Take the little "radioscope" in your hand-- a tiny tube less than an inch in length, closed at one end, with a small magnifying lens at the other. In the closed end of the tube you observe a small disk of paper covered with microscopic particles of yellow crystals--sulfid of zinc. In front of the yellow crystals is a small metallic pointer, like the second-hand of a very small watch, and on the end of the pointer is--nothing, absolutely nothing, so far as your eye can see. Look at it very carefully. No! Nothing! Now, take the little tube, go into a darkened room, and look into it through the lens end, and you will see a sight incredible. The metal pointer does have a minute speck of something on its tip, and between that tip and the yellow crystals are leaping showers of sparks of light. Will the shower stop after a few minutes? No. After an hour? No; nor after a thousand years! The calculation is that that all but invisible speck on the tip of the pointer will keep that shower of sparks going day and night, for thirty thousand years! For that speck is radium, which actually seems as tho it were a hot fragment struck off from God's great white throne, so amazing is its radiant energy.
It operates, not merely by setting "waves" in motion, but it throws off a stream of actual particles which move with an inconceivable velocity (at the rate, some physicists allege of 200,000 miles a second), and without--and here is the miracle--without any apparent diminution in the morsel of radium itself. It can hurl these particles literally through six inches of armor plate. It can and does send them right through your own head while you are looking at them, just as if your brain were a loose sieve, as perhaps it is, or a grove of trees quite wide apart, and a bright, flashing bird, all crimson and gold, were flying right through the trees, without even hitting his wings.
Now, what I want to say is that the modern discovery of such marvels as these, as being real, actual, objective, demonstrated facts, stretches the mind out into a thrilling series of undreamed-of possibilities, and this is a preparation for faith. This is the first step. This is the first lamp on the modern road to faith.--Albert J. Lyman.
