Twilight And Dawn by Caroline Pridham

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"When first the Saviour wakened me,
And showed me why He died,
He pointed o'er life's narrow sea,
And said, 'To yonder side.'

"'I am the ark where Noah dwelt,
And heard the deluge roar--
No soul can perish that has left
My res--To yonder shore.'

"Peaceful and calm the tide of life
When first I sailed with Thee;
My sins forgiven, no inward strife,
My breast a glassy sea.

"But soon the storm of passion raves;
My soul is tempest tossed;
Corruptions rise, like angry waves--
'Help, Master, I am lost!'

"'Peace, peace, be still, thou raging breast:
My fulness is for thee'--
The Saviour speaks, and all is rest,
Like the waves of Galilee.

"And now I feel His holy eye
Upbraids my heart of pride--
'Why raise this unbelieving cry?
I said, To yonder side.'"

McCHEYNE.

THE THIRD DAY.

THE EARTH BENEATH.

"_He hangeth the earth upon nothing._"--JOB xxvi. 7.

"_The pillars of the earth are the Lord's, and he hath set the world upon
them._"--1 SAM. ii. 8.

"_As for the earth, out of it cometh bread: and under it is turned up as it
were fire. The stones of it are the place of sapphires; and it hath dust of
gold._"--JOB xxviii. 5, 6.

Have you ever noticed that some words have two meanings, both their own,
but giving us very different thoughts about the things of which they speak,
according to the way in which we use them?

It is so with our earth. We may speak of it as the firm ground upon which
we stand, and may think of the wonderful time of which we are going to read
in our chapter in Genesis, when God caused it to bring forth and bud, and
clothed all its waste places, so that it has been ever since the green
earth which is so fair to look upon. This is the way in which we generally
speak of the earth, is it not?--but we may also think of it, not as it
appears to us, but as a great globe hung up in the heavens by the mighty
hand of God, who "hangeth the earth upon nothing"; for "the pillars of the
earth are the Lord's, and He hath set the world upon them."

If you could look at a star through a telescope, I think the first thing
that would strike you is that there is nothing by which it is upheld and
kept in its place. You might say, as you saw it, as it were, hanging in the
depths of the sky, "Why, it is hung upon _nothing_!"

It is just so with our earth: there is nothing that we can see by which it
is supported, no "pillars" for it to rest upon--but yet it is kept in its
place. God set it there, and God keeps it there.

The Hindu has tried to account for this in his own way: he says the earth
does rest upon something; it is supported upon the backs of four great
elephants and when he is asked, "Where do they stand?" he replies, "Upon
the back of a huge tortoise." This shows the folly of men who have tried
to explain what filled the patriarch Job with awe and wonder, even before
God had asked him those questions which He alone could answer. "Where
wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hast
understanding. Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who
hath stretched the line upon it? Whereupon are the foundations thereof
fastened? or who hath laid the corner stone thereof, when the morning stars
sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

Once in a time of great danger and trouble, Luther wrote thus to a friend:
"I recently saw two miracles; you listen to hear of something startling:
some great light burning in the heavens, some angelic visitation--some
unusual occurrence; but you hear only this. As I was at my window, I saw
the stars, the sky, and that vast and glorious firmament in which the Lord
has placed them. I could nowhere discover the columns on which the Master
has supported this immense vault, and yet the heavens did not fall! And
here was the other miracle: I beheld clouds hanging above me like a vast
sea--I could neither perceive ground on which they reposed, nor cords by
which they were suspended, and yet they did not fall upon me."

We find it difficult to think of our own globe as a star; but so it is, and
when you go out at night and look up at the sky, all covered with little
points of light, you may remember that our great earth, with its mountains
and forests, seas and plains, and all its cities and towns alive with busy
men and women, is but a tiny speck in God's universe; many of those stars
which seem so small, as their "twinkle, twinkle" comes from so far away,
are themselves suns, larger than that mighty sun of ours which it takes the
earth a whole year of days to travel round; and all these wonderful worlds
belong to Him "for whose pleasure they are and were created."

Looked at in this way, our earth is but one of a group of eight stars,
which have been called planets, or wanderers, because, while other worlds,
which are called fixed stars, keep constantly in the same position with
regard to each other, these planets are always moving. They have two
movements; I think you know that our earth turns round upon itself, as your
top does when it spins, and that in this way the changes of day and night
come to us; the other movement is that by which it, along with the other
planets, travels round the sun.

This yearly journey round the sun which the earth takes is a long one, but
so swiftly does it move that it may be said rather to fly than to wander.
Shut your eyes and count "One," "two," "three," "four," "five"; in this
little moment of time the earth will have got over a hundred miles of its
journey. You see it flies along faster than any bird; and what a noiseless
flight it is! How is it that we do not feel it moving? Ah, you must
remember that the earth carries _you_ along with it; you know nothing about
the rapid journey, and yet you are a traveller in spite of yourself--a
traveller round the sun.

All the planets, like our earth, move round the sun, and are kept in their
places by means of a wonderful power which we cannot see, but which is one
of those "laws of nature," as the rules which God has made for His great
universe are sometimes called, about which I told you that they never
alter. It is a law, or rule, that, in the world around us, "the same causes
always produce the same effects." If you think a little about this, it will
become plain to you that it is so, and if you observe carefully you will
see that this rule is the same in connection with the smallest as well as
the greatest things; if it ever seems that it is not so, be sure that this
is only because you do not yet know all about what you have been observing.
And now learn a little about the beautiful rule by which the planets are
kept in their places.

Two hundred years ago, Sir Isaac Newton discovered that everything in the
universe attracts or draws every other thing to itself, and this power or
attraction he called "the force of gravitation." I cannot do much more than
tell you the name of this "law," but you will learn more about it one day I
hope, and see how simple and yet how wonderful it is. An astronomer of our
own day says, in his _Story of the Heavens_, that there are "grounds for
believing that the law of gravitation is obeyed throughout the length, the
breadth, the depth, and the height of the entire universe," and a little
observation and thought will enable you to see something of its working in
the world around us.

Do you remember my telling you how fond I was of swimming boats long ago?
When my brother and I used to launch our paper boats--not on the river,
but in that big tub in the yard--our great difficulty was to keep them
from running each other down, and becoming dismal wrecks before they had
completed their first voyage. We did not know why, but it seemed as if the
vessels of our tiny fleet _would_ drift towards each other, in spite of all
our efforts to keep them apart. Have you not found it so with your boats?
It certainly was with ours, but we should have been surprised if anyone
had told us that as they ran against each other, our paper boats were but
obeying the "law of gravitation," each little vessel drawing the other to
itself by a power which it had of attracting it. Knowing this rule makes
many things plain. If you throw your ball high into the air, it is sure
to come down again. Why? Because the earth, which is a much larger ball,
attracts it to itself by the law of gravitation; by the same law, the drops
of rain in a shower fall to the ground; by the same law, we and all the
people upon the globe are able to stand firm on it; by the same law, the
great earth itself, the moon, and all the planets are kept in their places.
But what is the mighty magnet which has power to draw the earth to itself?
It is that wonderful globe the sun, which is more than a million times
as large as the earth; and though it is so far, far away--at a distance
greater than we can have any idea of--yet by its mighty power of drawing
them to itself, makes our earth, as well as the other planets, move round
it in the most beautiful order, and keeps them all in their places.

Although Newton felt sure that this unseen but resistless power, of which
he afterwards spoke reverently as "the finger of God," kept the moon going
round the earth and the earth round the sun, yet he was at first silent
about his great discovery; he worked and waited for long years, until he
had proved that it was not merely a happy guess, but that he had really
discovered the rule which governs the motion of sun, moon and stars. Then
he explained the reason why the moon is always moving _round_ the earth,
and the earth and other planets _round_ the sun, instead of all moving on
in a straight line; it is because everyone of the heavenly bodies attracts
all the rest, and thus the smaller move round the larger, all in perfect
order and harmony.

[Illustration: SAILING THE BOAT]

You must not think that this force set them all moving; it only governs
their movements, the earth pulling the moon to itself, and the sun in
like manner pulling all the planets with gentle but resistless power, and
keeping them all moving round himself--their glorious centre.

You will learn by-and-by what has been found out about the other planets.
All I shall tell you of them now is, that they are, like the earth, quite
dark in themselves. The light they give is reflected light from the sun;
just like the light which comes to us from another planet, which belongs,
not to the sun, but to our earth, and indeed is so near home that I am sure
you can find out its name for yourself. Of the seven other planets which
belong to the sun, the nearest in size to our earth is one which shines
with a lovely soft light, and is sometimes the evening, sometimes the
morning star. Ask someone to show you Venus; and I think you will soon
learn to look for her in the evening, and to love her pure, calm radiance.
This star is peculiarly beautiful in the early morning, when she seems to
shine alone in the sky, and reminds us how, in the last book of the Bible,
the Lord Jesus speaks of Himself, and says, "I am the ... Bright and
Morning Star." What a beautiful name for us to know the Lord Jesus by!
There are some children who know Him by that name, and they are watching
for that bright star to appear.

I will tell you of one. Her name is Sharley; but she is not May's sister
Sharley, and I do not think she is quite so old. This little girl had been
obliged to go away from her home, to stay for some time in the Children's
Hospital. This is a bright, pretty place, with pictures and flowers and
toys. But it was not at all like home to poor little Sharley; and as she
thought of her mother and her sisters she sobbed and cried in her little
bed, and buried her head under the pink quilt, and refused to be comforted.
A lady came to see her, and brought her a picture-book; but still she hid
her face, and cried, "Oh, do let me go home!" The lady tried to please
her by showing her a stuffed squirrel, and telling stories about how she
had seen the merry little creatures, with their bright eyes and red bushy
tails, running about in the beech-woods, eating nuts. But no, nothing that
she could do or say would win a smile or a bright look. At last she noticed
a little Testament lying upon the tray across her bed, beside the toys
which had been given her to play with, and she said, "Is that your own
Testament, Sharley? Will you find the place and read me your favourite
verse?"

In a moment the little girl stopped crying, and turned over the leaves of
her Testament till she came to the very end; and she put her finger on the
verse, "Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus." As she
pointed to the words the lady read them, and then asked, "Do you want Him
to come?"

Sharley did not speak, but nodded her head.

"Why do you want to see Him? What has He done for you?"

"He died for me," said the little girl. And then she asked just one
question, "If the Lord Jesus hasn't come before Monday, do you think mother
will come and take me home?"

I am glad to tell you that little Sharley had not long to stay in the
hospital; she soon got well enough, to be allowed to go home. But I
tell you about her that yon may see that she was not too young to know
what the Lord Jesus had done for her, and to be looking out for Him to
come--watching for the "Bright and Morning Star."

And now I want you to find one more verse about the earth as it hangs in
the sky, a very beautiful verse in the fortieth chapter of Isaiah. "It is
He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof
are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and
spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." What is meant by the "circle of
the earth"? You have learnt that the earth is round, like the sun and moon;
for you see how round the globe in the schoolroom is, and you know that it
is meant to be as like the earth in shape as it can be made. Besides, you
have read of sailors who have made voyages round the world, and brought
their ships back again to the very place from whence they set sail. It
seems quite plain to you, now that you have been taught so much about the
form of the earth, that it must be round. But I wonder whether you have
ever thought that, long before a geography-book was written or a globe was
made--at a time when no one had ever sailed round the world, but all the
wise men thought the earth was flat (except where the mountains and hills
were), and that if they could only travel far enough, they would in time
get to the world's end--God had spoken of it as round. He had spoken of
Himself as the One who "sitteth upon the circle" (or "arch") "of the
earth"; and of the inhabitants thereof--all the people who have lived and
died upon it--as "grasshoppers"; creatures of a day.

When we learn something about other worlds, and find out that this world,
so large in our eyes that we cannot think of anything to compare with it
for greatness, is yet so small that it is like a grain of sand in the vast
universe which God created at the beginning, we may well ask

"Why did the Son of God come down
From the bright realms of heavenly bliss,
And lay aside His kingly crown,
To visit such a world as this?

"Why in a manger was He born,
Who was the Lord of earth and sky?"

The answer to this question is to be found in the verse which you know so
well, where the Lord Jesus Christ Himself tells us that "God so loved the
world"--this place which is "a little city" indeed compared with other
worlds; and the "few men within it"--all sinful people who had gone away as
far as they could from Him--God so loved this lost world, "that He gave His
only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but
have everlasting life." The Son of God gave up "all that He had" to buy
back this lost world, for the sake of the treasure which was hidden there.
Do you know what that treasure is?

And now we will look again at a verse in the Book of Job, which tells us
something very wonderful about the inside of this great globe of ours, upon
the fair outside of which we live and move. You would never have thought
it possible that such a great ball could be weighed. But by weighing and
measuring--not with scales and weights, you may be sure, but by clever ways
which are known to learned philosophers--it has been found out that our
earth is very, very heavy. The philosophers thought it could not be so
heavy if it were made of earth and rocks all through, and they wondered
what could be far down beneath the deepest mines, in those secret places
which they could not reach. But long before these wise men had begun to
weigh and measure, and to guess and wonder, God had said, "As for the
earth, out of it cometh bread"--you know that in many places the surface of
the earth is rich with waving corn--"and under it is turned up as it were
fire."

I remember well when I first heard about this fire always burning at the
heart of the earth. I had been told that the world was round like a ball,
and yet that people lived upon every part of it. And when I turned the
globe in the schoolroom round until I had found New Zealand--that land
which is just opposite our own country, as you can see for yourself if you
look--I used to think how wonderful it was that the New Zealanders should
be there "walking about under my feet," as I had been told they were; and a
great desire came into my mind to make a way right through to them, and see
what they were like. I believe I thought they were men who walked on their
heads, for in those days I much preferred guessing at things I did not
understand, to asking someone who knew how to explain them to me. So you
see I understood so very little, that I actually thought that by getting up
early and working hard it would be quite easy for me, with my little spade,
to dig right down to the other side of this mighty globe!

However, one day, before I had made more than an opening to my tunnel, I
listened to a conversation about digging deep wells and mines. I could not
understand most of what was said, nor did I know the meaning of any of the
long words which I then heard for the first time; but there was one thing
which I did understand, and this made me stop short in my work, afraid to
dig another spadeful of earth. I had thought it would be so delightful to
walk through my tunnel, and come out at the other side where the strange
New Zealand people lived; but now my great dread was lest I should get to
the inside of the earth before I was aware of it, when I had dug perhaps
only a little hole; for those who were speaking about it, said how
impossible it was to get very far below the surface,--or, as they called
it, very deep into the "crust" of the earth--because of the great heat,
which makes the men who work in deep mines glad to throw off their clothes.
"The deeper the bore, the greater the heat," they said; and then went on to
speak of this crust as if it covered the earth as the shell covers an egg,
so that I thought it might perhaps be broken just as easily. "And how
dreadful it would be," I said to myself, "if I could get to the inside of
the earth and find it all on fire!"

It was a pity that I did not ask a little about what surprised and
frightened me so much, and especially that I did not get someone to explain
to me the meaning of this new word, the "crust" of the earth. I know now
that it is the name that has been given to that part of the earth which is
known to be firm and solid--the bed of the ocean as well as the dry land.
Beneath this crust lies the inner part or kernel of the earth, and no one
knows of what it consists; all that can be done is to examine the rocks
which rest upon it, and whether the lowest of these layers of rock has
yet been reached, we do not know. If you have ever been to a quarry where
the rocks have been blasted and cut away, you have seen a little way down
into this earth-crust. I remember once, when I was living in a country
warmer than England, seeing a beautiful sight. It was a great quarry in a
hillside. In part of it men were busy, cutting out the stone and carrying
it away; but all over one side, which was no longer worked, a beautiful
vine had woven its lovely green leaves and purple clusters of grapes.

You would have thought, perhaps, that the side where the rough, hard rock
was hidden by the fruitful vine, was the only part of the quarry worth
looking at; but the other side, where the quarrymen were at work, was very
interesting to anyone who would take the trouble to notice how the rocks
lay, piled one upon another, and especially to one who had learnt a little
about the different kinds of rock of which the earth-crust has been made.
Even if you have never learnt much of what is called geology, by keeping
your eyes open and your mind awake you may see a great deal in the stones
which have perhaps seemed to you most uninteresting. A block of granite
from one of the Dartmoor hills, and a piece of slate from a Welsh
quarry--how different these two kinds of stone are! We see this at once;
but they become much more interesting when we know that each has its own
history. The granite is one of the fire-made rocks, so called because there
are marks upon it, like letters written long ago, quite plain to those who
have the skill to read them; which show that though it is now so hard, it
was once soft, as soft as iron becomes when melted by very great heat.
The mountains of Devon and Cornwall, the Grampians of Scotland, even Mont
Blanc, the "Monarch of Mountains," are made of the grey or red granite
which takes such a beautiful polish when cut that it is much prized for
buildings.

The piece of slate has quite a different history. It is one of the
water-made rocks, in which so many fossils have been found; while in
the fire-rocks there are no remains of anything which ever lived. The
water-rocks are so called because water has had so much to do with the
making of them; for they have been very slowly formed by the gravel and
grains of sand which have been washed down by streams and torrents, and
left behind in their course. In these slate and sandstone rocks the
wonderful fossil animals, which are to be seen in the Museum, have been
found. A fossil means what has been dug out of the earth; and numbers
of animals are to be found buried deep in the rocks along the coast of
Yorkshire--huge creatures which lived on the earth long, long ago, of which
the hard parts, such as bones and teeth, have gradually been turned into
stone.

All this is very wonderful to think of, and I am sure the poet, who spoke
of finding "sermons in stones," was wiser than he knew; but what will you
say when I tell you that one kind of rock--the chalk with which you are so
fond of drawing upon the black-board--is made of shells, most of them very
tiny ones, which can be seen only by a microscope? What myriads of living
things once made their homes in those little shells, and what sort of
life they lived, we cannot tell; but there the shells remain in the white
chalk, and the microscope will show them to you, as it shows so many hidden
wonders in this wonderful world, where the very great and the very small
meet on every hand.

Only the other day, May brought me a lovely branch of white coral. "Look,"
she said, "when baby was out for a walk, a lady gave her this." She thought
it very pretty, but she was surprised when I showed it to her through a
magnifying-glass, and told her that it had been made by a very tiny kind
of jelly-fish; a plant-animal some people call it, of the same kind as the
sea-anemone; and she wondered still more when we found in a book a picture
of a coral island, and I told her that such little creatures have been busy
ever since the world began, constantly building up the coral-rocks. These
rocks, which are strong enough to resist the force of the waves, rise out
of the sea naked and bare, but are soon covered with green, and become the
resting-place of the sea-birds, until at last they are like that lovely
island, fringed with tall cocoa-palms, which we saw in the picture. If it
were not for the myriads of tiny jelly-fishes, who work on and on, each
forming its own little bones from the lime it gets from the sea-water,
dying, and leaving its skeleton behind for others to build upon, there
would be none of these beautiful green isles of the sea of which sailors
love to tell us.

We were speaking of contrasts some time ago; now for a contrast. Beside the
coral, with its lovely branching sprays, we will put a piece of coal. You
think the coal very black and ugly, not fit to be put alongside the white
coral; but let me tell you that there is that in the coal which was once
far more beautiful than the coral--which is only a bare skeleton after
all--could ever be; for, though coal and coral are alike dead now, both
were once full of life.

But the coal, which is certainly more useful than beautiful at present, has
had a wonderful past. Besides the fossil-animals which are dug out of the
earth's crust, there are also fossil-trees and ferns, and it is of them
that coal, which seems only like a black stone, is made. I have read that
in a part of England where there are now great coal mines, for a long time
no one knew the worth of coal except some old women, who said they could
make their fires burn beautifully by putting those black bits of stone upon
them. How strange this seems; and what should we do now if we had not these
black stones to burn? Coal is generally called a mineral, as all things
which are dug from mines are called; but it is really a vegetable. You may
perhaps pick up in some swampy place, a piece of wood, very black, which
breaks as you handle it. Look at it well, for this wood is being turned
into coal; but for what was once a forest to become a coal-mine takes a
very long time indeed, with a strange history of change and decay; yet it
is true that the coal dug out of mines is nothing else than trees and ferns
and mosses, long ago buried by mud and sand, and so crushed together that
they have become like a piece of black stone.

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