Kings and Comets.

Timaru Herald, Volume XIIIC, Issue 14216, 4 June 1910, Page 2 (Supplement)

Kings and Comets.

(By Toliunga, in "N.Z. Herald.") The comet has come and been seen, and is going; and a king has died and been buried; and to the barbarian there is a connection between the two events —at which idea, the civilised scoff. Yet it may be that the barbarian is not necessarily foolish, and that the civilised is not necessarily wise, but that there may be more communion between the doings of stars and comets and the lives of men and kings than the civilised think possible, though, perchance not quite as much as the barbarian assumes.

"Rank superstition!" says tho j modern man contemptuously, the self- ! satisfied modern man who imagines • that lie hears God spoaking in the j rumble of a printing press, and is quite | •sure that we can be taught in primary j schools the secrets of the ages, anil j that the romance and the mystery j have departed from tho movements of J the stars as from the lives of men. And yet we naturally close our eyes in the dark and wake refreshed in the dawn, the mysterious processes of sleeping and waking being obvious counterparts of Hay and Night; and when the sun lilts towards the zenith in tho j Spring tho blood flows and flushes in i the veins of men and maidens as the. | sap flows and flushes tinder the bark 1 of trees: and in the moon we see a j power which not only governs tides, but is a potential factor in tho calendar J of being. When wo forget -these things, and thousands of kindred things, it is easy to laugh at the connection made in the barbaric, mind between tile coming of comets and the death of kings. .Darwin tells us of being in the Scottish Highlands and finding himself < without his watch, one long summer day, asking a herd-laddie of the time. Darwin know many things, was the greatest biologist in Britain, Fellow of many learned societies, master of the sciences, student who never tired of work. the shrewdest observer and dcducer in tho civilised world—and the barefooted hord-laddie stared at liini in amazement: "To dinna seem bleend, but canna ye see the sune; man, it's juist a lia' : oor fra' twa." V.liich started Darwin thinking npdn tho'many, things we miss in civilised life, and ho\v easily we lose touch with that "Nature" which, under primitive conditions, is our constant companion and only book. Which is wholly so. Sun-time annrt,_ there is not one man in a hundred in the cities of the world who can tell tho time of the night by a glance at the moon, when the moon is visible. There is probably not one man jin a hundred who has ever thought that the moon is any sort of clock, ali though it has told the watches of the | nigiit to the shepherds on the ills, and to the sailors on the sea from time immeniorablo. And none of us in civilisation retain the keen vivid perception that sleep is akin to death, which is common among savages, although wo not only retain the idea in our poetry and religions, but are theoretically aware that, according to tho scientists. Individual Life only gradually acquired tho tenacity which first enabled it to struggle through the Night and thus to renew, day after day. continued and conscious existence.

The truth is that the moment we light the gas or switch on the electricity, almost as soon as wo make a dip candle or buy a tin of kerosene, we forget that the Sun is so much the dominating thing upon tho earth that we cannot even pass into its shadow without inconvenience and cannot live long in its shadow without dying. From the idea that the sun and the moon and the stars, the planets and the comet, the meteors and the nebulae, were all made and designed for no other purpose than to servo and instruct the being known to us as Mankind, we swing into the opposite idea, that man is entirely incidental to the scheme of the universe and that sun, moon, and stars, planets and comets, meteors and nebulae, evolve after a fashion of their own and without any direct connection with the species of animal we are. Which last state of mind is equally incomplete and unsatisfactory as the lirst, or rather is much more incomplete and unsatisfactory—for it is tho fatuous theorising of people wlja have lost personal touch with natural things and have not yet developed the intellectual sympathy and artistic, insiglit which would enable them even by j.ivug firesides and in electric-heated bedrooms to see the sun-warmed earth spinning ever through the refrigerating depths of space. That the Comet was not made wholly for our amusement goes without saying. although most of us in civilisation hesitate to decide whether it was made to amuse us or to frighten us. It is quite inconceivable to think that the Architect of the Universe would arrange for the flight of a big squib merely to prevent us from becoming tired of tho monotony of the ordinary starry heavens; yet is is surely equally inconceivable —to those who are not afraid to think religiously because it has become the passing habit of civilisation to think without imagination—fo think that there is no connection between man and comets in a universe which is subject to One Law, and of which the mystery of mysteries is the

absoluteness and the completeness of this One Law, as shown wherever and whenever wo are. able to see and to appreciate any phase of its infinite application. And is it not possible, even probable, that the heavenly bodies have a relation to our lives because we have grown up and developed and become what we are under physical conditions which embrace the physical conditions of the entire universe?

For, look you, if it is once admitted that sleeping is part of our physical being because we have grown up upon an earth which spins daily into cold

and dark from heat and light, how can we feel sure that the coming of a comet does not herald the death of 'n king: 1 Remembering this, that the death of a king is. an algebraic symbol, implying that which js of momentous importance to a people and not necessarily meaning the passing of an individual whoso coming or going might be of no importance to anrhody—not. even to the individual himself. For there are ninnv people, male and feifiale both, who are of no

value whatever scenting to increase the census figures, who neither excite affection nor desiro to excite it, and of whom the throbbing, suffering, sinning, joying, loving huuman soul seems to have been left behind in Limbo when they were born.

If we sleep with the turning of the Earth into shadow, if the tides of living ebb and flow with the moon, if the Springtime brings strength and passion to all created things—to nmn not least —is it a strange tiling that the Last of the Saxon Kings should iall whilo tile comet flared to sunward or that Oliver Cromwell should pass away on the wings of the Great Storm P If we dismiss the theory of sequence between the events and replace i by the theory of co-ordination, tho connection is obviously less strained and more acceptable. .For it opens to us, as by a dimly-glazed window, the vision of a universe to which wo are not alien and stranger and amid whose stupendous forces we are not intruders, the vaguo outlines of a universe which s ~, na. ^e "with'' Man, though not 'for him, which is an accompaniment, reflecting as in a. glorious mirror the progress ol the individual and the rising of the race.

And if one thinks an epoch-making king too small a thing to be related to a comet, there no one us all who would gladly toss aside = the universe to ease the breathing of a •sick child who has seen loved eves in tin-) starlight, "who has glorified the comet by comparing it in his heart to a. girl's streaming hair? If we may trust our instinct and our intellect at all. the spirit counts for more in the indecipherable scheme of things than all the matter of all the stars. And those who by their lives affect the lives of others possess the snirifc indeed.