THE HORROR OF ASTRONOMICAL CATASTROPHES.
THE Swiss Times alarmed half the world the other day by threatening us with that particular form of sensa- tional bogy which, because it has a quasi-scientific authority, inspires a great deal more alarm than any of the modern feats of prophecy,—namely, a Comet which was to come into collision with the Earth somewhere about the 12th of next August. The threat was not, as it happens, a very well- authenticated one, as it was attributed to a Genevan astronomer, Professor Plantamour, who does not profess comets,—and in these
days of the extreme division of labour, every astronomer has a special department of his own,—and no doubt falsely ascribed to him, as no new comet of any magnitude has been lately discovered at all, and if it had been, the elements of its orbit could not have yet been calculated so as to know the exact period of its crossing the ecliptic. Finally, the public ought to know by this time that a comet is composed of matter so rare that if it did cross our ter- restrial path,—as many a comet has done,—it would at most only make the difference which a whiff of steam makes to the course of a cannon-ball. But in spite of all this, the Swiss Times felt the utmost confidence that its somewhat imaginary news would be read with a certain gush of horror all over Europe, and so it was. Under the head of " A Pleasant Prospect," it was studied by thousands of newspaper readers with a romantic mix- ture of excitement and fear ; an excitement and fear which would not have been demonstrably groundless if, instead of being founded on a supposed collision between the earth and a comet, they had been aroused by speculations on the extremely disturbed and volcanic state of our own sun. A body that indulges in flaming hydrogen cyclones, some of which appear to mount almost as far from the surface of the sun as the moon is from the earth, must be subject to eruptive forces of fearful magnitude ; and these, for anything we know, might end in such a shattering to fragments of the stay and prop of our system as appears to have happened before now to other suns of probably not less importance and magnitude. A shock of that kind would certainly put an end to the history of man on this globe, while a chance encounter with cometary vapour would not be likely to hurt us at all ;. and accordingly the former is the most plausible of the various scientific forms of the cry of ' wolf ' by which we are liable to have our nerves tried in the present day. The order for winding up, if it does come from this side, is much more likely to be due to some unexpected violence of the sun's, than to any of those highly inconstant and mobile travellers of the celestial spaces which there is any chance of our encountering without previous preparation.
But what we want to analyze is the ground of the excessive horror which these suggested catastrophes inspire. We know that the aspersion thus thrown upon the stability of the present condition of things has sometimes quite haunted timid imaginations, which can't endure to think of flame-volcanoes as the centres of astronomical order any more than to realize that the earth is mined beneath our feet in a manner which might at any time result in earthquakes such as shook Lisbon to its fall. Now we quite understand the horror of the latter sort of catastrophe. If the earth and its inhabitants are to remain, but men are to have such powerful evidence of the instability of their tenure of life, that every now and then a capital is to be blotted from the face of the globe, and some of the links of historical civilization sundered with a shock, no doubt the tendency must be to paralyze more or less the energies of those who remain,—to make them feel that they are at the mercy of forces far more terrible than any it is possible for them to learn to wield, and so to sow that fatal sort of indifference which comes of comparative insecurity as certainly as prudence comes of comparative safety. Besides, where particular places vanish from the
earth, there must be a sudden sundering of the ties which bind those so fearfully destroyed to those who remain, and all catastrophes of this kind are legitimate subjects of fear. But none of these considerations appear to apply to catastrophes which, if they happen at all, would sweep away every race and family and individual now existing on the globe from its surface. We can have no experience of such a calamity till it happens, and therefore none of the horrors of that vast dread which springs from memory ; and again, whatever vague conception of its terrors we may attempt to form from a consideration of the possi- ble causes, must be at least modified by the consideration that there would be no horror of parting, no pain such as is caused by partial calamities, and in all probability, no time to experience even a nervous dread before all would be over. Any solar ex- plosion which suddenly released the earth from its present path, and sent it spinning on a totally new one, would, as far as any conception of it can be formed, cause so tremendous a shock that no human nervous system could survive it an instant. If the man who falls from a great height is said to be dead to all pain, abso- lutely unconscious, before he receives the blow which extinguishes life, it could hardly fail to happen that any great jar which sud- denly impressed upon the earth a totally new group of forces would shock us into silence and unconsciousness before we had time to reflect what had happened. And where is the special terror of such an expectation? Why, indeed, is it half so terrible as that tolerably well-grounded certainty of lonely death in which we habit- ually live? Pascal's je mourrai seal' has to our ears a far more awful sound than any threat of a sudden and universal sentence of death. Is it that there is a benevolent grief for posterity latent in the dread that our children and grandchildren, instead of living to inherit our houses and fields and gardens and wealth and titles and pleasures and thoughts and dreams, will be launched with us at once into the new life, without ever mastering com- pletely the conditions of the old ? Hardly that, because when an innocent child dies, the grief is always said, and no doubt honestly held, to be rather for those who are left behind than for it, and in this case there would be no grief of that kind. Besides, to those who believe in the Divine government of the universe, there is per- haps rather less difficulty in conceiving a divine purpose for a universal and abrupt emigration of " the dim common popula- tions " to other spheres and happier conditions of being, than in comprehending the purpose of a gradual drafting away of the suc- cessive generations of elders, and, as the necessary consequence, of that interruption for long periods of years of the most tender and sacred ties which is one of the perpetual mysteries of our present life. If " those whom the gods love die young," there can be no great difficulty in conceiving that some one generation of the young might be transported at one stroke with their elders into the higher life, not for its sins, but for the promise of its virtues. A death that in all probability would be absolutely simultaneous, instantaneous, and painless for all mankind, could hardly be any- thing but a very happy exchange for the death by which most of us will actually go, and for the separations which most of us again will certainly suffer before we go ; and for those of us who believe absolutely in immortality, it would hardly be possible to grieve over a somewhat shorter lease of the bodily life of this world, in consideration of the earlier enjoyment of the higher and wider sphere of being which is to come after.
But then it will be said that for any man in health to be sud- denly informed of the day on which he is to die must always be a shock, and that if this be so for one man, it must be so for millions of men ; that all our more definite notions of happiness and hope are of earthly mould, and that to take them suddenly away from all men without very clearly revealing what is to be substituted for them, must necessarily be a cause of universal terror. Well, but as a matter of fact, even criminals often bear sentence of death with wonder- ful calmness, though they probably tremble more than others at the judgment to come. What we want to get at is, why a sen- tence of death pronounced equally on all, and to be executed on the same day, should have so much more terror,—or indeed why it should not have much less,—than that same sentence pro- nounced on each separately would have for the individual so sen- tenced. Men and women go out to die with perfect composure who would apparently be horrified if they were sure that all mankind were to die with them at the same moment, and it is difficult to see why.
We suspect one great secret of the horror that any contem- plation of a planetary catastrophe arouses in us, is the sense of abrupt insignificance to which it reduces so much of our past lives. There have we been toiling to till and drain and
build and study and compile and analyze and calculate and invent and legislate and organize, and all we have done outwardly, it is suggested, may pass into a little vapour at a moment's notice. The mere sentence of individual mortality does not carry with it this feeling of insignifi- cance. The wealth and capital and knowledge and discovery and organization are expected to live after us, when we die decently in our beds. We go, but we leave behind us solid monuments of what we were. We leave wills and trusts, and books and memories to our children, the value of which we immensely exaggerate, but which nevertheless remain, as it were, to justify us for having lived at all. There is a certain horror attaching to the conception of the simultaneous evaporation, as it were, of all our work at the moment of our death, which inten- sifies greatly the sense of our nothingness, the feeling of the utter transience of our being. True, whatever we have done remains, so far as it has affected what we are ; but that is a comparatively transcendental view of the matter, hardly real enough to most minds to soothe the agitation of their -self-love at the thought of this sudden and complete obliteration of their doings from the physical record of events. And again, we suspect that most men look upon death with dread indeed, but with a certain sense of personal dignity, as one of the solemn acts of life which can only be gone through once, and which deserves a little attention and even respectful deference from those around,—attention and deference of which they would be defrauded if they were to share in a universal and momentary death. And the follow- ing consideration, again, constitutes a real distinction between the definite fixing of a day for one's own death, and the same kind of anticipation of a universal catastrophe ;—the man whose death is fixed for a given day has still to determine all the arrangements he will make for those who survive him; even if there is nothing of this kind to be done, he has still some interest is looking to the demeanour of others towards him, as they " prepare him for death," as it is called, and identify their own hopes and fears with his acts ; in short, though he is to die, much is still to go on in which he cannot help being more or less interested even up to the time of his death. But suppose that all are to die, and die together, and there would be as violent and sudden an arrest of all the moral movements of the world, as there would be of the physical movements if the sun exploded into fragments. With what interest would you sow, if on the 12th of August, before the harvest could be got in, you were perhaps all to die ? With what interest would you legis- late, if before the Queen's assent to your Acts could have been given for a week or two, the need of all legislation were at an end ? Would even the mathematician care to calculate anything except the physical elements of the great destructive crisis? Would the engineer make another engine or the poet another verse ? Perhaps the preacher might find a new energy, though even he would be sadly paralyzed by the assurance that he was to suffer just the same fate as his audience. But as for most of the earthly cares and interests of human life, they would be far more com- pletely obliterated for every one by the certain proximity of death for all, than for any special individUal by the certain proximity of his own death alone. And this it is, we take it, which is the chief secret of this hypothetical dread at any supposed astronomi- cal catastrophe ; that the blank in human interests of which it suggests a faint reflection is so great, that it is impossible to fill it up even by the far nobler interests of that anticipated spiritual transformation, of the details of which we are so absolutely ignorant. In this life spiritual duties are so completely hung upon the framework of earthly things, that the prospect of the annihilation of the latter leaves even the souls of men paralyzed in a kind of blank amazement ;—and this, in spite,of the fact that every living man who could really trust himself to the mercy of God and the love of Christ would have infinitely more to gain than to lose by such a catastrophe.
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