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The bit of the earth that broke off long ago

When we are talking of the wonders of the world we must not forget the Moon which revolves round it once every twenty- seven days. As the Earth is a bit of the Sun, so the Moon is a bit of the Earth. It was torn off by the tug of the Sun from the molten Earth ages and ages ago. Even as the Moon nowadays raises tides in the sea, so the Sun in those ancient days raised tides in the half-molten metal as it whirled, and so a bit of the half-molten metal was partly whirled and partly tugged away, and went rushing round the Earth, at first quite near it. Like the Earth, it had great volcanoes spouting fire, and it must have been a splendid spectacle as it rushed round the Earth dragging great molten tides after it. But it could not hold the gases and the water vapours within it as the Earth did; it was too small to have sufficient gravitational force, and so, even though it had probably the same elements as the Earth in its crust, it never managed to produce plants or animals.

In time this fragment of the Earth got farther and farther from the Earth, and in time it cooled down, and now it is like an enormous piece of dry slag covered with huge extinct volcanoes, and it keeps always the same side to the Earth. But it is a very beautiful object in the sky, and it is the cause of the tides in the ocean.

Could there be a more marvellous world than this planet of ours, spinning on its axis and racing round the Sun between Venus and Mars, with the silver Moon shining on its oceans е There are bigger suns and planets than ours, but is there any with such a wonderful heritage of life е

And the Earth is the home of mankind, full of beautiful and wonderful things. We are all rushing on, no man knows where, through the ocean of infinite space. We are spinning round at thousands of miles an hour, we are revolving round the Sun at eighteen miles a second, but so smooth is the motion that we feel neither the whirl nor the rush. On and on we go, and when the Earth has revolved some seventy times round the Sun, you, I, and each one of us, must go perhaps on a. still longer and more wonderful journey. But while we are in the world let us try to explore its wonders and understand it, seeing in all things the wisdom and love of God who made us out of a cloud of gas; and let us realise that, vast as is the universe, even so vast is the soul that has been given to us to comprehend it.