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XXVII.

THE STARRY HEAVENS.

PSALM viii. 3, 4.

"When I consider Thy heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which Thou hast ordained; what is man that Thou art mindful of him? and the son of man that Thou visitest him?"

WHEN the lovely light of the sun vanishes at eventide, and shades of darkness fall upon the towns and villages, the rocks and mountains ;-when the busy tumult of life is hushed; and all wearied mortals, and other living creatures, sink into repose; when this great globe itself, as it were dead, appears to us to rest like a corpse in its gloomy grave: then the night rises with inspiring solemnity, and the eternal stars shine from heaven on our darkness; we see no more our earth with its beauties and its deserts; we see only strange worlds, which look upon us with benignant smiles from the infinity of space.

Every night renews to me the image of my

death. Sleep, the brother of death, will close my eyes my limbs seek rest-the world has no more charms-this darkened world has lost its light and ornaments. And Heaven alone now shines! If death some day shall close my dim and failing eye, and this life sink for ever into night, and I lose sight of all sublunary objects—then still the heaven shines, and eternity is opened, in all its splendour, to my view.

The wisdom of the Creator has not ordained all this in vain. It is not in vain that He reminds me, by every night which obscures the globe, of the time when this earth will for ever pass from under me. It is not in vain that God causes the resplendent worlds of heaven continually to shine down upon me from immeasurable distance. They remind me of the prospects of eternity, of my endless existence beyond the grave. These distant stars are worlds, and all much greater than the world which I now inhabit. They twinkle with a glorious light in infinite space. They proclaim the greatness of the Creator, the mercy of the Eternal Father; they are doubtless dwelling-places in the universe of God.

Half of my life is day-half of my life can I devote to earthly business, and belong to this world. But half of my life, alas! is night, and strange worlds

blaze in the vast firmament above me, which seem to say to me: Consider us! Thou belongest not to the earth alone-but to Heaven also. Thou art composed of body and soul;-thy time consists of night and day;-thou hast relation in part to this world, but in part also to eternity. Let not earth then make thee forget Heaven.'

But how indifferently does the worldly-minded mortal wander along beneath the splendour of the starry heavens! how seldom does his mind raise itself, at the sight, to the majesty of Him who created the heavens and the earth! He perceives not the greatness of the Almighty; he understands not the witnesses of eternity which so eloquently address him. He at most admires, with childish pleasure, the glittering specks in the firmament, and finds amusement in the thousand suns above his head, without carrying his contemplations one step further-like the beast which, unconscious and lacking thought, heedlessly passes on through the wonders of creation.

But not so do you, O true disciple of Jesus Christ! Never let the brightness and magnificence of the firmament appear to you in all its affecting radiance, without your entertaining thoughts of eternity. Never lift up your eye to the flaming suns and worlds of the boundless universe above

you, without at least reflecting on that majesty of God, and that omnipotence, which no human intellect can comprehend.

Imagine to yourself, while you look upwards, the endless variety and number of those stars. With the naked eye, in a clear atmosphere at night, we can number eleven hundred stars, that is, eleven hundred bodies larger than our globe. But if our weak sight be assisted and quickened by the use of telescopes, then we perceive in the vast space of heaven, which we survey, 80,000 stars, of which one is continually more remote than another in the wide expanse before us. Through the best telescopes we discern a vast number of constellations. Astronomers, by means of their strongest magnifying-glasses, have counted so many stars in one small spot of the heavens, that if all parts of the firmament were equally dense, the whole visible heaven would have above 75,000,000 of those celestial bodies. Could human art further sharpen the power of vision, so that it should pierce still remoter regions of the universe, the number of the heavenly bodies could no longer be expressed by human signs.

But the distance of the stars from our globe is not less wonderful than their multitude. Most of them revolve at so vast a distance from us, that they do not appear through the finest telescopes,

greater than we see them with the naked eyethere is no number which can express their distance from us. One of the nearest stars among those which shine by their own light, is the splendid day-star, the sun. It becomes larger when observed through a telescope, and yet its distance amounts to nearly 100,000,000 of miles. What an immense distance!

How small, at such a distance, appears this glorious irradiating body, which we call the sun,— which is, in fact, 1,448,000 times greater than our Earth! The light of the sun, which takes scarcely more than eight minutes of time to fly through the immense space between its source, and the earth which it enlightens, would require as many years to travel through the yet more immeasurable space from the sun to the next star which shines by its own independent light.

How vast is the universe, how infinite! And yet, we certainly see only the least part of these suns and worlds, wandering, as it were, in the boundless field of heaven. There still shine and revolve millions and millions of these in remote regions. For from century to century, astronomers have here and there espied a new strange star, which for the space of many years glittered near other stars, then shone weaker, and at length, losing itself in the infinity of the universe, totally disap

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