ASTRONOMY AND RELIGION

Hot Lakes Chronicle, Issue 115, 15 February 1895, Page 4

ASTRONOMY AND RELIGION

j How xo Relate Tueji. By Sik Edwi>- AItKOLD. ' The best thing that could happen £or mankind would be if a greati i astronomer bad been born a poet or a ! great poet should become au astronoJ met'.' Sj Sir Edwin Arnold declares ; ! and by blending his poetic fancy and astronomic lose he does something tu supply the want he bewails : ' to indicate how new, superb, and noble are the meanings which the ancient formulas might receive from current facts. lie regrets the lack of imagination in astronomers who ' foolishly say ' that ' those large mysterious planets must be lifeless, failing to perceive that life equat33 itself to its conditions, and that there may bo creatures on the sun which thrive upon incandescent hydrogen; Moonpeople who flourish without air or water; Jovians and Saturnians, well-contented with an abode in a state of vapour ' : ' it is probable that only a slight exaltation of the power of the optic nerve would present the picture of tha starry sky to us in a very different aspect. . . . Since ail heavenly bodies exercise an influence, gravitatory and otherwise, upon all other bodies, it is conceivable that a kind of vision may hereafter exist to which their mutual contact and interaction would be perceptible.' lie still more regrets the failure of philosophers and theologians to adjust their systems to the new conceptions brought by astronomy. .Pessimism and anarchism aud materialism of lifts he feels to be ridiculous in the light of ' the stately march of the stars.' Surely they give us a glimpse of lufimty and a hint of immortality. Two passages are cited from the Gospels : ' One is where the great Teacher of Nazareth, perhaps with His divine eyes fixed at the time upon the shining firmament, said pityingly, ' In my father's house are many mansions ; if it were not so I would have told you.' And the other passage is a saying from the same tender and holy hps—- ' Tho Kingdom of Heaven is nigh unto you, yea, even at your very gates.' Probably these last words, at once so simple and so mysterious, condense a prodigious physical fact. It may well be that the next great secret of existence is hidden from us by a veil so thin that its very thinness makes it impenetrable. A touch, a turn, a change, as slight as when f .he light pebble lying on the thin ice feels it melt and fells to the bottom, may be all that is necessary to lift tho curtain of another and utterly transformed universe which is yet not really another ; but this same one that we see imperfectly with present eyes, and think timidly with present thoughts.' Sir Edwin ' tho \yv I * «H.ivn.t;inn ' la '.m.rrnwr.(l I I w up- - - . ■ a,.;u to old-fashioned notions of the world : ' The idea of redemption by love, For example, which has a thousand illustrations even in tho little sphere sf human experience, would probably only derive greater and greater magnificence of demonstration if we could ■see and know its operation iu systems developed beyond our own ; and amid that immense, and to-day inconceivib!o, march of evolution, of which we anly get shadows here. But is it not avident thai wo must think more largely than to imagine ourselves, or to let thoso whom we teach imagine, that tho Son of God was once absent from such an universe as we now perive—from the splendid spaciousness sf His dominions of light and life—wholly abstracted in the care and charge of ' this little 0, tho earth ?' The love of God. manifested in Him, tva3 doubtless present with us, a3 .vith ill the ccsrncs ; but to think becomingly and proportionately to facts, wo must recognise that it was also and simultaneously present in every abode af planetary and steliar —perhaps of galactic and nebular--society. . . . We have enlarged onormously our conceptions of the universe, but apparently forgotten to magnify our beliefs.' In the Fortnightly Review, Sir R. Ball, writing on tho samo subject, has i short astronomical paper in which he discusses the possibility of life on stber plansts, and the nature of that life. His conclusions are thus ex pressed ' ISo reasonable person will, I thiuk, i doubt that the tendency of modern research has been in favour of tha supposition that there may be life on sorno of the other globes. But the :harncter of each organism has to be fitted so exactly to its environment, :hat it seems in the highest degree mlikely that any organism we know nere could live on any other globe daewhere. \Ye cannot conjecture ,vhat the organism must be which vould be adapted for a residence in Tenus or Mars, nor- does any linn of 'eseat'ch at present known to us: hold >ut the hope of more definite knowedge.