Letter from the Earth
THE Creator sat upon the throne, thinking. Behind him stretched the illimitable continent of heaven, steeped in a glory of light and color; before him rose the black night of Space, like a wall. His mighty bulk towered rugged and mountain-like into the zenith, and His divine head blazed there like a distant sun. At His feet stood three colossal figures, diminished by extinction, almost, by contrast—archangels—their heads level with His ankle-bone.
When the Creator had finished thinking, He sad, “I have thought. Behold!”
He lifted His hand, and from it burst a fountain-spray of fire, a million stupendous suns, which clove the blackness and soared, away and away and away, diminishing in magnitutde and intensity as they pierced the far frontiers of Space, until at least they were as diamond nail heads sparkling under the domed vast roof of the universe.
At the end of an hour the Grand Council was dismissed.
They left the Presence impressed and thoughtful, and retired to a private place, where they might talk with freedom. None of the three seemed to want to begin, though all wanted somebody to do it. Each was burning to discuss the great event, but would prefer not to commit himself till he should know how the others regarded it. So there was some aimless and halting conversation about matters of no concequence, and this dragged tediously along, arriving nowhere, until at last the archangel Satan gathered his courage together—of which he had a very good supply—and broke ground. He said: “We know what we are here to talk about, my lords, and we may as well put pretense aside, and begin. If this is the opinion of the Council—”
“It is, it is!” said Gabriel and Michael, gratefully interrupting.
“Very well, then, let us proceed. We have witnessed a wonderful thing; as to that, we are necessarily agreed. As to the value of it—if it has any—that is a matter which does not personally concern us. We can have as many opinions about it as we like, and that is our limit. We have no vote. I think Space was well enough, just as it was, and useful, too. Cold and dark—a restful place, now and then, after a season of the over delicate climate and trying splendor of heaven. But these are details of no considerably moment; the new feature, the immense feature is—what, gentleman?”
“The invention and introduction of automatic, unsupervised, self-regulating law for the government of those myriads of whirling and racing suns and worlds!”
“That is it!” said Satan. “You perceive that it is a stupendous idea. Nothing approaching it has been evolved from the Master Intellect before. Law—Automatic Law—exact and unvarying Law—requiring no watching, no correcting, no readjusting while the eternities endure! He said those countless vast bodies would plunge through the wastes of Space ages and ages, at unimaginable speed, around stupendous orbits, yet never collide, and never lengthen nor shorten their orbital periods by so much as the new miracle, and the greatest of all—Automatic Law! And He gave it a name—the LAW OF NATURE—and said Natural Law is the LAW OF GOD—interchangeable names for one and the same thing.”
—Mark Twain. Letters from the Earth. Written in 1868, published in 1962.
