"Yes, the wee creatures that inhabit the bodies of us germs, and feed upon us, and rot us with disease. Ah, what could they have been created for? they give us pain, they make our lives miserable, they murder us--and where is the use of it all, where the wisdom? Ah, friend Bkshp, we live in a strange and unaccountable world; our birth is a mystery, our little life is a mystery and a trouble, we pass and are seen no more; all is mystery, mystery, mystery; we know not whence we came, nor why, we know not whither we go, nor why we go. We only know we were not made in vain, we only know we were made for a wise purpose, and that all is well! We shall not be cast aside in contumely and unblest, after all we have suffered. Let us be patient, let us not repine, let us trust. The humblest of us is cared for --oh, believe it!--and this fleeting stay is not the end!"
You notice that? He did not suspect that he, also, was engaged in gnawing,
torturing, defiling, rotting, and murdering a fellow-creature--he and all the
swarming billions of his race. None of them suspects it. That is significant.
It is suggestive--irresistibly suggestive--insistently suggestive. It hints
at the possibility that the procession of known and listed devourers and persecutors
is not complete. It suggests the possibility, and substantially the certainty,
that man is himself a microbe, and his globe a blood-corpuscle drifting with
its shining brethren of the Milky Way down a vein of the Master and Maker of
all things, Whose body, mayhap,--glimpsed partwise from the earth by night,
and receding and lost to view in the measureless remotenesses of Space--is what
men name the Universe.
- "Three Thousand Years among the Microbes"
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