It is, indeed, "a thing of shreds and patches." But we are caught in
the web of material existence from which there can be no lawful escape,
save by unpremeditated physical death. We are thrust into the seething
cauldron of formative life. The entire race of man, forced forward by
the resistless power of the law of progress, is on the everlasting
journey to the heights of perfected being. To us, enmeshed in the ties
of interest and affection, the various heredities and the worldly
Karmas which hold us fast, the slow, unnumbered processes of evolution
on this, our home world, as recorded in history seem unendurably long.
But time is naught--eternity is unending--and "ten thousand years are
but as a day with God," the great Maker and Moulder of our immortal
souls.




THE WORK OF NATURE.

The planet itself is stirred to its very centre. On one side, the
earth opens its horrible maw and swallows up uncounted numbers of her
children, or spews out her molten interior in vast lava tides,
overwhelming and destroying all within their reach. At the opposite
side, great floods of gas and rock oil, set free by the operation of
the drill, shoot up in the air and fall back upon the soil in a
luminous spray, as like to liquid gold as aught not filled with the
beloved auriferous metal could be. The waters loosed from their
fastnesses over-reach their accustomed bounds, and great tidal waves
are encountered in unexpected latitudes. Nature is rounding up her
great circle, and making conditions for a new era.