once from
its gravitation cable and be turned adrift into space. Its time has not
yet come. It will not come until the great central sun of the system to
which it belongs has passed laboriously through all his stages of
stellar life and died out also. Then when that dead sun, according to
the impact theory, blunders across the path of another sun, dead and
blind like himself, its time will come. The result of that impact will
be a new star nebula, with all its weary history before it; a history of
suffering, in which a million years will not be long enough to write a
single page.

"Here we have a scientific parallel to the hell of superstition which
may account for the instinctive origin of the smoking flax and the fire
which shall never be quenched. We know that the atoms of which the
human body is built up are atoms of matter. It follows that every atom
in every living body will be present in some form at that final impact
in which the solar system will be ended in a blazing whirlwind which
will melt the earth with its fervent heat. There is not a molecule or
cell in any creature alive this day which will not in its ultimate
constituents endure the long agony, lasting countless aeons of centuries,
wherein the solid mass of this great globe will be represented by a rush
of incandescent gas, stupendous in itself, but trivial in comparison
with the hurricane of flame in which it will be swallowed up and lost.

"And when from that hell a new star emerges, and new planets in their
season are born of him, and he and they repeat, as they must repeat, the
ceaseless, changeless, remorseless story of the universe, every atom in
this earth will take its place, and fill again functions identical with
those which it, or its fellow, fills now. Life will reappear, develop,
determine, to be renewed again as before. And so on for ever.

"Nature has known no rest. From the beginning--which never was--she has
been building up only to tear down again. She has been fabricating
pretty toys and trinkets, that cost her many a thousand years to forge,
only to break them in pieces for her sport. With infinite painstaking
she has manufactured man only to torture him with mean miseries in the
embryonic stages of his race, and in his higher development to madden
him with intellectual puzzles. Thus it will be unto the end--which never
shall be. For there is neither beginning nor end to her unvarying
cycles. Whether the secular optimist be succe