The Worthington advance. [volume] (Worthington, Minn.) 1874-1908, 1897-02-25
HEAVEN NOT IN THE SKY.

HEAVEN NOT IN THE SKY. Il
Science Demonstrates That tho Belief OF
the Ancients II Wrong.
Every church spire pointing its slen-
der finger to the sky is a reminder Of
that idea concerning the location OF
Heaven which was universal in former
times and which is still more or less
clearly entertained by millions of men
and women at the present day. The up
ward glance of the eye and the aspiring
gesture which instinctively accompany
references to the Almighty and to
Heaven are additional indications show
ing how deep-rooted is the opinion that
the abode of the blessed and the throne
OF the Creator are situated not on the
earth, but above the earth. This idea
of the location of Heaven is not confined
to Christian people, but is common also
among savage tribes, who generally re-
gard the sky as the proper locality for
the homes of their gods and of the dis
emboweled spirits of men. It was in
the sky also that the ancient deities of
Greece and the orient were supposed
to dweQl-at least those who represent
ed the benign powers and the powers of
light.
Cicero, in one of his mostremarkab!e
and beautiful works, 1.-THE Dream of
Scipio," has finely expressed the pre-
vailing belief of his time and of the
preceding ages that Heaven lay above
our heads and among the stars.
Cicero represents the grandson Of
Scipio Africanus as visiting in dream
the spirit of his grandfather, the cone
queror of Hannibal. He finds his great
ancestor dwelling high among the
celestial orbs, and from the arch of the
Milky Way he looks down with wonder
upon the earth. There, too, he dis,
covers the spirit of his father and ex-
presses desire to remain in an abode
SO delightful.
Not yet" his father tells him; mot
until God, whose temple this is, shall
have delivered thee from the prison OF
the body canst thou have access to these
abodes. he has given to men soul,
ray from those eternal fires which you
call the celestial bodies and stars, and
you cannot, except at the command OF
Him who bestowed it, separate that
soul from its Aeshly prison house,"
The elder Scipio then goes on to ten
his son that everything below the
sphere of the moon is mortal end cor
ruptible except the immortal souls OF
men, while everything above the moons
sphere is eternal and incorruptible.
Cicero was pagan, and the ideas
which he thus expressed, and which
were generally entertained in his time,
were of pagan origin. Yet they ac-
corded in general way with the an.
Gent Hebrew idea of the location of
Heaven, and after the beginning of the
Christian era that idea remained sub
stantially unchanged. The doctrine of
the rotundity of the earth and of the
existence of people dwelling on the OPP
posite side of the globe from Europe
was resisted and condemned because it
was regarded as inconsistent with the
orthodox notion of the location of
Heaven overhead. HHeaven were over
head for Christian in Europe, where
was it when he visited China? Could
he put Heaven under his feet by simply
going to another part of the earth?
But science moved on remorselessly.
teaching THAT the stars were not ''eter-
nal fires,' having spiritual essence,
but simply other and more distant suns,
and that the planets, although they
differed from the earth in their precise
condition, yet closely resembled it in
makeup. Finally, in OUT own days,
have come the demonstrations of the
spectroscope, which give direct proof
that the sun is composed of precisely
such substances as exist on and in the
earth; that the atmosphere of the
planets consist of the same gaseous cle-
ments that we are familiar with here,
and that even the distant stars have
nothing mysterious in their compost
tion, but contain metals and chemical
elements Identical with those that form
the SUN, the moon and the earth.
Then, too, we know now that the
space separating the planets and the
stars is an airless region where de-
gree of cold prevails which terrestrial
thermometers would be utterly incapa-
bic of registering, and that these frigid
regions are traversed in various direc-
tons by wandering comets and meteors,
either in swarms Or widely scattered,
all of which consist of iron, carbon,
hydrogen and other elements that we
encounter continually on Garth. In
fact, these vagrant bodies frequently
fall upon the earth, and thus bring us
tangible proof that neither they nor
the regions of space from which they
come have anything supernatural about
them.
In short, from one end of the visible
universe to the oHher-while there is
infinite variety of combinations and
condHions-we can find no evidence
whatever that the essential nature of
things varies in any manner. The earth
is corruptible, and the home of mortal
things. The sun is no more immortal