Are the Planets Inhabited? Part 7

"Oh, life as futile then as frail.

What hope of answer or redress?

Behind the veil, behind the veil."

It is to this veil that we are now brought. It seems impossible to believe that Life, so rare a fruit of the universe, intelligent Life, conscious Life, to which the long course of evolution has been so manifestly leading up all through the long ages, should have no better destiny than a final and hopeless extinction; that this Earth and all the efforts and aspirations of the long generations of men should have no worthier end than to swing, throughout the eternal ages, an empty, frozen heap of dust, circling round the extinct cinder that was once its Sun. If we look backward, we seem to discern clear signs of progress; if we look forward, we discern nothing but the veil. Science is but organized experience, and experience of the future we have none.

There was a time when on this world there was no life; a time when life began. How did it begin? Under what conditions?

Of that great change--when non-living matter first became endowed with life, became so endowed not by the action and intervention of other living matter, but without it--we have no knowledge, no experience. And so long as this continues to be the case, that change, the greatest physical change that has yet taken place in the history of the universe, the first change of the non-living into the living, is outside the reach of science; it lies beyond its border. We may guess and speculate about it, but speculation is not science; we may spin words about it with the utmost skill of the dialectician, but metaphysics is not science; it can never come within the scope of science until it has first come within the scope of experience.

There is, therefore, a veil behind us as well as the one that encloses us in front; and as. .h.i.therto Science has failed to pierce the veil of the past, it is even less able to pierce the veil of the future; for of the future we have no experience.

Here, then, our enquiry must end, for it is an enquiry of physical science; the search for living material organisms endowed with intelligence. How life first came upon this Earth, or when, or where, is beyond the power of science to determine. Yet it did come. There was a time when there was no life here; none, not even the humblest form of it; nor was there any hint or foreshadowing of it, still less of all its infinities of form, and possibilities of development.

Once Life was not, yet Life came, and now, life is abundant, but abundant only in worlds quite exceptional in their conditions, and therefore few in number; it is even conceivable that this Earth of ours may be unique. But life as we know it, protoplasmic life, life dependent upon water, the life of intelligence united to the material organism, is under sentence of death. Has it any future beyond that veil? Is there any kind of life not subject to these narrow limitations; not under the inexorable decree?

To questions such as these Science has no reply to give; it is even more helpless to answer them than to determine how life first came; its experience does not reach so far. Science can examine the present conditions of physical life, but whether or no that life can undergo a change greater than that which pa.s.sed upon the old inorganic world, it cannot determine. It has no experience.

But if Science is dumb, if the utmost exertion of human energy and power of research can throw no light on a future of which we have no experience, we are not left without an answer. A voice has been heard, the voice of the Son of G.o.d Himself:

"I am the Resurrection and the Life. He that believeth on Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

And accepting His word, the Church in all ages, and among all nations, peoples, and tongues, has made reply:

"I LOOK FOR THE RESURRECTION OF THE DEAD AND THE LIFE OF THE WORLD TO COME."