Tea at Trianon: God's Universe

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, February 10, 2017

God's Universe

Science helps us to grow in knowledge and awe of God's magnificent creation. From Monsignor Charles Pope:

As we look out on God’s universe, we cannot even fathom how huge and magnificent it is; we cannot comprehend its immensity. If one were to make a scale model of the Milky Way galaxy and reduce each star in it to the size of a grain of sugar, the model would have to be about 2000 miles wide and 1000 miles high—and that’s just one galaxy! There are billions of galaxies in the universe, which is ever expanding. Even the nearest star in our galaxy is about 25 trillion miles away from us.

And we are whirling around and outward! Earth rotates at a speed of about 1000 miles per hour (at the equator) while itself revolving at roughly 67,000 miles per hour around the sun. And our entire solar system is rotating around the center of the Milky Way galaxy at more than 500,000 miles per hour. And the Milky Way galaxy is flying outward and away (according to Doppler shift) at 1.3 million miles per hour! All creatures great … praise the Lord, for He has made them all!

Inner Space: What is equally amazing is the universe that exists, hidden from the naked eye, in what we might call “inner space”: that tiny, almost invisible world of microbiology. In just a drop of pond water there may be hundreds of thousands of bacteria and microorganisms, a veritable universe unto itself. Indeed, in every human body there are trillions of microorganisms in a kind of microbial fauna. About 80 different types of microorganisms live in the mouth alone. Every square centimeter of the human bowel contains as many as 10 billion organisms. Every square centimeter of our skin contains about 10 million individual bacteria. Even on our eyelashes are colonies of helpful bacteria and microorganisms that help keep the harmful ones away. These massively numbered civilizations—universes, really—of microorganisms are only recently known to us, thanks to the invention of powerful microscopes. To those in this “micro-world,” our bodies must seem as massive as outer space seems to us. If a microorganism could think, it would consider our bodies a universe too large to comprehend. Just as there are trillions of stars, there are trillions of microorganisms. To a microbe on our eyelash, a bacterium on our toe seems light-years away. (Read more.)