The Mormon Doctrine of Deity: The Roberts-Van Der Donckt Discussion. B. H. Roberts

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СКАЧАТЬ ("Self Culture" for March, 1899.)]

      Growth, enlargement, expansion for his whole nature, as he recognizes that nature in its intellectual, moral, spiritual and social demands, are what his soul calls for; and the systems of theology that rise not to the level of these hopes are unworthy man's attention.

      Keep these thoughts in mind for a moment, I pray you. That is, remember the powers in man, what he has attained to in this life, and what it is conceivable for him to attain unto after the resurrection of the dead, when death shall have been removed from his pathway. Keep this in mind, while I bring to bear on the theme under consideration another line of facts.

      Let us consider, just for a moment, and in a very simple manner, the universe in which man lives. And let us start with what we know, and keep well within those lines. First of all, then, as to the earth itself: Thanks to the knowledge man now has respecting the earth it is no longer regarded as the center of the universe, around which revolve sun and moon and stars, that in the ages of darkness were thought to have been created for the sole purpose of giving light by day and by night to the earth. No; man has learned the true relation of the earth to these other objects in the universe. He knows that the earth is but one of a number of planets—one of a group of eight major planets, and a larger number of minor ones, that revolve regularly around the sun—and one of the smallest of the group of major planets at that. Outside of this group of planets, with whose motions and laws man has become familiar, is a vast host of what are called "fixed stars;" that is, stars that apparently have no motion, but which really do move, only their orbits are so immense that man with the unaided eye can not discern their movements—hence we call them "fixed stars."^[A] Our astronomers have learned that these "fixed stars" are not like the planets which move in their orbits about our sun, but, on the contrary, are like the sun itself, self-luminous bodies, and doubtless like the sun the center of opaque planetary groups; or at least we may say that reasoning from analogy, that is regarded as a very probable fact.

      [Footnote A: "To the unassisted eye, the stars seem to preserve the same relative positions in the celestial sphere generation after generation. If Job, Hipparchus, or Ptolemy should again look upon the heavens, he would, to all appearance see Aldebaran, Orion, and the Pleiades exactly as he saw them thousands of years ago, without a single star being moved from its place. But the refined methods of modern astronomy, in which the telescope is brought in to measure spaces absolutely invisible to the eye, have shown that this seeming unchangeability is not real, but that the stars are actually in motion, only the rate of change is so slow that the eye would not, in most cases, notice it for thousands of years. In ten thousand years, quite a number of stars, especially the brighter ones, would be seen to have moved, while it would take a hundred thousand years to introduce a very noticeable change in the aspect of the constellations." (Newcomb's Astronomy, pp. 464-5.)]

      Sir Robert Ball in speaking of these worlds and the probability of their being inhabited says:

      We know of the existence of thirty millions of stars or suns, many of them much more magnificent than the one which gives light to our system. The majority of them are not visible to the eye, or even recognizable by the telescope, but sensitized photographic plates—which are for this purpose eyes that can stare unwinking for hours at a time—have revealed their existence beyond all doubt or question, though most of them are almost inconceivably distant, thousands or tens of thousands of times as far off as our sun. A telegraphic message, for example, which would reach the sun in eight minutes, would not reach some of these stars in eighteen hundred years. The human mind, of course, does not really conceive such distances, though they can be expressed in formula which the human mind has devised, and the bewildering statement is from one point of view singularly depressing. It reduces so greatly the probable importance of man in the universe. It is most improbable, almost impossible, that these great centers of light should have been created to light up nothing, and as they are far too distant to be of use to us, we may fairly accept the hypothesis that each one has a system of planets around it like our own. Taking an average of only ten planets to to each sun, that hypothesis indicates the existence, within the narrow range to which human observation is still confined, of at least three hundred millions of separate worlds, many of them doubtless of gigantic size, and it is nearly inconceivable that those worlds can be wholly devoid of living and sentient beings upon them. Granting the to us impossible hypothesis that the final cause of the universe is accident, a fortuitous concourse of self-existent atoms, still the accident which produced thinking beings upon this little and inferior world must have frequently repeated itself: while if, as we hold, there is a sentient Creator, it is difficult to believe, without a revelation to that effect, that he has wasted such glorious creative power upon mere masses of insensible matter. God cannot love gases. The high probability, at least, is that there are millions of worlds—for, after all, what the sensitized paper sees must be but an infinitesimal fraction of the whole—occupied by sentient beings.^[A]

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