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The Scare-Crow of Our Modern Astronomers.
The lost tale is about the tail of that comet, and how it destroyed America. What an exodus has taken place! Here is the great steamship loaded with stars from a New York opera troupe, including Caruso, all en route for Europe. Here is Signor Bonci hurrying after them, wild with excitement, with his hair flying to the winds: "Only save me, good captain, from being on this side the water when America gets hit by that cyanogen bomb. Take me back to Italy, and take me back quick."
For three days the New York dailies announced that the fatal night had come. Either Halley's comet was to burst in a shower of meteorites capable of inundating the continent, or a deadly gas was to suffocate its inhabitants. They feted the comet like the New Year—in champagne. It was just tommyrot, was it. The great restaurants were thronged. The mayors of small towns ordered the bells to be rung. Everywhere the same expectancy; everywhere the end of the world.
This fear and terror result from modern atheistical science, which predicts a distinct end of the physical universe. From childhood this fear is inbred. The greatest deliverer from these fears is an assured conviction that the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob is not going to destroy this physical frame, the earth; that he has in these last days sent a revelation of himself, of his character, and his purposes toward mankind. The Cellular Cosmogony demonstrates that the physical universe is an eternal structure. The inhabitants of America have rejected this revelation of God, in preferring the old and effete system of Copernicus, which grew up in the Middle Ages. They are afraid, because they are living under the domain of fear, which is ignorance.
The comet has always been a source of terror to those who think in Copernican figures. The length of its tail is sufficiently amazing. It is supposed by these astronomers to measure more than one million miles across at the point where the earth (a little planet, swinging around at an enormous rate in space) darts through it. The head of the comet has been sighted at, supposedly, sixteen million miles from the earth. In rebuttal of all this testimony founded upon hypotheses, for these immense distances originate from the primary guess that the earth is convex, the Cellular Cosmogony proves that men are dwellers in a cell only twenty-five thousand miles in circumference, with a diameter of eight thousand miles. A cell implies prisoners. It is a fact, that it is such a good idea that it takes you captive.
Instead of any cause for apprehension at the sight of our celestial visitor, with all its apanage, one has only to remember what a comet is in terms of Koreshan Universology. It is simply caused by the breaking up of zones of cruosic energy generated at the colures. These form lenses that reflect the sun's rays. Comets spirate about the sun—the central sun, not its visible localization, and then plunge into it to feed its fires. Let people go to bed and sleep nights henceforth, when a comet is in view.
What happened after all this anxiety? The comet lost its tail, and thereby all the dreadful tale of its devastation on the American continent was lost to the world,—lost to Signor Bonci and to the song birds from Italy. That streaming tail of fire which swept the heavens but yesterday, spreading affright and terror into thousands of hearts, all dominated by the brutal notion implanted from childhood, of the end of the world, slid off it in a night.
The Supreme Attraction of a Rational Basis.
What is more beautiful, more thrilling, more uplifting, more consoling, than the thought that God sends special revelations of himself at stated intervals through a great Teacher, who comprises all of Deity that men can comprehend? The beautiful, coherent, and logical doctrines of Koresh commend themselves to the intellect, so that once understood, nothing else can be thought of in comparison. To think that these manifestations through a cycle of twenty-four thousand years are cumulative, and that each teacher involves his predecessors, while the last, mentally involving all the rest, imparts wisdom concerning the universe, is so grand, so wonderful, that no man would relinquish it, once vitally inspired. It becomes part of a man's nature. It becomes as it were inbred, infolded in every cell and fibre of his brain. To go back to the confusion of tongues symbolized by the multiplicity of sects, each striving for the mastery, after grasping the purity, beauty, and unity of such a system, would be like putting on the swaddling bands of infancy after one is full grown.
The vastness, the grandeur, the awe inspiring qualities that belong to Deity as he is proclaimed in the Copernican system, with its suns and earths circling in infinite space, is the favorite theme of latter day savants. Who has pricked their bubble? The modern David, with the simple postulate which upsets the infinite universe: "Everything which has form must have limitation;" or the simple question, "How can there be a center without a circumference?"
The Copernican hypothetists maintain their theory of a great system of suns and earths revolving about a fixed point in an infinite (unlimited) universe, which means one without bounds. Is this logic? Is this reason? Does it appeal to the ratiocinative faculty of any man, or of any college, or of any university? "Beware," says Emerson, "when the great God lets loose a thinker!"
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The source scans remain the record. This page preserves the periodical's argument and reported observations without presenting its conclusions as independently established results. The claims remain attributed to The Flaming Sword.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 24, No. 6 · Jun 1910 · PDF p. 18