ions.
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