ilt the Brooklyn Bridge? Who projected the vast waterway from
Chicago to the Gulf? Who first thought of a cable across the depths of
seas? Who bridged the Firth of Forth, the Ganges, the Mississippi? Who
projected the gray docks of Montreal? the Simplon Tunnel? Who wound the
iron rails across the Alleghanies, the Rockies, the Sierras? Who drew
the wall that has encircled China for a thousand years? Who projected
the Suez Canal? the Trans-Siberian Railway? Who sunk the mines of
Eldorado? Who designed the Esplanade at Hamburg? the stone banks of the
Seine? the waterways of Venice? the aqueducts of Rome? the Appian Way?
the military roads of Chili and Peru? the Subway in New York?

Gravity, stress, strain, weight, tension, sag, cohesion,--a few
mathematical formulas, and a knowledge of the primary laws of
physics,--upon such principles as these, the world is rapidly changing
form and use.

The Engineer, in a strange and subtle way, stands near to God. His work
is done hand-in-hand with God. He takes the forces of nature and the
laws of the material world, and bends them to the needs and use of man.
Sky and sea or desert may be about him. He knows the arctic cold, the
tropic heat; the forest and the plain; the mountain and the marsh; the
brook and river; the peak and the precipice; the glacier and the tempest
in their course. Out of the very elements he is daily building new paths
for man to tread. Soon he, too, must pass; laid after death, it may be,
beside some mighty water that his handiwork has spanned.

In loneliness and silence does he not often think, I wonder, of the God
with whom he deals? It is God who provides the river and the sea; God
who through endless ages has piled stone on stone, crust on crust, and
has crumpled the strata of the earth as tissue in His hand. It is God
who has bound every mote to the earth-centre; who has sent magnetic
currents coursing through the globe, and has made tides and sea-changes,
and the trade-winds to blow. It is the God of the Gulf Stream, the
Caribbean Sea, the God of the Appalachians, the God of the Himalayas,
the God of the Cordilleras, of the Amazon, the Yukon, the Yang-tse-Kiang
with which he really deals.

The endless ages pass and go, but God abides. Little, daring man lifts
here and there a hand to mould the world which God has made--pricks the
earth for gold or silver, iron or coal--but GOD is everywhere immanent
and shines through every hour of change. Hence the Ma