The Conservative Reformation and Its Theology - Saint Mary ...

substance which we call ice: it is visible, tangible, hard, and very cold. If it
is struck, it returns a sound. It will not take fire, and puts out fire, and
occupies in space a few inches. It melts and flows, and becomes warm; it
occupies less space; it still will not take fire, but puts out fire--still visible,
still tangible, still audible on a stroke, and can be tasted. I increase its
temperature to a certain point, and it becomes invisible, intangible,
intensely hot, inaudible; its volume has increased to between sixteen
hundred and seventeen hundred cubic inches for every cubic inch as water.
From its passivity it has become a force of the most tremendous potency,
rivalling in its awful energy the lightning and the earthquake. The
developed qualities of the substance which we first saw as ice, bear
thousands swiftly over land and water, or, bursting their barriers, carry
death and destruction with them. But science takes this substance and
divides it into its elements. One of these is hydrogen. The heavy mass of
ice has yielded tile lightest of all known bodies; the extinguisher of
combustion has given a substance of high inflammability; the hard has
yielded one of the few gases which have never been liquefied. The other
element, oxygen, is also one of the gases which have never been liquefied.
The liquid of the world is produced by the union of two substances which
cannot themselves be liquefied. The ice has no magnetic power, the
oxygen has. Take the oxygen of our original lump of ice, and introduce the
hydrogen of the same lump into it in a stream, and the two elements that
quenched flame sustain it; or bring them together in a mass, and apply fire
to them, and the union is one in which a terrific explosion is followed by
the reproduction of the water which, under the necessary conditions, may
become ice again. The circle has been run. Now if, under the changed
conditions of nature, such marvellous phenomenal changes may take place
in connection with the elements, with no change in their substance, who
can say how far other changed conditions of nature may carry other
substances in the sphere of nature? Yet more, who can say what the
changed conditions in the supremest sphere of omnipotence may effect
phenomenally in the sphere even of the natural, and, a fortiori, in the
sphere of the