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The Yerkes telescope again causes God to retreat farther and farther within the depths of boundless space. It reveals innumerable bodies vastly larger than is our sun and millions of miles beyond; alas, it fails to reveal God. Where is “he?” Is he playing hide and seek with humanity? Why does “he” not emerge from ‘his” hiding place and demonstrate “his” existence to all the world and thus stop all cavil and unbelief?
Is God something or nothing? If something, this forty-inch lens, the grandest achievement of human genius, would now demonstrate and corroborate ‘his” existence. It fails to do so. “He” cannot be the invisible ether, nor abstract space. “He must be a tangible reality or a myth. The telescope says, ‘all search is in vain.” Shall we ignore the highest authority of a civilized race, or shall we prostrate our intellects and worship a myth ?—The Boston Investigator.
A SINGLE grain of musk shut up in a room for years, will fill it with matter thrown off from itself without any appreciable loss of bulk. No glass, however great its magnifying power, can make a particle of this material substance visible. The writer above quoted ought therefore to deny that it exists; but if he does, his own sense of smell, which he cannot doubt, will prove him a liar. A deer, or even a man with shoes on his feet, passes over the ground. Many hours subsequently, a hound is shown the track and follows it at a rapid speed. At every step, a material substance so refined and subtile that no instrument ever invented by man, or that can be invented, can reveal its presence, is left in the track, yet if a hound scents it he will follow the trail on the run. Obviously, then, taking the infidel materialist on his own ground of materialism, there is plenty of room for God to exist in the world without his blind eyes seeing Him, even though he were not a spiritual being, which he is, but a material being, which he is not. The infidel denies that spiritual substance, which is far more refined and delicate than any form of matter, exists solely because he can not, by any helps man has discovered, see it, when, to be consistent, he must deny that many forms of matter, and in its ultimate particles, all its forms, have any existence. Shallow indeed, must be the mind that can be satisfied with such fallacious reasoning.
“He must be a tangible reality or a myth.’ Tangible means touchable. Electricity is certainly a reality. It is tangible too, but a man must be careful how he touches it, or he will never touch anything again. Light is a reality, but does not respond to touch; it is not, therefore, a myth. Thought is something real, yet not tangible nor visible by Yerkes’ great telescope. The mightiest realities in nature are not only intangible, but escape our senses altogether. Life is certainly a reality, that by the means of moisture and various other material and spiritual substances brings into being incalculable amounts of various products every year, but it can hardly be said to be tangible. Yerkes’ telescope never enabled anybody to see it, nor is it appreciable by any of the senses. Idiocy can no more see God, than a blind man can distinguish colors. It is only the “pure in heart”? that have the promise of “seeing God,” and that will be when they “awake in his likeness.”
Editorial transcription checked against the cited scans; historical claims remain those of The Flaming Sword.
The Flaming Sword · Vol. 12, No. 16 · Mar 4, 1898 · PDF p. 8