The Evening statesman. [volume] (Walla Walla, Wash.) 1903-1910, 1909-05-16
THE LESSON OF THE STARS.

There is more to the big beautiful
dream of talking with Mars than
merely material for few merry jests
! from the light-hearted jokesmiths,
though there is ample excuse for at
least a smile in the very conception
of a human being setting up device
big enough to attract the attention of
away. Mars is to the people on the
earth only red pin point in the i'm
measurable spaces of the upper ether
The red planet is, it is true, only one
seventh as large as the pompous
spheroid called the earth, yet the lat
ter can hardly hope to be more than
tiny flicker of light in the vast
sidereal void. But the smile that be-
gins at the thought of the portentious
figure the earth beings imagine they
are cutting with relation to the other
planets of the known universe dies
beings should conceive such a mighty
concept as to bodily challenge the
mysteries of the illimitable voids.
Some thing that must forever sepa-
rate man from the other animals of
creation turns his face upward to the
heavens and makes MIN claim fellow
ship with the stars. His voice has
gone out across the mighty battle
ments and over the depthless chasms
Of the stupendous hiddle of the count
less millions of orbs that sprinkle
the midnight fields of the great blue
canopy. With an audacity that is
sublime he weighs the spheres in the
balances of mis- science, and, I'M
daunted by the barriers of which the
rest of creation has never even
dreamed, he has wandered into the
unfathomed depths OF space on the
magnificent forays of his genius I'M
til he has charted the oceans of the
air and mapped the heavens with the
That is an achievement that ought
to compel the admiration of Divinity
itself
Man alone of all created things has
had his face set toward the stars, and
this latest effort to establish COM
munication is not the only one he has
ever made. For countless centuries
he has been talking with the stare
He has declared, with a splendid
logic that has taken no thought of his
own irsignificance, that it is no more
wonderful that Mars, for instance
should be inhabited and that other
planets should be the home of SEN
| tient beings bearing some analogy to
human creatures than that this little
| globe should be the only one of all
/ the millions fashioned by the same
| Almighty hand There is the hint
of a profound significance in the
fact that astrology was SO closely
linked with the first religions. Crude
and runic as it was, it was the tan
gible bond that held the finite fast TO
| the throne of the infinite Man was
never so puny that he did not in
| dulge in the splendid egotism that he
was a part of the universe, that he
was son of infinity who could not
be disinherited Even though his
| first conception was little higher than
that of the slave forces that had
to be propitiated by sacrifices and ap-
peased by Establishment, yet he
never conceived the thought that he
could by any possible means repu-
date the condition in which he found
himself He never wanted to.
! AS the centuries passed he did not
bow so low and gradually he come
into the full stature of sonship until
the doctrines of historical religions
were formulated, each arrogating
more and more of the prerogatives
of divine relations until they culmi-
mated in the conception of the father
mood of God and the brotherhood of
| Christ, which is only an apotheosis
of the utter oneness of all life with
the God nature in Nirvana
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