gold

• when he tries me, I shall come forth as

3:3.2The Uni­ver­sal Fa­ther is the only per­son­al­ity in all the uni­verse who does ac­tu­ally know the num­ber of the stars and plan­ets of space. All the worlds of ev­ery uni­verse are con­stantly within the con­scious­ness of God. He also says: “I have surely seen the af­flic­tion of my peo­ple, I have heard their cry, and I know their sor­rows.” For “the Lord looks from heaven; he be­holds all the sons of men; from the place of his habi­ta­tion he looks upon all the in­hab­i­tants of the earth.” Ev­ery crea­ture child may truly say: “He knows the way I take, and when he has tried me, I shall come forth as gold.” “God knows our down­sit­tings and our up­ris­ings; he un­der­stands our thoughts afar off and is ac­quainted with all our ways.” “All things are naked and open to the eyes of him with whom we have to do.” And it should be a real com­fort to ev­ery hu­man be­ing to un­der­stand that “he knows your frame; he re­mem­bers that you are dust.” Je­sus, speak­ing of the liv­ing God, said, “Your Fa­ther knows what you have need of even be­fore you ask him.”

• product of lava flows in Sierras

60:3.3This pe­riod thus be­comes the mod­ern moun­tain-build­ing stage of ge­o­logic his­tory. Prior to this time there were few moun­tain peaks, merely el­e­vated land ridges of great width. Now the Pa­cific coast range was be­gin­ning to el­e­vate, but it was lo­cated seven hun­dred miles west of the pres­ent shore line. The Sier­ras were be­gin­ning to form, their gold-bear­ing quartz strata be­ing the prod­uct of lava flows of this epoch. In the east­ern part of North Amer­ica, At­lantic sea pres­sure was also work­ing to cause land el­e­va­tion.

• men journey to ends of earth for

63:5.6The An­don­ites were fear­less and suc­cess­ful hunters and, with the ex­cep­tion of wild berries and cer­tain fruits of the trees, lived ex­clu­sively on flesh. As An­don had in­vented the stone ax, so his de­scen­dants early dis­cov­ered and made ef­fec­tive use of the throw­ing stick and the har­poon. At last a tool-cre­at­ing mind was func­tion­ing in con­junc­tion with an im­ple­ment-us­ing hand, and these early hu­mans be­came highly skill­ful in the fash­ion­ing of flint tools. They trav­eled far and wide in search of flint, much as pres­ent-day hu­mans jour­ney to the ends of the earth in quest of gold, plat­inum, and di­a­monds.

• first metal sought by man

81:3.4The wide­spread use of met­als was a fea­ture of this era of the early in­dus­trial and trad­ing cities. You have al­ready found a bronze cul­ture in Tur­kes­tan dat­ing be­fore 9000 B.C., and the And­ites early learned to work in iron, gold, and cop­per, as well. But con­di­tions were very dif­fer­ent away from the more ad­vanced cen­ters of civ­i­liza­tion. There were no dis­tinct pe­ri­ods, such as the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages; all three ex­isted at the same time in dif­fer­ent lo­cal­i­ties.

81:3.5Gold was the first metal to be sought by man; it was easy to work and, at first, was used only as an or­na­ment. Cop­per was next em­ployed but not ex­ten­sively un­til it was ad­mixed with tin to make the harder bronze. The dis­cov­ery of mix­ing cop­per and tin to make bronze was made by one of the Ad­am­son­ites of Tur­kes­tan whose high­land cop­per mine hap­pened to be lo­cated along­side a tin de­posit.