Godey's Lady's Book

GODEY'S LADY'S BOOK
Philadelphia, February 1850

THE TREASURY.

THE SUPREME POWER.

BY EDWARD EVERETT.

"IT has been as beautifully as truly said, that the undevout astronomer is mad." The same remark might, with equal force and justice, be applied to the undevout geologist. Of all the absurdities ever started, none more extravagant can be named than that the grand and far-reaching researches and discoveries of geology are hostile to the spirit of religion. They seem to us, on the very contrary, to lead the inquirer, step by stop, into the immediate presence of that tremendous Power which could alone produce and can alone account for the primitive convulsions of the globe, as the proofs are graven in eternal characters on the side of its bare and cloud-piercing mountains, or are wrought into the very substance of the strata that compose its surface; and which are, also, day by day and hour by hour, at work to feed the fires of the volcano, to pour forth its molten tides, or to compound the salubrious elements of the mineral fountains which .spring in a thousand valleys. In gazing at the starry heavens, all glorious as they are, we sink under the awe of their magnitude, the mystery of their secret and reciprocal influences, the bewildering conceptions of their distances. Sense and science are at war. The sparkling gem that glitters on the brow of night, is converted by science into a mighty orb – the source of light and heat, the centre of attraction, the sun of a system like our own. The beautiful planet which lingers in the western sky when the sun has gone down, or heralds the approach of morning – whose mild and lovely beam seems to shed a spirit of tranquillity, not unmixed with sadness, nor far removed from devotion, into the very heart of him wino wanders forth in solitude to behold it – is in the contemplation of science, a cloud-wrapt sphere – a world rugged mountains and stormy deeps. We study, we reason, we calculate. We climb the giddy scaffold of induction up to the very stars. We borrow the wings of the boldest analysis and flee to the uppermost parts of creation; and then, shutting our eyes on the radiant points that twinkle in the vault of night, the well-instructed mind sees, opening before it in mental vision, the stupendous mechanism of the heavens. Its planets swell into worlds. Its clouded stars recede, expand, become central suns, and we hear the rush of the mighty orbs that circle round them. The bands of Orion are loosed; and the sparkling rays which cross each other on his belt, are resolved into floods of light, streaming from system to system, across the illimitable pathway of the outer heavens. The conclusions which we reach are oppressively grand and sublime; the imagination sinks under them; the truth is too vast, too remote from the premises from which it is deducted; and man, poor frail man, sinks back to the earth and sighs to worship again, with the innocence of a child or Chaldean shepherd, the quiet and beautiful stars, as he sees them in the simplicity of sense.

But in the province of geology, there are some subjects in which the sense seems, as it were, led up into the laboratory of divine power. Let a man fix his eyes upon one of the marble columns in the Capitol at Washington. He sees there a condition of' the earth's surface, when the pebbles of every size and form and material, which compose this singular species of stone, were held suspended in the medium in which they are now imbedded, then a liquid sea of marble, which was hardened into the solid, lustrous, and variegated mass before his eye, in the very substance of which he beholds a record of the convulsions of the globe.

Let him go and stand upon the sides of the crater of Vesuvius, in the ordinary state of its eruptions, and contemplate the glazy stream of molten rocks that oozes quietly at his feet; encasing the surface of the mountain, as it cools, with a most black and stygian crust; or lighting up its sides at night with streaks of lurid fire. Let him consider the volcanic island, which arose, a few years since, in the neighborhood of Malta, spouting flames from the depth of the sea; or accompany one of our own navigators from Nantucket to the Antarctic ocean, who, finding the centre of a small island to which he was in the habit of resorting, sunk in the interval of two of his voyages, sailed through an opening in its sides, where the ocean had found its way, and moored his ship in the smouldering crater of a recently extinguished volcano. Or, finally, let him survey the striking phenomenon which our author has described, and which has led us to this train of remark—a mineral fountain, of salubrious qualities, of a temperature greatly above that of the surface of the earth in the region where it is found, compounded with numerous ingredients in a constant proportion, and known to have been flowing from its secret springs, as at the present day, at least for eight hundred years. unchanged, unexhausted. The religious of the elder world, in an early stage of civilization, placed a genius or n divinity by the side of every spring which gushed from the rocks or flowed from the bosom of the earth, Surely it would be no weakness for a thoughtful man who should resort, for the renovation of a wasted frame, to one of those salubrious mineral fountains, if he drank in their healing waters as a gift from the outstretched, through invisible hand of an everywhere present and benignant Power.

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