The stars have their orbits like the planets; on some regular plan, unknown but harmonious, their movements through the celestial spaces are adjusted. A collision only happens when something goes wrong: how often, how imminent, is that?
Sooner, it may be.
The streets of space are crowded; they are strewn with continual catastrophe. Of the seen stars, few no doubt at this instant are in our immediate vicinage. But the tramp stars—dark suns wandering unglimpsed through the void, droves of dead worlds no equations can abolish—are everywhere, more numerous than the lucid ones, as dead men than live; and it is a tramp star that our sun, then like to be a tramp star himself, is likest to encounter.
Not all the stars, live or dead, can be moving away from each other. In space Euclidean or non-Euclidean, in commonsense four-dimensional or three, as many must be moving nearer each other; towards disaster as away from it.
Some order in the star-streams, harmony of the heavens, music of the spheres, is predictable; the Empyrean as a perfect mechanism without flaw or disturbance is not. Disasters disprove it. Often, and imminently, something goes wrong.
Any moment we may strike a nebular stretch of heaven. Such regions are full of solid matter, stardust, in-drifting meteorites and the like. The nebula, acting as a brake on the sun’s motion, will reduce his pace at the very instant he enters an area where, other bodies being more numerous, pace to escape them is what he will chiefly need.
Nor, principally, is head-on collision requisite. Let another great star pass near—one thousand million miles away. He will derange, de-orbit us; send us crashing, liquefying, into the riven and distorted sun. Let Antares or Arcturus, of terrible size and terrible speed, move by at tenfold, twelvefold the solar distance. The sun will be pulled into streamers, tearing forth to greet the Arcturian dragons of fire; in half-an-hour we shall be fused out of all identity, a drop in their chaos. And many a star is mightier than Arcturus; and many are nearer; many faster. One in Columba runs at two million miles an hour.
Sooner or later, assuredly with a star.
Yet collision, which thus includes grazing and mere propinquity, is too narrow a word.
Collision, which implies splintering impact of solid bodies, is too massive a word.
Collision, which, in lubberly portrayal of unliving earths in lumbering percussion, conjures up no vision of the dying crying souls upon them, is too abstract, too astronomical a word.
Collision, the one fate that will outstay the others, yet partakes of the nature of them all. Like the cold, irrevocable. Like the comet, coming at an hour unknown, from a direction unknown; a chance, not a process; a crash, not a geological creeping. Resembling the water-end or the waterless, according as the foe’s first deed would be to melt the mountain snows and flood us, or to parch. Resembling the fire-end; it is the Fire-End, destinate, ultimate, Sheol-Gehenna, the great balefire of combustion.
Collision, the one fate that destroys not only man but his home, alone is destroyer and creator. The twin cyclopean gas-streams, as they flare out across the furious infinite, will take the form of a double spiral; then of a gaseous nebula; then, condensing, of a star—maybe with planets, with an earth, with us all reborn again, again long after to re-die. Death nova will be birth nova, as the nebula which gave us life was born itself of death, in the crash and ruin of life preceding. The heavenly colossal catastrophes are death; they are life. Collision makes; collision kills.
Out of the chance riot of stars came worlds, came living existence, came we. In new chance riot we shall depart. The heavens go crashing and whirling. The universe forms, un-forms, re-forms. The Terror rolls on. What is it? What means it? What is my soul in that universe? May God have mercy.
God
Will He have mercy?
Impiously our attention has all been devoted to modes of material destroying of a material world, as though no Spirit breathed through it; atheistically, only to so-called natural ways of termination.
There are supernatural ways. In these men have believed; each religion, each sect, each sub-sect holding its different guess as to His choice of hour, contributing its variant as to His choice of method, ready to fight or to die for its own pet terminal detail, ready to murder and martyr for a deviation or a doubt. In these men still believe. If no one now or had ever believed in them, we could not with our pygmy frail knowledge and paltry five senses rule them out.
Astrologers have in all ages foretold the Birthday Death: “when the fixed stars have made a revolution unto the points from whence they first set out, a kind of dying upon the day of its Nativity”—prophets and peoples the End as Punishment: the natural forms of destruction, fire, flood or ice, being supernaturally sent of God, or the gods, by way of rebuke and recompense for the multitude of our iniquity, for three transgressions of Damascus and for four—magicians, saints and mystics the Decreation: the sudden unframing of the worlds by the word of Him Who framed them: Fiat, a shake of the sceptre, and then Nothing.
God is the self and essence of each of the elements whose temporal manifestations have here been humbly unfolded. He is water, He is ice; Himself is the stars; our God is a consuming fire. He will act through these His elements not modally, to human sense perceptibly; but essentially, without circumstance, extrinsicality or phase. As it was in the beginning, when all was without form and void, till His Spirit moved upon the face of the unborn waters,
A moving mist,
A quickness which my God hath kist,
and hatched the world, so likewise shall it be in the end: the Spirit of God shall move upon the
