Atlanta Georgian. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1912-1939, 1914-02-22

name was-Or anything about his past.
That man was not different from any
of us-except in degree. He knew all
about his life and personality, dating
from his arrival at the hospital.
Each of us knows about himself
dating from the hour of his arrival on
this planet. But that is only moment
ago.
What we really are, where we came
from, when we landed here on earth,
whittier we are to go when we leave
here-nOt one of us knows. We are
little human insects standing on the
bottom step of vast, terrible staircase
of time. The steps are the billions of
centuries-and they stretch away from
US and above us, far beyond the reach
of our feeble sight and imagination.
We shrink from thinking of the two
great, dreadful realities
TIME, without beginning or end, and
ENDLESS SPACE, also without begin
ming or end, without ANY limit.
But those two terrible realities are the
only absolute REALITIES within our
mental vision. All else passes and is
real, only as we ephemeral creatures are
real.
You remember as a child how the
words World without end, Amen" used
to brighten you.
Yet man is not thinking being, I'M
less he faces and, according to his
mental power, strives to deal with the
great realities of Time and Space. With
those realities, philosophy and think
ers have dealt since the beginning of
human life.
The simple mind puts these simple,
childish questions:
How BIG is this universe, in which
our earth is as grain of sand?
How wide and high, and long and
deep is it? !.
And how long has this dreadful In
conceivable universe existed? When
did it begin? When will it end?
Through how many endless billions of
centuries does time stretch back of us.
and through what fearful length does
time stretch before us?"
e
The fact is that the intelligence within,
telling us that one thing is true, tells us
also that the SAME thing must be false.
WE are creatures that have had a
beginning and will have an end. And all
OF those things with which we deal have
length, breadth and thickness, and are
of certain size.
Our minds cannot grasp or express
In words what we think we mean by
endless time" and "space without be-
ginning or end"
We know that time surely never began
how could it? Put the beginning
where you please, and there was TIME
before that. And we know that time
cannot ever end. Let everything else
end, and TIME must go on.
Philosophers tell us that there is no.
such thing as time, that what we call an
hour is the journey of hand on the face
of clock, or part of the earth's turning
on its axis. And what we call year is
the spiral journey of the earth around
the sun.
But we KNOW that time exists and that
there is such thing as a reality of time. And
while one half of our brain says that tIme
could never begin and reverend, the other half.
weary of contemplating eternity, says that nme
MUST end.
We feel toward times reality as Johnson felt
about the ancient discussion Of free Will and
predestination. Sir" said he to Boswell. we
KNOW our will is free and there's an end on
Our intelligence says to us, j know that nme
is real"
Yet that same intelligence abhors and invol-
unfairly rejects the thought of time with limit.