites. Last year Mr. Preece, the cable being broken, sent, without wires, one hundred and fifty-six messages between the mainland and the island of Mull, a distance of four and a half miles. Marconi, an Italian, has sent recognizable signals through seven or eight thick walls of the London post-office, and three fourths of a mile through a hill. Jagadis Chunder Bose, of India, has fired a pistol by an electric vibration seventy-five feet away and through more than four feet of masonry. Since brick does not elastically vibrate to such infinitesimal impulses as electric waves, ether must. It has already been proven that one can telegraph to a flying train from the overhead wires. Ether is a far better medium of transmission than iron. A wire will now carry eight messages each way, at the same time, without interference. What will not the more facile ether do?

Such are some of the first vague suggestions of a realm of power and knowledge not yet explored. They are mere auroral hints of a new dawn. The full day is yet to shine.

Like timid children, we have peered into the schoolhouse - afraid of the unknown master. If we will but enter we shall find that the Master is our Father, and that He has fitted up this house, out of His own infinite wisdom, skill, and love, that we may be like Him in wisdom and power as well as in love.

#22. Mobility of Seeming Solids

2008-08-03T10:14:00.000+08:00

When a human breath, or the white jet of a steam whistle, or the black cough of a locomotive smokestack is projected into the air it is easy to see that the air is mobile. Its particles easily roll over one another in voluminously infolding wreaths. The same is seen in water. The crest of a wave falls over a portion of air, imprisoning it for a moment, and the mingled air and water of different densities prevent the light of the sun or sky from going straight down into the black depths and being lost, but by being reflected and turned back it shows like beautiful white lace, constantly created and dissolved with a thousandfold more beauty than any that ever came from human hands. All the three shifting elements of the swift creations are mobile. This seems to be the case because these elements are not solid. The particles have plenty of room to play about each other, to execute mazy dances and minuets with vastly more space than substance.

Extend the thought a little. Things that seem to us most solid are equally mobile. An iron wire seems solid. It is so; some parts much more so than others. The surface that has been in closest contact with the die as the wire was drawn through, reducing its size by one half, perhaps, is vastly more dense than the inner parts that have not been so condensed. File away one tenth of a wire, taking it all from the surface, and you weaken the tensile strength of the wire one half. But, dense and solid as this iron is, its particles are as mobile within certain limits as the particles of air. An electric message sent through a mile of wire is not anything transmitted; matter is not transferred, but the particles are set to dancing in wavy motion from end to end. Particles are leaping within ordered limits and according to regular laws as really as the clouds swirl and the air trembles into song through the throat of a singer. When a wire is made sensitive by electricity the breath of a child can make it vibrate from end to end, ensouled with the child's laughter or fancies. Nay, more, and far more wonderful, the wire will be sensitive to the number of vibrations of a certain note of music, and no receiver at the other end will gather up its sensitive tremblings unless it is pitched to the keynote of the vibrations sent. In this way eight sets of vibrations have been sent on one wire both ways at the same time, and no set of signals has in any way interfered with the completeness and audibility of the rest. Sixteen sets of waltzes were being performed at one and the same time by the particles of one wire without confusion. Because the air is transmitting the notes of an organ from the loft to the opposite end of the church, it is not incapable of bringing the sound of a voice in an opposite direction to the organist from the other end of the church.

The extreme mobility of steel is seen when the red-hot metal is plunged into water. Instantly every particle takes a new position, making it a hundredfold more hard than before it was heated. But these particles of transferred steel are still mobile. A man's razor does not cut smoothly. It is dull, or has a ragged edge that is more inclined to draw tears than cut hairs. He draws the razor over the tender palm of his hand a few times, rearranges the particles of the edge and builds them out into a sharper form. Then the razor returns to the lip with the dainty touch of a kiss instead of a saw. Or the tearful man dips the razor in hot water and the particles run out to make a wider blade and, of course, a thinner, sharper edge. Drop the tire of a wagon wheel into a circular fire. As the heat increases each particle says to its neighbor, "Please stand a little further off; this more than July heat is uncomfortable." So the close friends stand a little further apart, lengthening the tire an inch or two. Then, being taken out of the fire and put on the wheel and cooled, the particles snuggle up together again, holding the wheel with a grip of cold iron. Mobile and loose, with plenty of room to play, as the particles have, neither wire nor tire loses its tensile strength. They hold together, whether arms are locked around each other's waist, or hand clasps hand in farther reach. What change has come to iron when it has been made red or white hot? Its particles have simply been mobilized. It differs from cold iron as an army in barracks and forts differs from an army mobilized. Nothing has been added but movement. There is no caloric substance. Heat is a mode of motion. The particles of iron have been made to vibrate among themselves. When the rapidity of movement reaches four hundred and sixty millions of millions of vibrations per second it so affects the eye that we say it is red-hot. When other systems of vibration have been added for yellow, etc., up to seven hundred and thirty millions of millions for the violet, and all continue in full play, the eye perceives what we call white heat. It is a simple illustration of the readiness of seeming solids to vibrate with almost infinite swiftness.

I have been to-day in what is to me a kind of heaven below - the workshop of my much-loved friend, John A. Brashear, in Allegheny, Pa. He easily makes and measures things to one four-hundred-thousandth of an inch of accuracy. I put my hand for a few seconds on a great piece of glass three inches thick. The human heat raised a lump detectable by his measurements. We were testing a piece of glass half an inch thick; and five inches in diameter. I put my two thumbnails at the two sides as it rested on its bed, and could see at once that I had compressed the glass to a shorter diameter. We twisted it in so many ways that I said, "That is a piece of glass putty." And yet it was the firmest texture possible to secure. Great lenses are so sensitive that one cannot go near them without throwing them discernibly out of shape. It were easy to show that there is no solid earth nor immovable mountains. I came away saying to my friend, "I am glad God lets you into so much of his finest thinking." He is a mechanic, not a theologian. This foremost man in the world in his fine department was lately but a "greasy mechanic," an engineer in a rolling mill.

But for elasticity and mobility nothing approaches the celestial ether. Its vibrations reach into millions of millions per second, and its wave-lengths for extreme red light are only .0000266 of an inch long, and for extreme violet still less - .0000167 of an inch.

It is easier molding hot iron than cold, mobile things than immobile. This world has been made elastic, ready to take new forms. New creations are easy, for man, even - much more so for God. Of angels, Milton says:

"Thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o'er land and ocean without rest."

No less is it true of atoms. In him all things live and move. Such intense activities could not be without an infinite God immanent in matter.

#21. Some Curious Behaviors of Atoms

2008-08-02T11:41:00.002+08:00

Ultimate atoms of matter are asserted to be impenetrable. That is, if a mass of them really touched each other, that mass would not be condensible by any force. But atoms of matter do not touch. It is thinkable, but not demonstrable, that condensation might go on till there were no discernible substance left, only force.

Matter exists in three states: solid, liquid, and gas. It is thought that all matter may be passed through the three stages - iron being capable of being volatilized, and gases condensed to liquids and solids - the chief difference of these states being greater or less distance between the constituent atoms and molecules. In gas the particles are distant from each other, like gnats flying in the air; in liquids, distant as men passing in a busy street; in solids, as men in a congregation, so sparse that each can easily move about. The congregation can easily disperse to the rarity of those walking in the street, and the men in the street condense to the density of the congregation. So, matter can change in going from solids to liquids and gases, or vice versa. The behavior of atoms in the process is surpassingly interesting.

Gold changes its density, and therefore its thickness, between the two dies of the mint that make it money. How do the particles behave as they snuggle up closer to each other?

Take a piece of iron wire and bend it. The atoms on the inner side become nearer together, those on the outside farther apart. Twist it. The outer particles revolve on each other; those of the middle do not move. They assume and maintain their new relations.

Hang a weight on a wire. It does not stretch like a rubber thread, but it stretches. Eight wires were tested as to their tensile strength. They gave an average of forty-five pounds, and an elongation averaging nineteen per cent of the total length. Then a wire of the same kind was given time to adjust itself to its new and trying circumstances. Forty pounds were hung on one day, three pounds more the next day, and so on, increasing the weights by diminishing quantities, till in sixty days it carried fifty-seven pounds. So it seems that exercise strengthened the wire nearly twenty-seven per cent.

While those atoms are hustling about, lengthening the wire and getting a better grip on one another, they grow warm with the exercise. Hold a thick rubber band against your lip - suddenly stretch it. The lip easily perceives the greater heat. After a few moments let it contract. The greater coldness is equally perceptible.

A wire suspending thirty-nine pounds being twisted ninety-five full turns lengthened itself one sixteen-hundredth of its length. Being further twisted by twenty-five turns it shortened itself one fourth of its previous elongation. During the twisting some sections took far more torsion than others. A steel wire supporting thirty-nine pounds was twisted one hundred and twenty times and then allowed to untwist at will. It let out only thirty-eight turns and retained eighty-two in the new permanent relation of particles. A wire has been known to accommodate itself to nearly fourteen hundred twists, and still the atoms did not let go of each other. They slid about on each other as freely as the atoms of water, but they still held on. It is easier to conceive of these atoms sliding about, making the wire thinner and longer, when we consider that it is the opinion of our best physicists that molecules made of atoms are never still. Masses of matter may be still, but not the constituent elements. They are always in intensest activity, like a mass of bees - those inside coming out, outside ones going in - but the mass remains the same.

The atoms of water behave extraordinarily. I know of a boiler and pipes for heating a house. When the fire was applied and the temperature was changed from that of the street to two hundred degrees, it was easy to see that there was a whole barrel more of it than when it was let into the boiler. It had been swollen by the heat, but it was nothing but water.

Mobile, flexible, and yielding as water seems to be, it has an obstinacy quite remarkable. It was for a long time supposed to be absolutely incompressible. It is nearly so. A pressure that would reduce air to one hundredth of its bulk would not discernibly affect water. Put a ton weight on a cubic inch of water; it does not flinch nor perceptibly shrink, yet the atoms of water do not fill the space they occupy. They object to being crowded. They make no objection to having other matter come in and possess the space unoccupied by them.

Air so much enjoys its free, agile state, leaping over hills and plains, kissing a thousand flowers, that it greatly objects to being condensed to a liquid. First we must take away all the heat. Two hundred and ten degrees of heat changes water to steam filling 1,728 times as much space. No amount of pressure will condense steam to water unless the heat is removed. So take heat away from air till it is more than two hundred degrees below zero, and then a pressure of about two hundred atmospheres (14.7 pounds each) changes common air to fluid. It fights desperately against condensation, growing hot with the effort, and it maintains its resilience for years at any point of pressure short of the final surrender that gives up to become liquid.

Perhaps sometime we shall have the pure air of the mountains or the sea condensed to fluid and sold by the quart to the dwellers in the city, to be expanded into air once more.

The marvel is not greater that gas is able to sustain itself under the awful pressure with its particles in extreme dispersion, than that what we call solids should have their molecules in a mazy dance and yet keep their strength.

Since this world, in power, fineness, finish, beauty, and adaptations, not only surpasses our accomplishment, but also is past our finding out to its perfection, it must have been made by One stronger, finer, and wiser than we are.

#20. Creations Now in Progress

2008-08-01T12:08:00.000+08:00

The forces of creation are yet in full play. Who can direct them? Rewards greater than Tilghman's await the thinker. We are permitted not only to think God's thoughts after him, but to do his works. "Greater works than these that I do shall he do who believeth on me," says the Greatest Worker. Great profit incites to do the work noted below.

Carbon as charcoal is worth about six cents a bushel; as plumbago, for lead pencils or for the bicycle chain, it is worth more; as diamond it has been sold for $500,000 for less than an ounce, and that was regarded as less than half its value. Such a stone is so valuable that $15,000 has been spent in grinding and polishing its surface. The glazier pays $5.00 for a bit of carbon so small that it would take about ten thousand of them to make an ounce.

Why is there such a difference in value? Simply arrangement and compactness. Can we so enormously enhance the value of a bushel of charcoal by arrangement and compression? Not very satisfactorily as yet. We can apply almost limitless pressure, but that does not make diamonds. Every particle must go to its place by some law and force we have not yet attained the mastery of.

We do not know and control the law and force in nature that would enable us to say to a few million bricks, stones, bits of glass, etc., "Fly up through earth, water, and air, and combine into a perfect palace, with walls, buttresses, towers, and windows all in exact architectural harmony." But there is such a law and force for crystals, if not for palaces. There is wisdom to originate and power to manage such a force. It does not take masses of rock and stick them together, nor even particles from a fluid, but atoms from a gas. Atoms as fine as those of air must be taken and put in their place, one by one, under enormous pressure, to have the resulting crystal as compact as a diamond.

The force of crystallization is used by us in many inferior ways, as in making crystals of rock candy, sulphur, salt, etc., but for the making of diamonds it is too much for us, except in a small way.

While we cannot yet use the force that builds large white diamonds we can use the diamonds themselves. Set a number of them around a section of an iron tube, place it against a rock, at the surface or deep down in a mine, cause it to revolve rapidly by machinery, and it will bore into the rock, leaving a core. Force in water, to remove the dust and chips, and the diamond teeth will eat their way hundreds of feet in any direction; and by examining the extracted core miners can tell what sort of ore there is hundreds of feet in advance. Hence, they go only where they know that value lies.

#19. Hint Help

2008-07-31T00:35:00.000+08:00

Benjamin C. B. Tilghman, of Philadelphia, once went into the lighthouse at Cape May, and, observing that the window glass was translucent rather than transparent, asked the keeper why he put ground glass in the windows. "We do not," said the keeper. "We put in the clear glass, and the wind blows the sand against it and roughens the outer surface like ground glass." The answer was to him like the falling apple to Newton. He put on his thinking cap and went out. It was better than the cap of Fortunatus to him. He thought, "If nature does this, why cannot I make a fiercer blast, let sand trickle into it, and so hurl a million little hammers at the glass, and grind it more swiftly than we do on stones with a stream of wet sand added?"

He tried jets of steam and of air with sand, and found that he could roughen a pane of glass almost instantly. By coating a part of the glass with hot beeswax, applied with a brush, through a stencil, or covering it with paper cut into any desired figures, he could engrave the most delicate and intricate patterns as readily as if plain. Glass is often made all white, except a very thin coating of brilliant colored glass on one side. This he could cut through, leaving letters of brilliant color and the general surface white, or vice versa.

Seal cutting is a very delicate and difficult art, old as the Pharaohs. Protect the surface that is to be left, and the sand blast will cut out the required design neatly and swiftly.

There is no known substance, not even corundum, hard enough to resist the swift impact of myriads of little stones.

It will cut more granite into shape in an hour than a man can in a day.

Surely no one will be sorry to learn that General Tilghman sold part of his patents, taken out in October, 1870, for $400,000, and receives the untold benefits of the rest to this day. So much for thinking.

Nature gives thousands of hints. Some can take them; some can only take the other thing. The hints are greatly preferred by nature and man.

#18. Natural Affection of Metal and Gas

2008-07-23T01:40:00.000+08:00

A man was awoken one night in a strange house by a noise he could not understand. He wanted a light, and wanted it very much, but he had no matches that would take fire by the heat of friction. He knew of many other ways of starting a fire. If water gets to the cargo of lime in a vessel it sets the ship on fire. It is of no use to try to put it out by water, for it only makes more heat. He knew that dried alum and sugar suitably mixed would burst into flame if exposed to the air; that nitric acid and oil of turpentine would take fire if mixed; that flint struck by steel would start fire enough to explode a powder magazine; and that Elijah called down from Heaven a kind of fire that burned twelve "barrels" of water as easily as ordinary water puts out ordinary fire. But he had none of these ways of lighting his candle at hand - not even the last.

So he took a bit of potassium metal, bright as silver, out of a bottle of naphtha, put it in the candle wick, touched it with a bit of dripping ice, and so lighted his candle.

The potassium was so avaricious of oxygen that it decomposed the water to get it. Indeed, it was a case of mutual affection. The oxygen preferred the company of potassium to that of the hydrogen in the water, and went to it even at the risk of being burned.

I was so interested in seeing a bit of silver-like metal and water take fire as they touched that I forgot all about the occasion of the noise.

#17. Natural Affection between Metal and Liquid

2008-07-22T22:07:00.000+08:00

A little boy had a silver mug that he prized very highly, as it was the gift of his grandfather. The boy was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but, what was much better, he had a mug often filled with what he needed.

One day he dipped it into a glass jar of what seemed to him water, and letting go of it saw it go to the bottom. He went to find his father to fish it out for him. When he came back his heavy solid mug looked as if it were made of the skeleton leaves of the forest when the green chlorophyll has decayed away in the winter and left only the gauzy veins and veinlets through which the leaves were made. Soon even this fretwork was gone, and there was no sign of it to be seen. The liquid had eaten or drank the solid metal up, particle by particle. The liquid was nitric acid.

The poor little boy had often seen salt, and especially sugar, absorbed in water, but never his precious solid silver mug, and the bright tears rolled down his cheeks freely.

But his father thought of two things: First, that the blue tint told him that the jeweler had sold for silver to the grandfather a mug that was part copper; and secondly, that he would put some common salt into the nitric acid - which it liked so much better than silver that it dropped the silver, just as a boy might drop bread when he sought to fill his hands with cake.

So the father recovered the invisible silver and made it into a precious mug again.

#16. Natural Affection of Metals

2008-07-20T21:37:00.000+08:00

"Sacra fames auri." The hunger for gold, which in men is called accursed, in metals is justly called sacred.

In all the water of the sea there is gold - about 400 tons in a cubic mile - in very much of the soil, some in all Philadelphia clay, in the Pactolian sands of every river where Midas has bathed, and in many rocks of the earth. But it is so fine and so mixed with other substances that in many cases it cannot be seen. Look at the ore from a mine that is giving its owners millions of dollars. Not a speck of gold can be seen. How can it be secured? Set a trap for it. Put down something that has an affinity - voracious appetite, unslakable thirst, metallic affection - for gold, and they will come together.

We have heard of potable gold - "potabile aurum." There are metals to which all gold is drinkable. Mercury is one of them. Cut transverse channels, or nail little cleats across a wooden chute for carrying water. Put mercury in the grooves or before the cleats, and shovel auriferous gravel and sand into the rushing water. The mercury will bibulously drink into itself all the fine invisible gold, while the unaffectionate sand goes on, bereaved of its wealth.

Put gold-bearing quartz under an upright log shod with iron. Lift and drop the log a few hundred times on the rock, until it is crushed so fine that it flows over the edge of the trough with constantly going water, and an amalgam of mercury spread over the inclined way down which the endusted water flows will drink up all the gold by force of natural affection therefor.

Neither can the gold be seen in the mercury. But it is there. Squeeze the mercury through chamois skin. An amalgam, mostly gold, refuses to go through. Or apply heat. The mercury flies away as vapor and the gold remains.

If thou seekest for wisdom as for silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasure, thou shalt find.

#15. Gas Help

2008-07-19T00:19:00.000+08:00

This refers to more than stump speech-making. The old Romans drove through solid rock numerous tunnels similar to the one for draining Lago de Celano, fifty miles east of Rome. This one was three and a half miles long, through solid rock, and every chip cost a blow of a human arm to dislodge it. Of course the process was very slow.

We do works vastly greater. We drive tunnels three times as long for double-track railways through rock that is held down by an Alp. We use common air to drill the holes and a thin gas to break the rock. The Mont Cenis tunnel required the removal of 900,000 cubic yards of rock. Near Dover, England, 1,000,000,000 tons of cliff were torn down and scattered over fifteen acres in an instant. How was it done? By gas.

There are a dozen kinds of solids which can be handled - some of them frozen, thawed, soaked in water, with impunity - but let a spark of fire touch them and they break into vast volumes of uncontrollable gas that will rend the heart out of a mountain in order to expand.

Gunpowder was first used in 1350; so the old Romans knew nothing of its power. They flung javelins a few rods by the strength of the arm; we throw great iron shells, starting with an initial velocity of fifteen hundred feet a second and going ten miles. The air pressure against the front of a fifteen-inch shell going at that speed is 2,865 pounds. That ton and a half of resistance of gas in front must be much more than overcome by gas behind.

But the least use of explosives is in war; not over ten per cent is so used. The Mont Cenis tunnel took enough for 200,000,000 musket cartridges. As much as 2,000 kegs have been fired at once in California to loosen up gravel for mining, and 23 tons were exploded at once under Hell Gate, at New York.

How strong is this gas? As strong as you please. Steam is sometimes worked at a pressure of 400 pounds to the inch, but not usually over 100 pounds. It would be no use to turn steam into a hole drilled in rock. The ordinary pressure of exploded gas is 80,000 pounds to the square inch. It can be made many times more forceful. It works as well in water, under the sea, or makes earthquakes in oil wells 2,000 feet deep, as under mountains.

The wildest imagination of Scheherezade never dreamed in Arabian Nights of genii that had a tithe of the power of these real forces. Her genii shut up in bottles had to wait centuries for some fisherman to let them out.

#14. One Plant Help

2008-07-18T22:34:00.000+08:00

A thousand acres of land on Cape Cod were once blown away. This wind excavation was ten feet deep. It was not an extraordinary wind, but extraordinary land. It was made of rock ground up into fine sand by the waves on the shore.

In all the deserts of the world the wind blows the itinerant sand on its far journeys. If the wind is moderate it heaps the sand up into little hills, some of them six hundred feet high, around any obstruction, and then blows the sand up the slanting face of the hill and over the top, where it falls out of the wind on the leeward side. In this way the hill is always traveling. In North Carolina hills start inland, and travel right on, burying a house or farm if it be in the way, but resurrecting it again on the other side as the hill goes on. Anyone may see these hills at the south end of Lake Michigan, as he approaches Chicago, west of San Francisco, all along up the Columbia River - the sand having come on the wings of the wind from the coast.

But to see the whole visible world on a march one needs to go to a really large desert. The Pyramids and the Sphinx have been partly buried, and parts of the valley of the Nile threatened, by hordes of sand hills marching in from the desert; cities have been buried and harbors filled up. Many of the harbors of the ancient civilizations are mere miasmatic marshes now. This is partly in consequence of the silt brought in by the rivers; but where the rivers do not flow in it is because the sand blows in along the shore. Harbors are especially endangered when their protection from the waves consists of a bank of sand, as on Cape Cod and the Sandy Hook below the Narrows of the harbor of New York.

How can man combat part of the continent on the move, driven by the ceaseless powers of the air? By a humble plant or two. The movement of the sand hills that threaten to destroy the marvelous beauty of the grounds of the Hotel del Monte at Monterey is stopped by planting dwarf pines. The sand dunes that prevent much of Holland from being reconquered by the sea are protected with great care by willows, etc., and the coast sands of parts of eastern France have been sown with sea pine and broom.

The tract of a thousand acres on Cape Cod had been protected by humble beach grass. Some careless herder let the cows eat it in places, and away went part of a township. It is now a punishable crime on Cape Cod to destroy beach grass.

#13. The Help of Inertia

2008-07-17T11:32:00.001+08:00

Since the time of David many boys have swung pebbles by a string, or sling, and felt the pull of what we call a centrifugal (center-fleeing) force. David utilized it to one good purpose. Goliath was greatly surprised; such a thing never entered his head before. Whether a stone or an idea enters one's head depends on the kind of head he has.

We utilize this force in many ways now. Some boys swing a pail of milk over their heads, and if swung fast enough the centrifugal force overcomes the force of gravitation, and the milk does not fall. That is not utilizing the force. It often terrorizes the careful mother, anxious for the safety of the milk.

But in the arts of practical life we do utilize this force, which is only inertia.

Once it took a long time for molasses to drain out of a hogshead of damp sugar. Now it is put into a great tub, with holes in the side, which is made to revolve rapidly, and the molasses flies out. In the best laundries clothes are not wrung out, to the great damage of tender fabrics, but are put into such a tub and whirled nearly dry. So fifty yards of woolen cloth just out of the dye vat - who could wring it? It is coiled in a tub called a wizard, and whirled.

Muddy water is put through a process called clarification. It is the same, except that there are no holes in the vessel. The heavier particles of dirt, that would settle in time, take the outside, leaving perfectly clean water in the middle. A perpendicular perforated pipe, with a faucet below, drains off all the clear water and leaves all the mud. Milk is brought in from the milking and put into a separator; whirl it, and the heavier milk takes the outside of the whirling mass, and the lighter cream can be drawn off from the middle. It is far more perfectly separated than by any skimming.

A rotary snowplow slices off two feet of a ten-foot drift at each revolution, and by centrifugal force flings it out of the cutting with a speed that a hundred navvies or dagos cannot equal.

#12. The Fairy Works A Pump Handle

2008-07-16T01:31:00.002+08:00

The Slave of the Ring could take Aladdin into a cave of wealth, and by speaking the words, "Open Sesame," Ali Baba was admitted into the cave that held the treasures of the forty thieves. But that is very little. I have just come from a cave in Virginia City, Nev., from which men took $120,000,000.

In following the veins of silver the miners went down 3,500 feet - more than three fifths of a mile. There it was fearfully hot, but the main trouble was water. They had dug a deep, deep well. How could they get the water out? Pumps were of no use. A column of water one foot square of that height weighs 218,242 pounds. Who could work the other end of the pump handle?

They thought of evaporating the water and sending it up as steam. But it was found that it would take an incredible amount of coal. They thought of separating it into oxygen and hydrogen, and then its own lightness would carry it up very quickly. But they had no power that would resolve even quarts into their ultimate elements, where tons would be required.

So they asked gravitation to help them. It readily offered to do so. It could not let go its hold of the water in the mine, nor anywhere else, for fear everything would go to pieces, but it offered to overcome force with greater force. So it sent the men twenty miles away in the mountains to dig a ditch all the way to the mine, and then gravitation brought water to a reservoir four hundred feet above the mouth of the mine. Now a column of this water one foot square can be taken from this higher reservoir down to the bottom of the mine and weigh 25,000 pounds more than a like column that comes from the bottom to the top. This extra 25,000 pounds is an extra force available to lift itself and the other water out of the deep well, and they turn the greater force into a pump and work it in the cylinder as if it were steam. It lifts not only the water that works the pump, but the other water also out of the mine by gravitation. So man gets the water out by pouring more water in.

#11. The Fairy Draws Greater Loads

2008-07-14T21:18:00.000+08:00

Pittsburg has 5,000,000 tons of coal every year that it wishes to send South, much of it as far as New Orleans - 2,050 miles. What force is sufficient for moving such great mountains so far? Any boy may find it.

Tie a stone to the end of a string, whirl it around the finger and feel it pull. How much is the pull? That depends on the weight of the stone, the length of the string, and the swiftness of the whirl. In the case of David's sling it pulled away hard enough to crash into the head of Goliath. Suppose the stone to be as big as the earth (8,000 miles in diameter), the length of the string to be its distance from the sun (92,500,000 miles), and the swiftness of flight the speed of the earth in its orbit (1,000 miles a minute). The pull represents the power of gravitation that holds the earth to the sun.

If we use steel wires instead of gravitation for this purpose, each strong enough to support half a score of people (1,500 pounds), how many would it take? We would need to distribute them over the whole earth: from pole to pole, from side to side, over all the land and sea. Then they would need to be so near together that a mouse could not run around among them.

Here is a measureless power. Can it be gotten to take Pittsburgh coal to New Orleans? Certainly; it was made to serve man. So the coal is put on great flatboats, 36 x 176 feet, a thousand tons to a boat, and gravitation takes the mighty burden down the long toboggan slide of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to the journey's end. How easy!

[Illustration: The Head of the Toboggan Slide.]

One load sent down was 43,000 tons. The flatboats were lashed together as one solid boat covering six and one half acres, more space than a whole block of houses in a city, with one little steamboat to steer. There is always plenty of power; just belt on for anything you want done. This is only one thing that gravitation does for man on these rivers. And there are many rivers. They serve the savage on his log and the scientist in his palace steamer with equal readiness.

#10. More Gravitation

2008-07-13T22:17:00.000+08:00

At Hutchinson, Kan., there are great beds of solid rock salt four hundred feet below the surface. Men want to get and use two thousand barrels a day. How shall they get it to the top of the ground? They might dig a great well - or, as the miners say, sink a shaft - pump out the water, go down and blast out the salt, and laboriously haul it up in defiance of gravitation. No; that is too hard. Better ask this strong gravitation to bring it up.

But does it work down and up? Did any one ever know of gravitation raising anything? Oh yes, many things. A balloon may weigh as much as a ton, but when inflated it weighs less than so much air; so the heavier air flows down under and shoulders it up. When a heavy weight and a light one are hung over a pulley, the light one goes up because gravity acts more on the other. Water poured down a long tube will rise if the tube is bent up into a shorter arm.

Exactly. So we bore a four-inch hole down to the salt and put in an iron tube.

We do not care about the water. It is no bother. Then inside of this tube we put a two-inch tube that is a few feet higher. Now pour water down the small longer tube. It saturates itself with salt, and comes flowing over the top of the shorter tube as easily as water runs down hill. Multiply the wells, dry out the water, and you have your two thousand barrels of salt lifted every day - just as easy as thinking!

We want a steady, unswerving force that will pull our clock hands with an exact motion day and night, year in and year out. We hang up a string, and ask gravitation to take hold and pull. We put on some lead or brass for a handle, to take hold of. It takes hold and pulls, unweariedly, unvaryingly, and ceaselessly.

It turns single water-wheels with a power of more than twelve hundred horses.

It holds down houses, so that they are not blown away. It was made to serve man, and it works without a grumble.

Thus the higher force in nature always prevails over the lower, and the greater amount over the less amount of the same force. What is the highest force?

#9. The Fairy Gravitation

2008-07-12T23:23:00.000+08:00

The Germans imagine that they have fairy kobolds, sprites, and gnomes which play under ground and haunt mines. I know a real one. I will give you his name. It is called "Gravitation." The name does not sound any more fairylike than a sledge hammer, but its nature and work are as fairylike as a spider's web. I will give samples of his helpful work for man.

In the mountains about Saltzburg, south of Munich, are great thick beds of solid salt. How can they get it down to the cities where it is needed? Instead of digging it out, and packing it on the backs of mules for forty miles, they turn in a stream of water and make a little lake which absorbs very much salt - all it can carry. Then they lay a pipe, like a fairy railroad, and gravitation carries the salt water gently and swiftly forty miles, to where the railroads can take it everywhere. It goes so easily! There is no railroad to build, no car to haul back, only to stand still and see Gravitation do the work.

How do they get the salt and water apart? Oh, just as easily. They ask the wind to help them. They cut brush about four feet long, and pile it up twenty feet high and as long as they please. Then a pipe with holes in it is laid along the top, the water trickles down all over the loose brush, and the thirsty wind blows through and drinks out most of the water. They might let on the water so slowly that all of it would be drunk out by the wind, leaving the solid salt on the bushes. But they do not want it there. So they turn on so much water that the thirsty wind can drink only the most of it, and the rest drops down into great pans, needing only a little evaporation by boiling to become beautiful salt again, white as the snows of December.

There are other minerals besides salt in the beds in the mountains, and, being soluble in water, they also come down the tiny railroad with musical laughter. How can we separate them, so that the salt shall be pure for our tables?

The other minerals are less avaricious of water than salt, so they are precipitated, or become solid, sooner than salt does. Hence with nice care the other minerals can be left solid on the bushes, while the salt brine falls off. Afterwards pure water can be turned on and these other minerals can be washed off in a solution of their own. No fairies could work better than those of solution and crystallization.

#8. Help from Insensible Seas

2008-07-11T00:20:00.001+08:00

Suppose one has been at sea a month (haha Harry on reservice). He has tacked to every point of the compass, been driven by gales, becalmed in doldrums. At length Euroclydon leaps on him, and he lets her drive. And when for many days and nights neither sun nor stars appear, how can he tell where he is, which way he drives, where the land lies?

There is an insensible ocean. No sense detects its presence. It has gulf streams that flow through us, storms whose waves engulf us, but we feel them not. There are various intensities of its power, the north end of the world not having half as much as the south. There are two places in the north half of the world that have greater intensity than the rest, and only one in the south. It looks as if there were unsoundable depths in some places and shoals in others.

The currents do not flow in exactly the same direction all the time, but their variations are within definite limits.

How shall we detect these steady currents when wind and waves are in tumultuous confusion? They are always present. No winds blow them aside, no waves drench their subtle fire, no mountains make them swerve. But how shall we find them?

Float a bit of magnetic ore in a pail of water, or suspend a bit of magnetized steel by a thread, and these currents make the ore or needle point north and south. Now let waves buffet either side, typhoons roar, and maelstroms whirl; we have, out of the invisible, insensible sea of magnetic influence, a sure and steady guide. Now we can sail out of sight of headlands. We have in the darkness and light, in calm and storm, an unswerving guide. Now Columbus can steer for any new world.

Does not this seem like a spiritual force? Lodestone can impart its qualities to hard steel without the impairment of its own power. There is a giving that does not impoverish, and a withholding that does not enrich.

Wherever there is need there is supply. The proper search with appropriate faculties will find it. There are yet more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy.

#7. Star Help

2008-07-10T23:01:00.000+08:00

"We for whose sake all Nature stands,
And stars their courses move."

Do the stars, that are so far away and seem so small, send us any help? Assuredly. Nothing exists for itself. All is for man.

Magnetism tells the sailor which way he is going. Stars not only do this, when visible, but they also tell just where on the round globe he is. A glance into their bright eyes, from a rolling deck, by an uneducated sailor, aided by the tables of accomplished scholars, tells him exactly where he is - in mid Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or Antarctic Ocean, or at the mouth of the harbor he has sought for months. We lift up our eyes higher than the hills. Help comes from the skies.

This help was started long since, with providential foresight and care. Is he steering by the North Star? A ray of guidance was sent from that lighthouse in the sky half a century before his need, that it might arrive just at the critical time. It has been ever since on its way.

The stars give us, on land and sea, all our reliable standards of time. There is no other source. They are reliable to the hundredth part of a second.

The Italian physicians, in their ignorance of the origin of a disease, named it the influenza, because they imagined that it came from the influence of the stars. No! There is nothing malign in the sweet influences of the Pleiades.

The stars are of special use as a mental gymnasium. On their lofty bars and trapezes the mind can swing itself higher and farther than on any other material thing. Infinity and omnipotence are factors in their problems. They also fill the soul of the rapt beholder with adoring wonder. They are the greatest symbols of the unweariableness of the power and of the minuteness of the knowledge of God. He calleth all their millions by name, and for the greatness of His power not one faileth to come.

Number the stars of a clear Eastern sky, if you are able. So multitudinous and enduring shall the influence of one good man be.

#6. More Moon Help

2008-07-09T10:12:00.000+08:00

Years ago, before there were any railroads, New York city had thousands of tons of merchandise it wished to send out West. Teams were few and slow, so they asked the moon to help. It was ready; had been waiting thousands of years.

We shall soon see that it is easy to slide millions of tons of coal down hill, but how could we slide freight up from New York to Albany?

It is very simple. Lift up the lower end of the river till it shall be down hill all the way to Albany. But who can lift up the end of the river? The moon. It reaches abroad over the ocean and gathers up water from afar, brings it up by Cape Hatteras and in from toward England, pours it in through the Narrows, fills up the great harbor, and sets the great Hudson flowing up toward Albany. Then men put their big boats on the current and slide up the river. Six hours later the moon takes the water out of the harbor and lets other boats slide the other way.

New York itself has made use of the moon to get rid of its immense amount of garbage and sewage. It would soon breed a pestilence, and the city be like the buried cities of old; but the moon comes to its aid, and carries away and buries all this foul breeder of a pestilence, and washes all the harbor and bay with clean floods of water twice a day. Good moon! It not only lights, but works.

The tide in New York Harbor rises only about five feet; up in the Bay of Fundy it ramps, rushes, raves, and rises more than fifty feet high.

In former times men used to put mill wheels into the currents of the tides; when they rushed into little bays and salt ponds they turned the wheels one way; when out, the other.

#5. Moon Help

2008-07-08T21:11:00.000+08:00

At Foo-Chow, China, there is a stone bridge, more than a mile long, uniting the two parts of the city. It is not constructed with arches, but piers are built up from the bottom of the river and great granite stringers are laid horizontally from pier to pier. I measured some of these great stone stringers, and found them to be three feet square and forty-five feet long. They weigh over thirty tons each.

How could they be lifted, handled, and put in place over the water on slender piers? How was it done? There was no Hercules to perform the mighty labor, nor Amphion to lure them to their place with the music of his golden lyre.

Tradition says that the Chinese, being astute astronomers, got the moon to do the work. It was certainly very shrewd, if they did. Why not use the moon for more than a lantern? Is it not a part of the "all things" over which man was made to have dominion?

Well, the Chinese engineers brought the great granite blocks to the bridge site on floats, and when the tide lifted the floats and stones they blocked up the stones on the piers and let the floats sink with the outgoing tide. Then they blocked up the stones on the floats again, and as the moon lifted the tides once more they lifted the stones farther toward their place, until at length the work was done for each set of stones.

Dear, good moon, what a pull you have! You are not merely for the delight of lovers, pleasant as you are for that, but you are ready to do gigantic work.

No wonder that the Chinese, as they look at the solid and enduring character of that bridge, name it, after the poetic and flowery habit of the country, "The Bridge of Ten Thousand Ages."

#4. Old Sun Help

2008-07-07T23:09:00.002+08:00

Holland is a land that is said to draw twenty feet of water. Its surface is below sea level. Since 1440 they have been recovering land from the sea. They have acquired 230,000 acres in all. Fifty years ago they diked off 45,000 acres of an arm of the sea, called Haarlem Meer, that had an average depth of twelve and three quarters feet of water, and proposed to pump it out so as to have that much more fertile land. They wanted to raise 35,000,000 tons of water a month a distance of ten feet, to get through in time. Who could work the handle?

The sun would evaporate two inches a year, but that was too slow. So they used the old force of the sun, reservoired in former ages. Coal is condensed sunshine, still keeping all the old light and power. By a suitable engine they lifted 112 tons ten feet at every stroke, and in 1848, five years after they began to apply old sun force, 41,675 acres were ready for sale and culture.

The water that accumulates now, from rain and infiltration, is lifted out by the sun force as exhibited in wind on windmills. They groaningly work while men sleep.

The Netherlandish engineers are now devising plans to pump out the Zuyder Zee, an area of two thousand square miles. There is plenty of power of every kind for anything, material, mental, spiritual. The problem is the application of it. The thinker is king.

This is only one instance of numberless applications of old sun force. In this country coal does more work than every man, woman, and child in the whole land. It pumps out deep mines, hoists ore to the surface, speeds a thousand trains, drives great ships, in face of waves and winds, thousands of miles and faster than transcontinental trains. It digs, spins, weaves, saws, planes, grinds, plows, reaps, and does everything it is asked to do. It is a vast reservoir of force, for the accumulation of which thousands of years were required.

#3. The Sun's Great Horses

2008-07-06T22:06:00.001+08:00

There was once a man who had thousands of acres of mighty forests in the distant mountains. They were valueless there, but would be exceedingly valuable in the great cities hundreds of miles away, if he could only find any power to transport them thither. So he looked for a team that could haul whole counties of forests so many miles. He saw that the sun drew the greatest loads, and he asked it to help him. And the sun said that was what he was made for; he existed only to help man. He said that he had made those great forests to grow for a thousand years so as to be ready for man when he needed them, and that he was now ready to help move them where they were wanted.

So he told the man who owned the forest that there was a great power, which men called gravitation, that seemed to reside in the center of the earth and every other world, but that it worked everywhere. It held the stones down to the earth, made the rain fall, and water to run down hill; and if the man would arrange a road, so that gravitation and the sun could work together, the forest would soon be transported from the mountains to the sea.

So the man made a trough a great many miles long, the two sides coming together like a great letter V. Then the sun brought water from the sea and kept the trough nearly full year after year. The man put into it the lumber and logs from the great forests, and gravitation pulled the lumber and water ever so swiftly, night and day, miles away to the sea.

How I have laughed as I have seen that perpetual stream of lumber and timber pour out so far from where the sun grew them for man. For the sun never ceased to supply the water, and gravitation never ceased to pull.

This man who relentlessly cut down the great forests never said, "How good the sun is!" nor, "How strong is gravitation!" but said continually, "How smart I am!"

#2. The Man who Needed 452,696 Barrels of Water

2008-07-05T22:28:00.002+08:00

A man once had a large field of wheat. He had toiled hard to clear the land, plow the soil, and sow the seed. The crop grew beautifully and was his joy by day and by night. But when it was just ready to head out it suddenly stopped growing for want of moisture. It looked as if all his hard work would be in vain. The poor farmer thought of his wife and children, who were likely to starve in the coming winter. He shed many tears, but they could not moisten one little stalk.

Suddenly he said, "I will water it myself." The field was a mile square, and it needed an inch of water over it all. He quickly figured out that there were 27,878,400 square feet in a square mile. On every twelve square feet a cubic foot of water was needed. A cubic foot of water weighs sixty-two and a third pounds. Hence it would require 74,754 tons of water. To draw this amount 74,754 teams, each drawing a ton, would be required. But they would tramp the wheat all down. Besides, the nearest water in sufficient quantity was the ocean, one thousand miles away over the mountains. It would take three months to make the journey. And, worse than all else, the water of the ocean is so salt that it would ruin the crop.

[Illustration: Breaking Waves.]

Alas! There were three impossibilities (so many teams, so many miles, so long time - and two ruins if he could overcome the impossibilities) trampling down the wheat and bringing so much salt. Alas, alas! What could he do but see the poor wheat die of thirst and his poor wife and children die of hunger?

Suddenly he determined to ask the sun to help him. And the sun said he would. That was a very little thing for such a great body to do. So he heated the air over the ocean till it became so thirsty that it drank plenty of water, choosing only the sweet fresh water and leaving all the salt in the ocean. Then the warm air rose, because the heat had expanded it and made it lighter, and the other air rushed down the mountains all over that side of the continent to take its place. Then the warm air went landward in an upper current and carried its load of water in great piles and mountains of clouds; it lifted them over the great ranges of mountains and rained down its thousands of tons of sweet water a thousand miles from the sea, so gently that not a stalk of wheat was trampled down, nor was a single root made acrid by any taste of brine.

Besides the precious drink the sun brought the most delicate food for the wheat. There was carbonic acid, that makes soda water so delicious, besides oxygen, that is so stimulating, nitrogen, ammonia, and half a dozen other things that are so nutritious to growing plants.

Thus the wheat grew up in beauty, headed out abundantly, and matured perfectly. Then the farmer stopped weeping for laughter, and in his joy he remembered to thank, not the sun, nor the wind, but the great One who made them both.

#1. Why Written

2008-07-04T22:06:00.002+08:00

Fairies, fays, genii, sprites, etc., were once supposed to be helpful to some favored men. The stories about these imaginary beings have always had a fascinating interest. The most famous of these stories were told at Bagdad in the eleventh century, and were called The Arabian Night's Entertainment. Then men were said to use all sorts of obedient powers, sorceries, tricks, and genii to aid them in getting wealth, fame, and beautiful brides.

But I find the realities of to-day far greater, more useful and interesting, than the imaginations of the past. The powers at work about us are far more kindly and powerful than the Slave of the Ring or the Lamp.

The object of writing this series of papers about applications of powers to the service of man, their designed king, is manifold. I desire all my readers to see what marvelous provision the Father has made for His children in this their nursery and schoolhouse. He has always been trying to crowd on men more helps and blessings than they were willing to take. From the first mist that went up from the Garden the power of steam has been in every drop of water. Yet men carried their burdens. Since the first storm the swiftness and power of lightning have been trying to startle man into seeing that in it were speed and force to carry his thought and himself. But man still plodded and groaned under loads that might have been lifted by physical forces. I have seen in many lands men bringing to their houses water from the hills in heavy stone jars. Gravitation was meant to do that work, and to make it leap and laugh with pearly spray in every woman's kitchen. The good Father has offered His all-power occasions to all men.

I desire that the works of God should keep their designed relation to thought. He says, Consider the lilies; look into the heavens; number the stars; go to the ant; be wise; ask the beasts, the fowl, the fishes; or "talk even to the earth, and it showeth thee."

Every flower and star, rainbow and insect, was meant to be so provocative of thought that any man who never saw a human book might be largely educated. And every one of these thoughts is related to man's best prosperity of joy. He is a most regal king if he achieves the designed dominion over a thousand powerful servitors.

It is well to see that God's present actual powers in full play about us are vastly beyond all dreams of Arabian imagination. It leads us to expect greater things of Him hereafter. That human imagination could so dream is proof of the greatness of its Creator. But that He has actually surpassed those dreams is prophecy of more greatness to come.

I desire that my readers of this generation shall be the great thinkers and inventors of the next. There are amazing powers just waiting to be revealed. Draw aside the curtain. We have not yet learned the A B C of science. We have not yet grasped the scepters of provided dominion. Those who are most in the image and likeness of the Cause of these forces are most likely to do it.

Among the Forces (by Henry White Warren)

2008-07-03T21:29:00.016+08:00

As I was fighting a losing battle against understanding Katagana in its full tyranny (seriously, can't Japanese stick to naming characters after their own language?!), I stumbled across a fantastic eBook analysing in abstract detail the forces of this world; how physical and spiritual powers give light to a whole new understanding of 'God's creation'. It's a brilliant piece of work, and I shall dedicate this entire month to posting a different chapter every single day (no prizes for guessing who'll win the award for Most Updated Blog of the Month).

Anyway, you may not understand it as of now (I myself am hoping for discernment in due course of posting what I've skimmed through in the past hour), but I really really REALLY pray that by the end of this month, after the very last chapter, we'll come to comprehend and appreciate the things that are common, unseen, but very very important.

[Frontispiece: Old Faithful Gesyer.]

"You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas."

- Psalm 8:6-8

See you guys tomorrow. Same time, same place.

We have the facts and we're voting Yes!

2008-07-02T23:56:00.007+08:00

You think you know the world you are living in. If you can feel it, and touch it, and smell it, and taste it, then it must be so. You tell yourself that you would bet your life on the simple fact that the sky is blue. And then one day someone comes along and informs you emphatically that you're wrong. Blue, you insist. Blue as the ocean. Blue as a whale. Blue as my daughter's eyes. But that person shakes his head, and everyone else backs him up. You poor girl, they say. All of those things - the ocean, the whale, her eyes - they're green. You've gotten them mixed up. You've had it wrong all along.

Isn't it strange how perception affects our basis of knowledge? Imagine you're colour-deficient and can't differentiate between blue and green. So as a kid even though you've been taught that the sky is blue, you pick up a green crayon to draw a cloudless sky. And your best friend sitting beside you tells you that you're wrong.

What if one day we all realise that there's no such thing as God? What if there is really no Heaven and Hell, and the Bible was just written by a bunch of really idealistic people? What if the thing we believe in wasn't true in the first place?

Scary stuff.

But you know something else that doesn't start with 'what if'?

In this world, it doesn't matter whether it's true or not. What matters is only if it will be believed or it won't be believed. Say some TOK idiot convinces everybody that there's really no such thing as God. That whatever Christians have believed in is non-existent. That our faith has been wasted on something useless. Hogwash. Bollocks. Poppycock.

Would I stop believing in something I found so real in my life? Would I regret how I might've lived in a lie all this while? Would I start looking for some truth the world approves of?

Or would I continue to trust in the One who showed me light through the darkness, follow the One who makes my paths straight, and love the One who first loved me?

You don't believe in something because it's the truth. It becomes the truth because you believe in it. The day when people stop believing in something, that something disappears from the world. But if at least one person believes it on Earth, it exists.

And since no one really knows the truth anyway, then just choose what you want to believe in. With all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength. :)

Chase this light.

2008-06-30T11:15:00.002+08:00

Most people miss their whole lives, you know. Listen, life isn't when you are standing on top of a mountain looking at the sunset. Life isn't waiting at the altar or the moment your child is born or that time you were swimming in deep water and a dolphin came up alongside you. These are fragments. Ten or twelve grains of sand spread throughout your entire existence. These are not life. Life is brushing your teeth or making a sandwich or watching the news or waiting for the bus. Or walking. Everyday, thousands of tiny events happen and if you're not watching, if you're not careful, if you don't capture them and make them count, you could miss it.

You could miss your whole life.

They won..?

2008-06-27T14:08:00.007+08:00

So I stayed over at Kalai's with Jerilyn to watch the match on Wednesday night.

"What match?" you may ask.

EXACTLY.

I (and the rest of the world, save for the lucky souls in St Jakob Park) managed to miss Klose's goal and Turkey's equaliser, saw Lahm doing his thang (at the mother of all last-minutes), and didn't see Germany actually win. It was hilarious when we tried to call Starhub. The machine operator was like, "Sorry, our hotline is fully engaged at the moment. Please try again later." and when I got through, "Sorry, our hotline is closed. Opening hours are from 8am to 8pm. Please try again tomorrow." I wonder how furious fellow Euro fans got that night. Bet reactions in the pubs and clubs in Germany and Turkey were interesting. :D

Anyways, because of the thunderstorm and power failure in Vienna, all Starhub could do was to show an apology note on the teevee screen. That left me camping out on Soccernet's live commentary and the other two morons promptly falling asleep on the couch. Before the transmission failed, the score was 1-1 and they were hoping for either side (they stopped caring who even before half-time) to win so they wouldn't have to watch during extra time and penalties. So when Klose made it 2-1 (thanks to trusty Soccernet), they were super relieved. But when Turkey equalised 7 minutes later (Germany really sucked at defending), all three of us were like, "Nuuuuu" for completely different reasons. Teehee.

To put the cherry on top, Germany played so badly that even I thought Turkey deserved to win. The defense was shaky with Lehmann being more of the Mr Hyde than Dr Jekyll (he's so eccentric, I miss Oliver Kahn), the passing was disorganised, Ballack and Klose were no where in sight while the rest were all over the place without the ball... And what was Lahm doing as a leftback defender?! Bless his little soul that he made ammends for all his mistakes with that 90" goal. Germany might've roasted Turkey for an early Thanksgiving, but they'd get trashed by Spain on Sunday if they continue to play like that. What a disgrace!

And I was thinking... What if something like this would happen with our own lives? When what is important to us is being snatched away from right under our noses, leaving us completely helpless and reeling with shock. And all we can do is to feebly protest and sulk because many circumstances are out of our control and we just can't do anything about it. I wonder if we'd feel frustrated and outraged and blame others. I wonder if we'd shrink into a corner and wallow in self-pity and blame ourselves.

Or we would be deeply humbled and stop relying on our own strengths, and fully understand that because many things are not in our control, we must trust and rely on the strength of The One who has all things in His control.

It's a choice every human being must make every day of his life. And just like how Turkey chose to hold their heads high with pride even though they were robbed of their well-deserved glory, I choose to look towards God, in which all things are possible through Him.

Anyway something totally rundom.

It's only 3pm and the dood behind me has downed a grand total of six cups of coffee. And he's off to the pantry for another cuppa. I'm severely astounded with his capacity for caffeine. Is it safe to drink so much of that vile stuff? I can't even finish a single-shot expresso without cringing. /=

Ah well. Thank God for green tea! :)

Classic moments and priceless memories.

2008-06-19T02:57:00.004+08:00

There's no work tomorrow and since I don't have to wake up at ungodly hours of the morning, I have been having the time of my life surfing Facebook groups and stumbled across THIS:

You Know You're in IB When...

- Relatives that have been dead for years come visit you and suggest that you get some sleep.
- You say the same sentence over and over again, not realizing you've said it before.
- Trees begin threatening you.
- You can see individual air molecules vibrating.
- You believe that if you think hard enough, you can levitate.
- You say the same sentence over and over again, not realizing you've said it before.
- You and Reality file for divorce.
- It appears that people are speaking to you in binary code.
- You have great revelations concerning Life, the Universe, and Everything else, but can't quite find the words for them before the white glow fades, leaving you more confused than before.
- You discover the aesthetic beauty of school supplies.
- You begin to talk to yourself, then disagree about the subject, get into a nasty row about it, lose, and refuse to talk to yourself for the rest of the day.
- You yell: "STOP TOUCHING ME!!!" even though you're the only person in the room.
- You say the same sentence over and over again, not realizing you've said it before.
- Five words: "WHY ARE WE DOING THIS?!?!?!?!?"
- You can spell "Baccalaureate".
- "I.B., therefore I B.S."
- "IB has an honor code?!?!"
- "Friends" and "fellow IBers" are interchangeable.
- You go to bed at 3AM and think, "Oh, it's an early night!"
- Social life? What's that?
- You've fooled yourself into believing that colleges actually care whether you're in IB or not.
- You try to wake up fast enough to catch yourself sleeping - and succeed.
- You talk to yourself in the 3rd person.
- You write sentences on multiple choice tests.
- It's okay to fail, so long as you are not alone.
- You frequently catch yourself saying "What?? We had homework??"
- You don't drink, but you find it a convenient way to explain how you dressed yourself in the morning.
- You finish your extended essay shortly after midnight. Your smile of satisfaction fades when you remember to start on your World Lit paper.
- Desperate to fill up your CAS hours, you claim watching a black and white movie as "creativity" and walking your dog as "activity", and your teacher approves it.
- You've sold your soul... to a teacher... for a C... for the 9 weeks...
- You cloned yourself so you could sell your clones' souls to other teachers for Cs for the 9 weeks again (hey, there may be a profit to be made in this).
- Your idea of impure thoughts is whether or not to copy math homework.
- You can count your last quiz grade on one hand.
- You wonder if there's Cliff's Notes on the Calculus book.
- You don't really cheat - you just tell people the answers.
- 'Cheating' became too difficult, so you took up telepathy.
- You've consulted tarot cards for hints on a History test.
- You have the library on speed dial.
- You've developed an imprint of your book bag in your back.
- Your best hope for most classes is either divine intervention or a strategically placed lightning bolt.
- Your books weigh more than you do.
- You can lead your way through a frog's intestines with your eyes closed.
- You forgot about that pesky Extended Essay thing until the night before it was due.
- You consider giving up going to the bathroom permanently to give you more time to study.
- You have convinced your parents the "1" you received on your IB Physics exam was really the "top 1% of all IB students worldwide".
- You think the meaning of life is: G = -RTlnK.
- You plagiarise from Cliff's Notes for the "What is Truth?" ToK paper.
- It's essential to learn to live with occasional failures.
- You find that you overreact when you get 2 points marked off on your homework.
- You find that you spend more time sleeping in class than at home.
- Tests are no longer singular efforts!
- Your list of excuses for not doing your homework is the length of Anna Karenina.
- You exceed the 4,200 word limit on the Extended Essay (by over 1000 words).
- The simplest words you know are at least 10 letters long.
- You find yourself spelling words out on scantrons. You are deeply saddened when you can only find one letter of "IB SUCKS!"
- You show up 4 hours late to an IB test and still manage to get a "5".
- During a Chemistry test, instead of doing the work, you write a random answer program in your TI-82 and get the highest score in the class.
- You can type 70 words per minute - on a TI-89.
- Brewing coffee takes too long, so you just eat the beans.
- The bags under your eyes are heavier than the ones carrying your textbooks.
- You haven't seen light in so long you glow in the dark.
- You can count the number of hours you sleep each week on one missing hand.
- You've taught yourself how to take naps while walking to your next class.
- You clean up your room and find a bed.
- You wonder about things like what would happen if your car traveled at the speed of light and you turned your lights on.
- The words: "Oh my God! There's a triad in this poem!"
- You enjoy finding out the hard way why normal distribution should work.
- It's the little things that confuse you.
- You find all the "glitches" in movies.
- You use your ToK background to analyze Winnie the Pooh's Book of Quotations.
- Free time?
- You've mastered the art of procrastination so well that your research paper finishes printing just seconds before you have to leave for school.
- Your college professors' grading systems seem a little too lenient.
- You managed to write 4,000 words on the subject "Hitler was a nice guy, wasn't he?" (sarcasm not included).
- You're not certain if you want to get laid, layed, or laid to rest.
- To celebrate finishing your IB exams you decide to be really wild and go for coffee.
- You hold "parties" to study.
- You look forward to your parties.
- Your fellow IBers look forward to your parties, attend them, and do actual studying there.
- You forget your brother's name because you haven't seen him in two years.
- Wait... what brother?
- "Anybody wanna play some cards?"
- You see your Extended Essay advisor more than you see your parents.
- You know how to integrate a chicken and can take the derivative of water.
- You've set an Apple II and your TI in a race to see which one could count to infinity the fastest.
- You took out the cheesy infinity code and substituted a Pi-calculating code.
- Your TI won.
- Better yet, you won, because you can name Pi to several hundred digits more than they could.
- No, you definitely won, because you caught an error in both of the final results.
- The Apple II was wrong by a larger amount.
- You derive formulas for fun. From first principles.
- The offer of bonus marks for combed hair results in a dramatic improvement in your appearance.
- Whenever you're watching a movie you find all the motifs and themes... without even trying.
- You start to laugh hysterically when you're writing a bibliography because a book has TWO authors.
- You find juxtaposition in places you shouldn't be looking for it.
- You relax vicariously through your non-IB friends (what non-IB friends???)
- The number 42 actually means something.
- Your goal for the year is to complete every item on this checklist.

And something for the females:
"I wish IB would get on its international knees and lick the ballsack I do not have."

Okay time to sleep before I go on a guilt trip about how many trees I've killed and attempt to transmorgify used tissue paper back to their natural state.

Me.

2008-06-13T10:56:00.008+08:00

Who am I?

That's easy. I'm a child of God.

What am I like?

That's a little bit harder.

"You are a strong girl."

"Stop being an escapist."

"Thanks for being so inspiring."

"You lack passion and hunger in you."

"You're a great (pun-intended) addition to this CG."

"With your size, who's gonna marry you?"

"I love the way you love people."

"You treat this house like a hotel."

"You're such a sweet girl."

"Zel, stop being a bitch."

"I can see God in you."

"Are you in a cult?"

"You are genuine."

"Stop lying to yourself."

Can we be so many things to so many people at so many times? Doing a personality test to find out what you're like, choosing the word that describes you best out of 4... I can be all those words if I wanted to. If that person wanted me to.

So in those times of solitude, the person I am just before I fall asleep and just after I awake, where there is no switch to turn on for the world... Can I actually be nothing at all?

After two worrisome weeks, I finally saw the moon in Macau's night sky. Funny I've never thought of the moon before all my life, but I notice its absence when it gets hidden behind the clouds. Those who were with me when I kept asking where the moon was can fully testify to how anal I got.

And then I think about how the female protagonist in Accuracy of Death said, "Death is similar to the Sun. There is nothing special about it. In fact, it is very common. But it is very important."

And in my case: Life is similar to the moon. There is nothing special about it. There are more than six billion souls on this planet so Life is indeed common. But it is very important. There may be nothing special about our lives, we may be completely normal and uninteresting, we may be nothing at all in this big, big world. But we are definitely important. That when our friends go on holidays, when our loved ones go missing, when we die, others will notice. Just as the moon is meant to be in the sky at night, our lives are meant to be lived. It doesn't matter what we are like to others. We are meant to just be.

So, what am I like?

Nothing special, but important. Just like you. :)

Your friendly neighbourhood game master

2008-05-29T00:57:00.000+08:00

Was just thinking of the MANGSEH! game Hoppies are famous for playing (well, at least my CG people do enjoy it).

Visions, opportunities, fleeting moments of inspiration...
Have you lost count of Life itself?

Catch it!
Miss it!
Catch.
Miss.
Miss,
Miss,
Catch,
Miss,
Er... Catch it?
??

Are you going to miss your catch
Or catch your miss?

Count all your blessings
And make your blessings count.

Make God your number one
And you'll get the right number in the end.

MANGSEH! :)

Karma kalls.

2008-05-28T12:12:00.009+08:00

"If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses His life for Me will find it."

- Matthew 16:24-25

Today's QT in a nutshell: Lose something for someone who can help you find something else that is worth more than what you lost in the first place.

Which also means if you find stuff on the floor, don't do the Finders Keepers thing. You know how they always say if you pick up lost items and claim them for yourself, you'd lose something more precious next time?

Okay fine, this is just one out of the many theories I concocted. Back in school days, I was so annoyed with irritants waking me up when I didn't want to that I told them, "Do you know doing this will bring you 7 years of misfortune? The 'breaking mirrors' theory was just a cover-up." It worked like a charm. (x

Which brings me back to today's QT. I was vividly reminded of the time in Crescent when I hijacked the teacher's microphone in the hall, hid under a random table and belted out Eminem's "Just Lose It" to an unexpecting audience of 300 in an attempt to liven everyone's dampened spirits caused by the release of Sec 4 prelim Biology results.

Zelanie is hungry. It's raining cats and dogs and marsipuls outside. But because she conveniently forgot to bring an umbrella, she will be stranded till the rain stops.

It's time to see some blue sky in my life (does anyone want to watch Accuracy of Death again with me hahaha), or at least in the next thirty minutes lest my roaring stomach fully expels its wrath to my fellow well-fed umbrella-ed colleagues soon.

Why can't you just let me let God be God?

2008-05-26T12:53:00.001+08:00

Judging by that phone call you just made, I'd like to ask you a question: Who's the one going to university, you or me?

Yeah, I know Melbourne's expensive and everything and I'd be a bigger strain on your expenses. But don't make it sound as if I'm desperate to study in SMU; don't make it sound as if I'm not making any (extra?) effort to study locally; don't make it sound as if I selfishly want to just get my ass overseas so I can run away from the vice-like grip Singapore's education is contorting the youths of today.

Feeding them with copies of extra resumes, appeal letters, additional documents that may deem fit for mere recycled paper isn't the way things should work. And saying it may be God's call when a certain someone calls you to send in all these papers... Don't make me laugh.

But because you are my mother and God says to honour my parents... I'd do up the letter. No matter how much I know that it isn't up to your friend nor how persuasive and convincing I can write. It's really all in God's hands. And I pray your prayer for me will change from "God, please let her get into SMU" to "God, I leave her life into Your hands. Please help both our hearts be ready and open to the good things You have in store for us."

Zelanie has not been a very happy girl of late. But she will press on with life's challenges cos God's on her side. Unless there are no two banks of my river and everything's just one big messed up Tsunami.

Oh well. God-willing, I could do with a re-enactment of "Moses and The Red Sea" right about now.

A vicious cycle?

2008-05-25T00:29:00.000+08:00

Slow down
Look around
All you people

Talking about what you've seen on teevee
Staring at societal misfits
Whispering about the people next door

Craving, longing, yearning
Desperately

For some truth in your life,
Or for the latest gossip?

To be an inspiration to others,
Or just one chance to speak and stun?

To fight for the things that matter to you the most,
Or for things that don't even concern you?

And sometimes I wonder...

Am I on the outside looking in,
Or just another guilty one trapped
In the centre of it all?

Holding on by letting go.

2008-05-23T15:06:00.005+08:00

I am not unique.

I cannot be someone's pillar of strength.

And I definitely do not have the power to influence someone's life so dynamically that he/she can die to the essence of time and its loss over and over again.

Honestly, don't exalt me for the sake of your self-indulgence in attempting to re-create the 'past'. Because by God's grace, that very tyranny of time has given me a second chance to re-live my life. To find myself amidst all the troubles Life can and will definitely throw at me. The same way you believe so much in Colossians 3:13, I believe so much more in Philippians 3:13.

Don't expect so much from me. Because I am not the one for you.

I am not unique.

I cannot be your pillar of strength.

And I definitely do not have the power to make AND break your life.

Only God can do this. Yet when we think of Him, we do not quake in fear at His wrath but delight instead in His love and forgiveness. God doesn't test you to break you. He tests to build you up.

So instead of believing in me, believe in Him instead.

Familiarity in the strangest places.

2008-05-21T11:25:00.008+08:00

I really thank God for giving me so many opportunities to experience Him in different places and climates, from the 40 degrees celcius heat wave in Khon Kaen to mosquito-infested St John's Island. You can feel His Spirit moving in a fully air-conditioned 15,000 seater auditorium AND a shed no bigger than the size of my bedroom. You can praise and worship him with multimedia, subwoofers, a symphonic orchestra, dancers and lights, AND with minimal instruments all (dangerously) connected to one power source. You can have QT and shepherding in the comfort of clean, secluded areas, AND at the same time, fighting for space with other CGs and the mighty ant population. And for a real exclusive bonus, also see my very first shooting star with Lee Yang while lying on our backs in the basketball court looking at the night sky at 3am.

As long as the entire Earth is under the same sky, God's greatness is really there. And it will never change. The only difference there will ever be is your heart condition. Whether you're able to pray and open up your spiritual eyes and hearts to Him in any type of environment; whether you're still sensitive enough to feel Him amidst the humidity and claustraphobia; whether your fire for God still burns ablaze albeit the immense overcrowding for oxygen. God really provides and blesses, and thankfully I was able to claim all His promises in camp.

Now, the hardest part: Living out my promises to Him too. Eurghh.

We learn something new everyday.

2008-05-14T11:16:00.005+08:00

Zomg, my name actually has some biblical meaning check this out:

A study of the origins, connections and meanings of The Indo-European words: reeka, ree, rea and river

By Odyssey Belchevsky

The biblical form 'Evangelie' or 'Evangelist' can be clearly explained with the combination of

eva< eva ="living" zelanie =" (z)evanzelanie">zevanzelie >evangelie

zelanie is the old Slavic word for "desire; long for", or simply Zeva(n)zjelie = desire for eternal life.

(Also the older form of God in the bible was given as Jihova (The letter J can be pronounced as Zj>Ž). This will yield a very close affinity to the Slavic words Zjiva> Zjivota)

In the Homeric writings we have the word/forms Zi,Ze, Ziti (Zi Zh, Ziti) with the meaning "to live, to breathe".

These are the characteristics of Zeus and are virtually identical to the Macedonian/Slavic Zi, Ze, Ziti and all its relations.

And to think my parents initially wanted to call me 'Melanie' but decided that it sounded too boring and tried every single alphabet and was happy with the very last one.

The armor of God

2008-05-12T10:07:00.008+08:00

"Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law - a man's enemies will be the members of his own household."

- Matthew 10:34-36

For all those whose Christian lives have been comfortable and smooth-sailing for the past few months and years, ask yourself this question: What have you been doing to build God's kingdom; to fulfill The Great Commission in our lives?

If you're stumped for an answer, it's time to wake up. Cos your life, no matter how lucky it seems to be, is actually stagnant. So before your oasis degenerates into a mosquito breeding ground with [insert Captain Jack Sparrow's voice] "really bad eggs!", think of what you can do to be a builder of human stones for God's temple.

Winston Churchill once said, "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life". So take up this challenge; pray for problems. It's only during times of toil and trouble where you find out where your loyalty lies.

When you sow in tears, you shall reap in joy. And with God on your side, the harvest will be more than enough for you to overthrow Nestlé and start your own nutritional company, since everyone's gonna turn organic sooner or later anyway.

Suddenly everything begins to seem so clear.

2008-05-10T03:00:00.004+08:00

How then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!"

- Romans 11:14-15

God, if this is Your will, then let it be done.

If I have to leave everything behind and fly over 3,779 miles of land and sea, I'll do it.

I'll be coming for you.

Zelanie wants to save. And the time is now.

The power of Singlish.

2008-05-09T14:28:00.000+08:00

Some of my favourite extracts from The Coxford Singlish Dictionary:

ALL FART AND NO SHIT
Used to describe someone who's full of empty promises.
"Ah, shaddup lah. Everyday say you wan' to treat me go lunch. You all fart and no shit only."

ANONEH
A Japanese expression similar to "Well..." or "If that's the case...", in Singlish this has come to be a generic term for any Japanese girl.
1. "Wah lau, see that anoneh! Her dressing damn solid one."
2. "I got some char bor friends in Pasir Ris, they are all anoneh working for airline one."

BECAUSE THE SKY IS SO HIGH, THE BIRD SHIT IN YOUR EYE
This phrase is essentially an annoyed retort to being asked "why", and conveys the meaning that the questioner ought to mind his or her own business. Popular in the mid-70's, its usage began to decline in the early 80's and is rarely heard these days.
Sally: " Eh, Jasmine, how come I never see you with Roger anymore?"
Jasmine: " We oreddy break up, lah!"
Sally: " Why?"
Jasmine: " Because the sky is so high, the bird shit in your eye!"

BORROW
For some reason, “to lend”.
“Eh, can borrow me your book?”

CARE-LAIR-FAIR (omg I thought it was a real English word)
Cantonese for "movie extra", it is also used to describe people as idle hangers-on or layabouts. It is suspected that the term was derived from somewhere else. Can also be used as a verb, as in "to care-lair-fair".
"Eh, next week my company is holding a product launch for TV. If got time, come and care-lair-fair, lah."

CHAMPION (I love this word)
A term describing the unbelievable actions of a person. Usually used in a derogatory manner.
Ah Beng : "Wah lau! You never hear! Ah Seng is in hospital! His finger kena bitten off by his hamster!"
Ah Meng: "Serious ah? He damn champion, man!"

CHER
Not to be confused with the surgically-enhanced American singer, this is just a short and snappy way to address one's teacher.
"Eskew me, Cher, can I go toilet?"

CHIBABOOM
Quintessential Singaporean sound effect for an explosion.
"Then ah, the bomb essploded... CHIBABOOM!"

CHOPE
To reserve or hold something for somebody. Sometimes used in games to denote having attained a ‘safe' position.
"If we're not at the theatre by 8, can you chope some seats for us?"

COCK
Despite seemingly obscene connotations, the use of "cock is actually fairly benign. It has become the de facto Singlish way to describe something as being nonsensical or sub-standard; the local equivalent of "rubbish" or "junk". Sometimes used as the short form of "cockanaden".
1. "Don't listen to him, he's only talking cock."
2. "Wah lau, you go and buy this cock thing for what?"
3. "Why you so cock, go and invest in that dot-com?"

CONFIRM PLUS GUARANTEE/CONFIRM PLUS GUARANTEE TIMES 2, WITH 3 YEAR WARRANTY
Variations of Confirm and Guarantee.
"Oi, you returning that VCD or not?"
"Aiyah, of course lah! Confirm plus guarantee times 2, with 3-year warranty!"

EXTRA
An adjective usually applied to people who do things which are unnecessary or pointless.
1. " Eh, Johnny! Recess already you still want to do homework! You si peh extra, you know!"
2. "This sort of simple thing don't make until so complicated, can or not? Why you so extra one?"

GIVE CHANCE
Singlish expression for "to be fair, generous, or to give a fighting chance".
1. "Our goalie not here yet, so give chance, can or not?"
2. "That guy always kena whack, they never give chance to him one."

GO FLY KITE
Derived from the English admonition "go fly a kite!" which means "piss off", "buzz off", etc, depending on your level of profanity-tolerance. Of course, we economical Singaporeans have removed the extraneous indefinite article.
"He know I so busy, still ask me to do things. Ask him go fly kite, lah!"

GONE CASE
Someone or something beyond help. A lost cause.
1. "We tried to help, but he oreddy gone case."
2. "If you continue like this, you sure gone case."

GOT
Denoting availability of something.
Beng: "Got milk or not?"
Seng: "Got!"

GRANDFUDDER ROAD
"Your grandfather's road". A belligerent expression aimed at road hogs. Similar to the English expression, "Do you own the road?""Wah lau, drive so slow! Your grandfudder road, is it?"

HERO
Has the same meaning as in English, but often connotes either a foolhardy person or someone out to grab attention.
1. "Just pass, can oreddy. Why try and score A? You hero or what?"
2. "It's too dangerous. Don't try to be hero."

HOW CAN
In true Singaporean economical style, this is a contraction of "How can this be?" or "How can this be possible?" Originates from the Malay-Hokkien hybrid phrase, "Mana eh sai?"
"Ah Beng became a President's Scholar? How can?"

IS IT?
A phrase that's tagged on to virtually any question. It is also used on its own to express skepticism.
1. "You got mail, is it?" (You've received mail, have you?")
2. Beng: "I got accepted into Harvard."
Seng: "Is it?"

K.I.V. (My mom always uses this while shopping)
"Keep In View". An acronym from colonial bureaucracy to stand for items, documents or papers that should be kept around for later consideration. This label is found on trays, cabinets and shelves. Essentially used as a verb, in the sense of "to shelve" or "put on the backburner" or "to procrastinate".
1. "I'm busy now, can I KIV it and get back to you?"
2. "If in doubt, just KIV and think about it later."

KOPE
(as in 'cope')
To steal, usually something trifling. Similar in meaning to "stun".
“Wah, where you kope all this stuff from?”

LAI DAT
"Like that". Yet another Singlish tag.
1. "He look like a pig lai dat."
2. "Wah lau, I like damn tired lai dat."
3. Beng: "How are you?"
Seng: "Lai dat, lor."

LIKE REAL
The Singlish equivalent to "As if!" or "Yeah, right." An expression of incredulity and disbelief.
Beng: "Eh, I just got into Mensa."
Seng: "Like real!"

MACAM
Malay term of comparison, equivalent to "like" in English. When used in Singlish, it can seem redundant, but in fact adds emphasis.
1. "Wah piang, this dessert macam taste like shit."
2. "That bugger dress up until like that, macam look like come from outer space."

MUG/MUGGER/CHAO MUGGER/MUGGER TOAD
To "mug" in Singapore is to study by rote. A mugger is thus a hardworking student who memorises notes and regurgitates them during exams: the very essence of a typical kiasu student. Often prefixed with the word "chao" (smelly) in front of it for emphasis.
1. "He everytime go library until it close. Damn mugger, siah!"
2. " If I don't chao mug now, then later exam sure can die, one!"

NO SOUND NO PICTURE
A no-show.
"Eh, I thought he was supposed to be here an hour ago? You mean he still no sound no picture ah?"

NOT SAY I SAY WHAT
A very common way of prefacing a statement that could be controversial or sensitive. The English equivalent would be, "This might just be my own opinion, butÉ" or "I'm not sure, butÉ"
"Not say I say what ah, but Ah Lian's dressing is si beh obiang."

OFF
Economical verb meaning to turn or shut something off.
"Please off the light."

ON
Economical verb meaning to turn something on.
"Please on the light."

ONE KIND
Contraction of the phrase "one of a kind" - usually used pejoratively.
"Ah Seng this kind of friend, damn one kind one! Everytime go out he say no money, ask me pay first!"

OSO CAN
A crude pronunciation of the words "also can," and is usually found at the end of sentences. Means "this is okay with me," or "this can also be done."
"This one you want to pay by installment, oso can."

OWN TIME OWN TARGET/O.T.O.T.
Another Army-inherited term, meaning to perform a task at one's leisure, or using one's discretion.
1. Private: "Eh, Sergeant! Give how long to sio?" (Sergeant, how long is our cigarette break?"
Sergeant: "O.T.O.T."
2. "This assignment is not very urgent. You own time own target can oreddy."

OWNSELF
A word which denotes that a task has been performed through one's effort alone.
1. This painting you ownself do, ah?
2. Can you ownself buy the drinks? My hands already full, lah.
3. Eh! Can you ownself do your homework instead of copying from others?

PAIN
In true Singlish economy, "painful"
"Ow! Why you step on my foot? Damn pain, you know!"

REPEAT AGAIN
A commonly-used redundancy.
"I can't hear you. Can you repeat again?"

SABO
Singlish contraction of "sabotage". Used to cover instances of practical jokes and tricks to outright betrayal.
"You don'ch sabo me, I warn you, ah!"

SAHT
Of uncertain provenance, it’s the local equivalent of “cool” or “groovy”.
“You got tickets to the sold out concert? How come you so saht one?”

SAY FIRST
Used as an expression to lay down one’s ideas/thoughts/feelings/intentions before doing/saying something. Can also be used as a question in respect to the order of priority of things to be done.
1. “OK, say first, today after work go where and chiong?”
2. “Eh say first leh, you still lurf me or not?”

SCARED WHAT
An expression of bravado.
“Go to jail, go to jail, lor. Scared what?”

SCUSE
Short for "Excuse me". Used in place of the phrase "Get out of my way!" in a vague attempt to be polite.

SEE HOW
To leave the matter alone and watch how it develops. Often repeated for emphasis.
"I oreddy submitted the application form. So now just see how, see how, lor."

SIAN
A wonderfully concise Hokkien adjective which conveys boredom, weariness, frustration and emptiness. The English equivalent would be "ennui".
1. “My job is damn sian, man.”
2. “Wah lau eh, I do A-maths, do until sian oreddy.”

SO HOW?
Economic term, used in the same manner as "So what now?"
"The show is oreddy sold out. So how?"

SOLID
An adjective describing something or someone as being very impressive.
1. “Did you see her performance? Solid, man!”
2. “Diana Ser is damn solid, man!”

SORRY NO CURE
Singlish phrase used to express indignation at an inadequate attempt at an apology
Ah Kok: "Why you potong jalan my girlfriend?"
Ah Beng: "Ai yah, sorry lah!"
Ah Kok: "Sorry no cure! Ai tio hoot?"

SPOIL MARKET
A term used to describe someone who does his work so well, he makes his colleagues look bad.
“Check out how Ah Seng's report! Got leather binding and colour transparencies! He damn spoil market one.”

STANDARD
Used to denote quality or skill.
"Wah lan, this prata so cold, damn no standard. Eat oreddy also not shiok."

STEADY POM PEE PEE (omg my favourite word of all time)
An extension of "steady", this is an adjective describing someone's prowess or sang froid, i.e. ability to remain cool under pressure.
"Wah! Matthew's MCQ is steady pom pee pee one, leh! He no need to study also can get full marks."

STER (haha cockster)
An army suffix, attached to verbs to describe their perpetrators, e.g. someone who ‘kengs’ (malingers) is a ‘kengster’, while someone who ‘tuangs’ (skives) is a ‘tuangster’. A lesser form than ‘king’ as in ‘tuang king’ or ‘keng king’.
“Eh, all you kengsters! Don’t pretend-pretend you sick so you can stay back and tuang, ah!”

STONE
An adjective/verb conveying either a lack of any activity, a state of stupor or stunned bewilderment. While it may owe its origins to it, the local use of the term seems to lack any connection with hallucinogenic drug-use.
1. "The guy never do anything, one. So stone!"
2. "Eh, let's go Orchard, man. Don'ch stone!"
3. "Wah lau, the maths exam question so cheem one. I see only I stone."

SUAN
To ridicule or insult someone.
1. "Why you go and suan him like that? What has he ever done to you?"
2. "Wah lau, did you see? He kena suan in TalkingCock.com!"

SURE CAN ONE
Phrase used to bolster one's/someone else's confidence that something can be achieved.
"This thing so easy to do, sure can one."

TALK COCK/TALK COCK SING SONG
To speak rubbish or nonsense. Probably originates from the English phrase “cock and bull”. “Sing Song” is added for emphasis. “Talk Cock” by itself also has the more benign meaning of “casual banter” or “chatting”.
1. “Ah Beng managed to pass the exam? Don’t talk cock!”
2. “I met Johnny at the kopi tiam just now, and we were talking cock for a while.”

TIO
Hokkien exclamation whose closest English approximation is "got it!" or "correct!" Suggests hitting the target or achieving something, usually but not necessarily pleasant.
1. "Eh! I heard Ah Beng tio 4D, man!" ("Hey, I heard Ah Beng struck the lottery!")
2. "You wan' your flat to get upgraded, then you must vote gahmen, lah. Tio bo?" ("To get your flat upgraded, you must vote in the government. Is that correct?")
"Tio!" ("Correct!")
3. "Wah, Ah Beng yesterday tio from his OC, man!" ("Yesterday, Ah Beng got it from his officer in charge.")
4. "Why you listen to him? He's a damn boh tio sort of person!" ("Don't listen to him - he's the type who just doesn't get it.")
5. "I voted him because he's the most ooh tio of the lot." ("I voted him because of all the candidates, he's the one who gets it the most.")

TZAI
A compliment about one’s coolness.
“Ah Lian agreed to go out with him? Since when he so tzai one?”

VERY THE
Singlish phrase meaning, inexplicably, 'very'. Usually employed with a clearly sarcastic tone.
1. "Wah lau eh, he ah, his armpit very the smelly, you know!"
2. "Piang eh, your skirt very the short, hor?"

VERY WHAT ONE
A phrase used to describe a quality so inexplicably irritating about something or someone. The Singlish version of the French phrase "je ne sais quoi".
"She, hor, very what one, you know?" (She has a certain je ne sais quoi.)

VOMIT BLOOD (PUKE MUCUS!)
Literal translation from the Hokkien phrase "tor hwee", which is used to describe undergoing extreme difficulty, intense suffering or great irritation. "Vomit" is often pronounced "womit".
Ah Beng: "Yesterday, hor, I teach my son Maths, teach until vomit blood."

WAKE UP YOUR IDEA
Singlish phrase, popular in the army, meaning, "get a clue" or "stop dreaming".
Sergeant: "Who say you can tuang like that, recruit? You better wake up your idea!"

WHACK
To approach something carelessly or eat something with relish.
1. “Eh, the seafood buffet here is quite solid. Whack all the prawns, man!”
2. "This is a serious job, okay, you cannot anyhow whack."

WHAT TALKING YOU?
Singlish for "What are you talking about?", it is a statement of incredulity or disbelief.
"Eh, Ah Beng where can pass 'A' Maths? What talking you?" (How can Ah Beng pass his 'A' Maths exams? What are you talking about?)

WHERE GOT
Pithy term expressing disbelief or sometimes, outrage.
1. Beng: "Seng, you took my wallet, right?"
Seng: "Where got?"
2. "He accused me of stealing his wallet. I ask you, where got like that?"
3. "A young man dying while in the prime of his life… Where got meaning?"

WON'T DIE
Singlish phrase used to reassure someone that something is not hazardous or troublesome. Derived from Hokkien, "buay si", with the same meaning, and directly translated into English.
"It's only an injection. Don't scared, won't die one" (The latter, in Hokkien, would be, "Meng kia, buay si eh.")

YOUR HEAD
Mild curse used to disabuse someone of his or her erroneous assumption.
1. Ah Beng: "You sure fail the test!"
Ah Seng: "Your head, lah!"
2. "She? Win Miss Universe? Your head, lah!"

How can I not want to see you in Heaven with me?

2008-05-05T13:05:00.003+08:00

The Parable of the Lost Son

Luke 15:11-32

Jesus continued: "There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, 'Father, give me my share of the estate.' So he divided his property between them.

"Not long after that, the younger son got together all he had, set off for a distant country and there squandered his wealth in wild living. After he had spent everything, there was a severe famine in that whole country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to a citizen of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed pigs. He longed to fill his stomach with the pods that the pigs were eating, but no one gave him anything.

"When he came to his senses, he said, 'How many of my father's hired men have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired men.' So he got up and went to his father.

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

"The son said to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.'

"But the father said to his servants, 'Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let's have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' So they began to celebrate.

"Meanwhile, the older son was in the field. When he came near the house, he heard music and dancing.So he called one of the servants and asked him what was going on. 'Your brother has come,' he replied, 'and your father has killed the fattened calf because he has him back safe and sound.'

"The older brother became angry and refused to go in. So his father went out and pleaded with him. But he answered his father, 'Look! All these years I've been slaving for you and never disobeyed your orders. Yet you never gave me even a young goat so I could celebrate with my friends. But when this son of yours who has squandered your property with prostitutes comes home, you kill the fattened calf for him!'

" 'My son,' the father said, 'you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.' "

---

"If other people cheat my money, I will make noise. If my own family cheat my money, I gam guan."

Thanks for always fetching me everywhere, even though it's totally unnecessary (and a waste of time and petrol).

Thanks for always giving me (more than) enough pocket money behind Mum's back, even though you always lecture (and bore) me about your childhood money-saving escapades.

Thanks for being always there for the family, even though work sucks and Mum's screaming gets on everyone's nerves.

Thanks for always loving Mum more than she loves you, even though (kidding!) she doesn't always deserve it.

Thanks for siding me when Mum scolds, even though I'm almost always in the wrong.

Thanks for bringing me into this world, even though I've caused you problems in more ways than one.

Thanks for always thinking of me, even though I don't always think of you.

Thanks for being the best Dad I can ever have.

Happy birthday. :)

It's over, but our lives have just begun.

2008-05-02T09:41:00.003+08:00

Dear God,

Thanks for giving me so much of Your goodness throughout Thai camp, even though I came without expecting anything from You.

Thanks for including me in The Great Commission, even though I'm so incapable.

Thanks for all the challenges, even though it is in my nature to fail You.

Thanks for always having faith in me, even though I don't always have faith in You.

Thanks for being the greatest friend I can ever have.

Love,
Zelanie

Something to fill in my one week hiatus.

2008-04-18T13:10:00.000+08:00

A Good Way to Study Economics

#1. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I am very rich. Marry me!"
That's Direct Marketing.

#2. You're at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your them goes up to her and pointing at you, say, "He's very rich. Marry him."
That's Advertising.

#3. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day, you call and say, "Hi, I'm very rich. Marry me."
That's Telemarketing.

#4. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You get up and straighten your tie, you walk up to her and pour her a drink, you open the door (of the car)for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her ride and then say, “By the way, I'm rich. Will you marry me?"
That's Public Relations.

#5. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. She walks up to you and say, “You are very rich! Can you marry me?"
That's Brand Recognition.

#6. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I am very rich. Marry me!" She gives you a nice hard slap on your face.
That's Customer Feedback.

#7. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, “I am very rich. Marry me!" And she introduces you to her husband.
That's demand and supply gap.

#8. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say anything, another person comes and tells her, "I'm rich. Will you marry me?" and she goes with him.
That's competition eating into your market share.

#9. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say, "I'm rich, marry me!” your wife arrives.
That's barriers to entry.

#10. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, “I am very rich. Marry me!” Another guy with flowers says, “I am richer. Marry me!"
That's absolute advantage.

#11. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm very rich. Marry me!" Her equally gorgeous friend tags along for the rest of the night.
That's economies of scale.

#12. You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, "I'm very rich. Marry me!" Two years later, you have kids.
That's the multiplier effect.

---

In just two hours, I'll be off to experience God in Thailand. Bye guys! :)

Mina-san, tadaima!

2008-04-11T12:06:00.006+08:00

That would mean, "Everyone, I'm home!" :D

Japan is incredibly awesome. Indescribable beyond words. Each district in Tokyo has its own unique (and crazily out-of-this-world) sub-culture, and they're located only one station away from each other. Although living expenses are a tad too high (we had to pay at least 10 bucks for each meal, and the subway tickets are at least $1.90), I really enjoyed myself that 11 days.

Just walking along the cobbled streets (yes, and they're really clean cos there're no public dustbins so you have to carry your trash home) and breathing in the fresh air of Osaka (I'll never eat Singapore takoyaki ever again after I tasted the ones there), Kyoto, Mt Fuji (omg it freaking snowed in Spring, how bout that for a miracle), Shimbashi, Ueno, Shinjuku, Akihabara, Yokohama, Harajuku, Ikebukuro, Ebisu, Narita... Nostalgia has already settled heavily in my heart. I HAVE to go back again.

Photos will be coming soon, depending on how fast Fuiyi, Joce, Pris and Jing upload them. I gave up on my 3-year-old camera on the very first day of the trip. :D

Anyway, God has blessed me tremendously the entire trip. Listen to this:

On 4 April, we went to Motomachi Shopping Street in Yokohama. I decided to put my wallet and passport into Jing's bag cos I didn't want to lug around too much stuff while shopping. The last time I saw my wallet was around 4pm, and when I wanted to buy something at 6pm, I couldn't find my wallet anywhere. So I figured it either fell out of Jing's bag, or I forgot to take it out of dressing rooms where I tried on stuff I didn't buy. Pris helped me retrace my steps, checking all the shops we've been in while the rest looked for a police station. Along the way, we stood in the streets and prayed in the cold for God to help us find it with everything intact. But we couldn't find it in any of the shops we checked. And most of the shopkeepers couldn't speak English to save their lives.

When we arrived at the police station (it was more like a box cos it's really small), it was empty but unlocked. So we sat around on the tables and chairs and tried to call the police depot. Then the funniest thing happened - while we were so engrossed in trying to work the telephone, the policeman came back carrying his dinner.

Imagine this: You've had a quiet, uneventful day and you decide, "Oh well, since everything's a-okay in this peaceful place, I'll get myself a nice hot meal and go home early tonight." And then when you come back with your take-out, you see five frantic foreign females in your once-empty office, sitting in your chair and using your phone on your table. His expression on his face was priceless.

After many minutes of trying to understand each other, with help from Oakwood Apartments and a nice man from Yokohama Police Depot who could speak English, we finally had the report done. It was so cute when I told him my name, he was like, "Zhe-rah-ni san" under his breath as he started writing out Hiragana so he could pronounce my name properly.

Anyway the situation was quite hopeless cos I had S$1,500 cash and there was no form of identification in my wallet save for my name on my AmEx card and ATM card. So any normal geezer who picked up my wallet could've had a field day with all the moolah. Everyone seemed to think so too.

So Oakwood, our hotel, said to leave the case to them and the police and they'd notify us if anything happens. Which during the rest of our stay, nothing did. So I got by with borrowed money from Fuiyi (thank God for her generousity) and even though I love Japan, I wasn't in the best of moods. I've never lost my wallet in my entire life, and to do so for the first time in foreign soil with no parents was really traumatising.

Even though I prayed to God so many times every day for my wallet and gave thanks to Him for my wonderful friends in Japan and CG mates back home who have been keeping me in their prayers, and for the fact that it was only money I lost, and not my passport or my life... I still didn't have peace in my heart. In fact, when the time came for me to leave Japan, I questioned God, "Is it really in Your plan for me to lose my wallet for good? If so, please tell me. Only then will I try my best to come to terms with it and learn from my carelessness." Thinking back, I actually lacked faith cos I prayed with expectance that God will return my wallet back to me, and didn't ~~want to~~ think that He might actually want to teach me a lesson.

However, on the express train to Narita airport, I looked out of the window. It was raining quite heavily in the countryside so everything was grey, brown and green. Then suddenly, I saw a solitary Sakura tree. The sudden burst of white, pink and yellow amidst the dull and dreary hues was so refreshing and I knew God was telling me to leave everything up to Him. No matter the circumstance, He'll make it okay. And something in me just gave up on myself, so I started to trust God for real.

Eventually, I got over the entire incident. I even forgot about the huge amount of money, and got on with my life. Then yesterday at 3pm, while I was making my ATM card at the bank, Fuiyi called to tell me that Oakwood has emailed her saying that the police has found my wallet. Although details of its contents are confidential, which means I don't know if everything's intact, I still thank God so SO much for the way He has answered my prayers. He let me panic, He let me worry, He let me cry, He let me hope, He let me ache, He let me trust, He let me recover, He let me rejoice.

Isn't God great? Even though I'm far away in another country, I still look up to the same sky where He is. And He's unfailingly good to me.

If you guys are thinking of going for "An Evening Of Worship With Planetshakers & Tim Hughes" at The MAX Pavilion tonight, stop thinking and just GO. I went yesterday and it was dynamic. God's presence there was so strong, and because of the whole wallet thing, I could praise and sing to Him wholeheartedly.

In the house of God, there exists people from different walks of life. But all are here for one purpose: To worship the same God. And all believe in the same thing: With Him, you can do anything and everything. :)

MY PRINTER IS WORKING!!

2008-03-27T02:41:00.000+08:00

That was like the fastest answer to a prayer request so far.

Thanks God. I hope you'll somehow repair my iPod too. :)

If gadgets are so user-friendly, why do they come with a manual?

2008-03-27T01:31:00.002+08:00

In less than 24 hours, I'll be on JAL, Osaka-bound.

#1. My suitcase is almost good to go, but I'm still waiting for some underwear to dry and to put in contact lens stuff.
#2. I'm worrying about how it'll exceed the 20 kg limit.
#3. My handcarry luggage is really too heavy.
#4. In spite of the countless revised checklists I've made the entire day, I'm certain there're still some important things that have slipped my mind.
#5. Can S$2,000 cash last me for 11 days?
#6. The cards I have to write to my CG mates by tomorrow are left untouched on the table.
#7. My SMU interview was supposed to be on 4 April, but I'm in Japan, so they're gonna reschedule me to another day. God, please don't let it clash with the Thai camp trip. :(
#8. I have to prepare copies of my IB certificate and cover letters for NUS, NTU, U of T and University of Melbourne by tonight. And my printer isn't working.
#9. Ever since CNY, I can only hear audio coming out from the left earphone of my iPod. At first, I thought the earphones were faulty, so I went to change. Turns out that my iPod earjack isn't working properly. Repairing it costs about a hundred bucks, which buying a new iPod may seem a better choice. But I don't need a new iPod omg, I just want to hear music normally.
#10. I think I'm going to have mensus in Japan.

Sian.

So what am I doing now to pass the time away? Setting up my new printer.

Doing it was pretty simple, I love how the instructions came in pictures with freaking cool arrows. Everytime I complete one picture, they'll direct me to the next, haha I find it really awesome. I think education shouldn't be confined to textbooks, children should watch what they read on teevee. (Y)

Installing was even easier. But when I connected the printer to the computer with the USB cable, they said it couldn't be detected. You know how when you insert stuff into the com with USB, it'll make this "tadaa!" sound? I heard it when I plugged in the cable, but like... Whatever man. It's times like these I wish I had an older brother.

God, please take all my worries away! Or at least, save my printer and iPod. :(

Love like red rockets

2008-03-24T14:01:00.002+08:00

So I came to work today and they put me right at the back of the corner of the office. Not a bad spot, since I've got a nice view and a place somewhat all to myself. My old desk was nearest to the door, where I had to acknowledge mailed documents and answer the bell. It wasn't really a bother, but now I don't have to do that anymore haha. Plus, there won't be anyone to sneak up behind me so yay. :D

It's only three more days to Japan. Amidst all the excitement, I just realised yesterday night while packing that I do not have a suitable luggage. Sigh. I dumped all my clothes on my sister's bed, hopefully my mom won't climb up to check these few days till I get a good trolley bag from my aunt. I reallyreallyreallyreallyreallyreally x10000000 hate packing omg.

Suet's leaving for like three different countries and it looks like I'll never see her again so I wrote her hate mail (haha inside joke) and I wanna share something I learnt while looking for a good Bible verse to give her.

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also."

- Matthew 6:19-21

Is there really a point to chase after wordly things? Getting into a good university, scoring in tests and exams, getting head-hunted from global companies, earning a six-figure salary, buying that Chanel bag you've always wanted. You'd feel happy and accomplished, and protect that bag, along with everything else you've bought with your hard earned money, with your life.

But how much more you will get from delighting in the Lord! Saving up for God's kingdom by letting go of everything in your life. There's a whole lot to lose. But so much more to gain.

Scholarships, university prestige, career options, job opportunities, branded goods... Life can get really complicated if you allow yourself to take all these factors into consideration to entitle yourself with 'a life worth living'.

So be like David, someone after God's own heart. For if you have Him here in your life, you can go anywhere in the world.

Great minds like a think.

2008-03-19T15:20:00.003+08:00

The Economist Group is moving!

Okay, not geographically. The office space is just going to shrink, that's all. A new group will take half the current office, and everyone from that side will move over. So today's really crazy, with all the packing and sorting and filing.

At least walking around will keep me awake. And lifting and carrying boxes chock-full of 2006/2007/2008 edition magazines and fighting a losing battle against The Compactor are really convenient forms of exercise. :D

You know how people tend to look at mirrors to fix their hair and make-up in between office hours, after meals, before a major presentation, or while waiting for friends? Don't they realise that once they turn away from the mirror and walk out of the toilet door, they automatically do not look the same as the person they see in the reflection? That small gust of wind from the door can change the position of just one strand of hair, and that strand of hair can change their entire appearance. Throughout the day before the next toilet visit, frowning, laughing, smiling... Things they don't expect to happen that do, and their reactions towards these circumstances. Do they really portray to others what they want to look like in the mirror? Reflections captured in their minds are mere freeze-frames. And they just don't work.

For me, I think confidence in God is the best make-up anyone can have. It wouldn't melt under the scorching sun or get washed away in the pouring rain. You wouldn't have to worry about it smudging, and it makes you shine from inside out. And most of all, it's exclusive and unique to each individual. That no matter what, the world will never be able take it away from you.

Make people love how you love God today!

Nice and nicely done

2008-03-17T10:06:00.006+08:00

With theory done and dusted (omg partaay), all I can do now is to pray that God will have mercy on me albeit my laziness and procrastination in preparing for the exam, and let me pass.

Met up with Rui and Eme yesterday. As usual, our outings always end up laughing at disgusting people (there are too many in Cine) and spitting food all over the table.

I also watched Koizora with Fuiyi last night, it's a good movie albeit its cliche plot and high school setting: Boy meets girl in 1st year, fall in love, make love, get pregnant, get damn excited about having baby, jealous ex arranges girl to be kidnapped and raped, girl gets miscarraige, boy and girl bury the 'body' and vow to come back every year to remember it, boy breaks up with girl in 2nd year without saying why, girl gets devastated and confused, boy ignores her, girl finds new boy in university, girl finds out from a friend that the other boy got cancer so he broke up with her, girl runs to hospital in the cold bitter winter, boy and girl reunite, boy dies.

That's the longest sentence I've ever typed. Sorry for any spoilers. :D

Anyway, it's a good movie because it appeals to the cell-phone generation by centering the plot (very subtley, I might add) around the significance of these indispensable gadgets to us. On the last day of school before summer break, the girl, Maki lost her phone in the library, and a boy, Hiro, found it. He started calling her every day in the summer without telling her his name, and just like that, two strangers fell in love. Then all the confusing drama-mama stuff happened, but the most poignant moment, I feel, was when he was on his deathbed and the girl was running to the hospital to see him. She called him and used 3G techonology to speak to him. The last thing he saw before he died was her face and the last thing he heard was her voice, so he breathed for the last time with a smile on his face and tears in his eyes.

Haha okay I know I've failed to exude the meaningfulness behind this. Anyway I think a lot of people would find the show a waste of money because it was probably too fast-paced and unrealistic. But they fail to realise the essence of the show, that it follows a cell-phone based novel and it has to be like this. That's the beauty of Jap movies and dorama. They'll never exploit and tarnish a novelist's story by modifying its original plot to suit audience's expectations.

So yes, it's a show worth my ten bucks. Plus, the lead guy is DAMN GORGEOUS. (x

mindcafe + JC Central = disaster zone

2008-03-13T23:59:00.003+08:00

I realised I don't really like tagboards that much, so I managed to revive my old Haloscan account (thank God for how I always use the same username and pw all the bleddy time) and got myself a commenting system. So please drop by and tell me what you are thinking, how you are feeling, or... How bad the weather is lately (yes I am advertising). I'd love to hear from you guys even though I don't see you in person. :)

And since I only had 4 hours of sleep yesterday from watching Kimi wa Petto (omg it's the best romance dorama ever) and totally died laughing in mindcafe at Abigail's attempt at making a tiger while playing Squint today, I shall make do with an interesting thought:

"Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love Him."

- James 1:12

Because it's only when you're willing to be tested that you truly discover who you are. And it's only when you're tested that you discover who you can be. The person that you want to be does exist, somewhere in the other side of hard work, faith, and belief, and beyond the heartache and fear of what life has.

A kite's joy

2008-03-12T23:36:00.004+08:00

The reason for a kite to fly happily in the sky is not because it's free. It's because there is a string that will eventually tug it close. Even if it could fly freely, no matter how high it flies... Even if it could reach outer space, it wouldn't be happy. But beyond that string is a place to go home to. Even if it gets tattered and torn, or becomes useless, there is a gentle hand that will hold it close.

That's why I can fly. For that, I will live the rest of my life as a useless creature and never let go of that hand.

If you were a kite, is God holding your string today?

TGIF, and weekends too.

2008-03-10T11:19:00.004+08:00

I haaaaaaate Mondays. :( :(

Only got 3 hours of sleep yesterday night cos I was on the phone with dear Fuiyi. We were speculating about how Johnny's Entertainment might just turn out to be something like The Stepford Wives, where "Johnny" could just be a woman who's super oppressed (given the pathetic status of women in Japan) and displeased with the entire male population (who're seriously male chauvanist pigs). And since Japan is the king of electronics, she rose against the tide and created a hybrid of The Perfect Male - awesomely goodlooking, unbelievingly talented and incredibly nice by planting a microchip in their brains to appeal to the female population in Japan.

If this was true, then she's a bloody rich bitch, cause apparently the guys earn really little as everything goes back to the agency. And these poor guys everyone worships are just really robots. I mean, almost everything they do on teevee is scripted, right? From dorama to interviews to variety shows. And omg, even when they do really normal things like washing their laundry or taking a walk, if it gets recorded on video, it sells like hot cakes.

Gee, how nice it is to be faymuzz.

Anyways, I love weekends. Saturday was spent with my lovely CG mates. We went to PS and laughed at dumb and useless fishes outside Carrefour, walked to Selegie to eat tau huay and discuss prospects of the coming financial year of Ryan Holdings Inc., and walked back to Dhoby Xchange to play arcade.

Went to my second Jap class on Sunday and made friends with three really nice and cute Jap girls, that weren't Jap AT ALL. They're true blue Singaporeans. It's super creepy cause they look, speak and act Jap. Their pronunciation is perfect, their clothes look Jap, their hairstyles look Jap, they even read Jap... But they speak perfect Singlish. We asked them why, and they said they mastered the language through watching dorama and anime. To date, I've watched about 23 dorama, and still I don't sound/look/act Jap. And they're only fifteen years old.

Isn't it scary?! I think if I continue to indulge myself in Jap dorama, I will slowly morph into a Japanese. I mean, now when I watch non-Jap shows, I freaking translate whatever they're saying into Japanese in my head. It's really fun, but I'd rather indulge myself in God. Even though I've learnt a lot from all these dorama, I learn ten thousand times more from reading the Bible, and starting my day with God every day.

God, please give me lots of Heaven-made coffee cause I'm starting to feel really shagged. I'm about to call subscription agents from all over the world to get their contacts, and tonight there's a huge pile of theory homework waiting for me. I pray that Your strength will sustain me throughout today. Thank You!

Minimum effort, maximum results.

2008-03-07T14:54:00.019+08:00

As I am sitting in the comfort of my office and typing this behind my supervisor's back, thousands of 19 year olds across this island quake with fear in their seats while awaiting The Paper that will decide their entire life (or so they say).

I feel so... Powerful. Hahaha nah I just thought of how I was like on 7 January. Drong (as usual) was babbling on and on about how well ACS(I) did and all, but for the first time I was actually paying attention to him haha.

IB is scary stuff. I mean, who knew that choosing an IOC extract feels as though you're choosing the next path of your life? Especially being the only girl in the room with an already-accepted Oxford candidate and a man full of blackheads pointing to the painting of the Last Supper and saying, "Welcome to the Last Supper. Now, it is time to spin the Wheel of Fortune. Where will it take you? Where will your destiny lie?" and starts flailing his arms around the 10 envelopes on the table.

Seriously, who was the idiot who made us study 40 extracts (40 lines each) of plays, novels and poems, but on the day of the exam provide us with a random 10, out of which we have to pick a random 1? Damn stupid right. And that's just 1 tiny part of English A1, which is just 1 of the 6 (excluding TOK and EE) subjects we study.

I don't even want to start on the number of assignments, presentations, essays, projects, portfolios and science practicals we have to do, on top of having CCA, CIP, and studying for class tests, midyears, finals and the actual exam. It's a wonder that we actually still have a life. Actually I think I died and like, God sent me back to Earth or something. Haha.

So, all you A Level ~~losers~~ people, if you think JC life sucks, please try IB. After doing a thousand drafts for just one innocent-looking essay; losing countless amounts of sleep trying to figure out the 'wonders' of AutoGraph so you can derive the formula of limits and differentiation; writing Chem reports every week... You'll probably finish PW in a couple of weeks, easy peasy simple pimple.

Okay, IB isn't that bad. It's really tough, but you get a lot more value out of it than what you pay the school every month. And you (okay, I) kinda appreciate education on a much higher level, cos it's not about studying hard all the time. It's studying smart.

Minimum effort, maximum results. That's what IB at ACS(I) is really all about. So I'm actually pretty glad I chose IB over A Levels. Cos the education there gives you an edge over everyone else. Plus, I won't be just another A Level student sitting amongst the rest of you guys now, hoping against hope that somehow, even with the common three H2s and one H1, I'd still be someone special.

The (after)life of the party

2008-03-05T10:47:00.004+08:00

weiwen adel:
you know what cutcake did??
superZEL:
what what?
weiwen adel:
he was half asleep
weiwen adel:
then he suddenly sat up and asked me: WHAT IS THE TIME?
weiwen adel:
then it's damn dumb cuz the clock is just behind him
weiwen adel:
then i was like: ermm.. 830
weiwen adel:
then he THANKYOU and went back to sleep
superZEL:
OMG?!
weiwen adel:
and i thought he was going to offer his place for me to sleep HAHA
weiwen adel:
but i think huiying and cutcake got blocked nose
weiwen adel:
so they were snoring
weiwen adel:
then halfway i woke up and cannot sleep liaooo
weiwen adel:
cuz it's too rhythmic
superZEL:
AHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA WHAT!!!!!!!!
superZEL:
they two slept on my bed
superZEL:
AND SNORED?!
weiwen adel:
HAHAHA
weiwen adel:
ppl with blacked nose snore when they sleep
weiwen adel:
hahaha
weiwen adel:
i mean blocked.. not blacked
superZEL:
the funny thing is
superZEL:
ONLY ONE OF MY NOSTRIL IS BLOCKED
superZEL:
the pisai only coming out from one hole la
weiwen adel:
OHMYYY
weiwen adel:
alternate snores
weiwen adel:
haahhaa
weiwen adel:
oh ryan also very funny!!
weiwen adel:
cuz he suddenly sat up
weiwen adel:
and stared at me in the chair
weiwen adel:
then i stared back at him
weiwen adel:
then his eyes start to slowly close and he fell back to sleep
weiwen adel:
it was hilariousss
weiwen adel:
and ben went toilet without even noticing me
weiwen adel:
AHAH
weiwen adel:
did ben remember what he did the night before??
superZEL:
HAHAHHAHAHAHHAA
superZEL:
yah he did
superZEL:
HE SUCKS LA
superZEL:
I AM NEVER LETTING HIM AND SONGJUN AND RYAN IN MY HOUSE EVER AGAIN
weiwen adel:
AHAHAHA
weiwen adel:
i think the tying him up is damn funny
superZEL:
YAH
superZEL:
we tied him to a chair please!
superZEL:
and when i was thinking of how to make a knot such that he won't get loose
superZEL:
HE WENT TO TIGHTEN IT OMG BEST
weiwen adel:
HAHAHA
superZEL:
then he said that, he had to go toilet in the morning
superZEL:
so he had to untie himself
weiwen adel:
YAYA!
weiwen adel:
i saw
superZEL:
that means the whole night before he go toilet
superZEL:
he slept with his leg tied to the chair?!
weiwen adel:
he did
weiwen adel:
he spent 10 min untying b4 going toilet
weiwen adel:
hahaha
weiwen adel:
exciting mannn

God, thank You for blessing me with this awesome CG with members that never fail to make all of my days so entertaining and worth remembering, and most importantly, making Your light shine through them to everyone else. (:

There ain't nothing better than free stuff.

2008-03-04T23:30:00.006+08:00

Hello! I had an awesome day today although I only had 5 hours of sleep last night all because of theory homework.

Piano lessons in the morning are worse than taking public transport to and from the CBD during rush hour. To make matters worse, I got my period in the middle of the night while I was having a really weird but cool dream and because I had to go to the toilet, I forgot what the dream was about. ): And usually when girls get their periods, they'll have stomach cramps right? As for me, I have back aches and my BACKSIDE hurts lah. So strange.

Anyway, I went to tuition my cousin after hanging around in Westmall (lol) for a couple of hours after that. I think teaching English to primary school kids is the easiest, really. I used to think Math would be the safest, cos there're only right and wrong answers, whereas for English and Science, they're really debatable. But giving English homework is fun! Cos my tutee's family is going to Korea during the March hols, I asked her to write book reviews on 3 short stories and present one more verbally in one of Enid Blyton's hardcover books. And I'm actually looking forward to reading them. :D

After that, I met ACB at Vivo for free tickets to 10,000 B.C.! This outing was a real blessing, cos I was supposed to meet Rui for dinner tonight but the poor girl has no money so I was gonna go home, but ACB needed someone to go with him for the movie. I saw the trailer on the bus a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, 'Golly gee, I wanna watch this". I really love those CGI films, like LOTR, Underworld, 300, Pirates of the Carribean, Van Helsing etc, so I thought 10,000 B.C. would be nice. And it was! Not gonna say anything though, so watch the movie yourself, it's really good if you've got my taste haha.

Anyway, Vivo's arcade is... Not that bad what. I heard from Ben that it's really small and the games suck, but there's the bumper car game, Ocean Hunter (which we played today), Jurassic Park, and this other really cool safari shooting game ACB and I are gonna try after CG.

God, thanks for making today a happy day. It shall give me new strength for tomorrow (waking up early in the morning for work really sucks man).