Apart from the teaching of God's word as to God's end in the creation and perpetuation of man, there is no greater mystery than human life. Make pleasure, happiness, self-interest, personal aggrandizement, or present sublunary enjoyment the end of life, and man is an enigma, life a problem incapable of solution, the world a chaos of disordered, wild conflicting elements, and all our reasoning a hopeless paradox. Man is then an atom of an atom world, tossed to and fro by every wind, whirled round by ever eddy, borne along by every current, until he vanishes into the nothingness from which he inexplicably emerged. He is an effect causeless, a beginning without middle or end, a meteor flash brilliant with promised glory, and extinguished in the very effulgence of its course.