ver. But then we should always
remember that there is nothing pure in the world, that there is no such
thing in nature as any substance consisting only of a single element,
pure and uncombined with others. Just as your gold eagle is not pure
gold, but alloyed with copper, everything in nature is alloyed.
Everything in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath, and in the
waters under the earth, is compound. The air you breathe, simple as it
seems, is composed of three gases, and is besides full of what Huxley
calls "a stirabout" of millions of seeds of animalculae and motes of dust
visible in the sunbeam. That hydrant water you are about to swallow is a
rich aquarium full of all manner of monsters, which the oxy-hydrogen
microscope will exhibit to your terrified gaze, devouring each other
alive. Should you get rid of them by evaporating your water, your
chemist will tell you that still your pure water must be a compound of
oxygen and hydrogen. There is no help for it.

Many years ago some astronomers fancied they had found clouds, or
nebulae, of gas, quite simple and uncompounded with anything else, a
great many millions of miles away in the sky. They were so very far away
that they thought nobody would ever be able to fly so far to bottle up a
specimen of that gas and bring it back here to earth and analyze it, to
find out whether it was pure and simple, or compound. So they felt quite
safe in affirming that there was the genuine, simple, homogeneous gas,
in the nebulae, with which Almighty God had nothing whatever to do, but
which had first made itself and then had condensed into our present
world. But unfortunately for this brilliant discovery the spectroscope
opened windows into the nebulae, and showed very plainly that they were
on fire; and fire is a compound; it can not burn without fuel and
something to support the combustion; so that settled the alleged
simplicity of the nebulae. It is now demonstrated, therefore, that every
known substance existing in nature is a compound, and therefore can not
be eternal. And the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. No
number of finite existences can be eternal. The universe, then, can not
be eternal.

Suppose, however, that, for the sake of argument, we should grant our
atheistic world-builder his materials, away off beyond the rings of
Saturn, or the orbit of Uranus (since he seems to like to have his
quarries a good way off from his building), would he be any