The stars of God.

Contents

The Earth, The Moon,

The Solar Family, I.

RESEMBLANCES— DIFFERENCES— ANTIQUITY.

I. The Earth

THE EARTH.

The earth is naturally the first round of the ladder by which our knowledge climbs toward the astronomical summits of the universe.

So let us begin at home — as our charities and duties and travels are compelled to do — that is, at the star that lies nearest to us, the star that is so near that it cannot be nearer, the star on which we live.

For the earth is a star. This assertion would have astonished the ancients. And to not a few in our own times it is "a hard saying — who can hear it ? What ! this great, dull outspread of plains and mountains and waters like the bright points that spangle the evening vault ! It cannot be. Our senses protest." And yet if we could be freed from the chains of gravity and go away indefinitely from the earth we should find its surface gradually contracting and levelling and brightening on our sight until at last it, too, would appear as a bright point on the sky surrounded on all sides by vacancy — in all respects one of the great sisterhood of stars that make the glory of our nights.

Our earth is not only a star, but is by far the most interesting and important to us of all the stars. This is saying too much to suit some, and too little to suit others. For our earth has extravagant admirers — also extravagant revilers. Some can hardly say too much for it, and some can hardly say too much against it. Some are disposed to worship it, and some to crucify it. Some have no other deity than earthly things and serve them devotedly all their lives, though without the formality of altar and prayers ; while to others the world is a mud-monster, denied and defiling — a sort of reptilian devil to be loathed and fought to the utmost. These extremes must settle their quarrel between themselves. We can side with neither. We cannot stand with the idolaters ; nor can we stand with the hermits of the Thebaid to whom the world was the sum of all villainies and dangers. But we can go so far as to say that no other star, in the whole broad heaven, has anything like the interest and value to us which our own star possesses.

It is our cradle, our workshop, and our grave. Of its substance our bodies are made. From its maternal bosom we get our living, and indeed all the materials of our comfort and civilization. On it we pass our entire probation as moral beings. And on it took place the incarnation, the atonement, and the manifold miracles recorded in our Scriptures — events great enough to consecrate and glorify any world. It furnishes our astronomical instruments, the place on which to plant them, the observers to use them, the mathematics and elementary knowledge of matter to empower them. It supplies the primary school which teaches us all we know about the nature and laws of matter — showing us that it consists of many kinds and that all its kinds, under all circumstances, are subject to one law of mutual attraction which can be used with enormous effect in explaining the distant heavens. The earth really supplies the alphabet from which we construct our astronomy : not only supplies the elementary astronomical letters, but largely puts them together into syllables and words and intelligible sentences.

Just as it is more important for a man to know ■ well his own country than it is to know well a foreign country, so it is more important for us to be well acquainted with our own star than it is to be well acquainted with any other star in all the radiant heavens.

"What do we know about this, to us, the most interesting and important of all the stars ? Very much indeed. Almost infinitely more than we know of any other star. Once it was not so. Xot so very far back, the earth to human ken was almost a sealed book — let us venture to say a book sealed with seven seals, though written within and on the backside. But that time is well past. Men became inquisitive. Since the earth was nearest to. them of all the stars ; since indeed it was that on which they dwelt, on which they could move about freely, and on which they could bring all their senses to bear in closest observation — what a fine field for successful inquisitiveness ! So they began to use to some purpose the most wonderful instruments of investigation known among men, viz., their own eyes, ears, hands, feet, brains ; gradually supplementing these with hammers and spades and crucibles and batteries and laboratories and calculuses and optical instruments and steamships and railways. Many ran to and fro and knowledge was increased. Satan is not the only observer whose business it is to go to and fro in the earth, and walk up and down in it. The world has been ransacked. Floods of travel and investigation have swept over nearly all lands. We have gone down into valleys, we have scaled mountains, we have crossed oceans ; the general features of the world are thoroughly understood, and details to an enormous amount. Whole libraries are needed to express them. They could not be told in years though we had ' a brazen throat and a hundred iron tongues.' They have been digested into so many sciences that not single mind can master them all. As much cannot be said of our knowledge of the distant heavens. One may know it all and still be no prodigy. We shall never know another star as well as we do our own

— until !

Not that our knowledge of the earth is anything like exhaustive. There is reason to suspect that what is known of our star is only a small part of what there is to be known. We have only begun to know the world. As yet we have scarcely done more than skim the surface of things. Our inquiries, like far-flying birds, have only alighted here and there on wide stretches of country. Africa, the tw T o Arctics, and the ocean-depths contain many a secret. So does the most familiar land the sun shines on ; and indeed the most familiar single object about us. No slightest thing within our reach can be considered as perfectly understood. Scores of questions can be asked to which no answers are given or promised.

The Sphinx has many a riddle to read us out of her earth-book which we cannot solve though we die for it.

And, not only is our knowledge of the earth incomplete but we are very far from having gone the length of our tether. Who imagines that we know about the earth all we can know, or are likely to know ? Who imagines that we have almost sighted the shore of our ocean — as we see it to day ? Our ignorance has the glow of morning on its face. Nature's promises are almost as plentiful as its problems. Mysteries are ever unfolding about us, like the buds of advancing spring. Every science relating to the earth is under marching orders ; and the orders are not to retreat but to advance. "Forward. March ! — there is yet much land to be possessed " — is in the mouths of all the captains and inscribed on all the banners. And hardly a year passes without advancing the outposts. New sciences are starting up while others are starting forward. Among them all, daily discoveries are the order of the day. All over the world the Pillars of Hercules, the Land's End, and Ultima Thule are being put to flight. Cloistered places are becoming public parks. It seems as if in the matter of knowledge of the earth the little fingers of the future will be thicker than the loins of the present. It is better to be in a slough of Despond than to have a slough of Despond in us. Neither of these unpleasant conditions belongs to the present generation of scientists. We are all full of cheerful expectation.

Of course there is an element of uncertainty in such an outlook on our future. Divine predictions always come true : human predictions often fail though made by Magi. We have occasion to remember that there is many a slip between the cup and the lip ; that knowledge, like other things, has a way of ebbing as well as flowing ; that sciences as well as scientists, have been known to backslide. But the past is sure. The knowledge we have gained about the earth we can count upon. So, we will turn from pleasant dreams of what will be to sober consideration of the facts already in hand.

For much knowledge of our own star we are indebted to the same instruments that have given us most of our knowledge of the distant heavens, viz., our optical instruments and our mathematics — the right and left hands of our astronomy. Working together these have given us all our accurate geography. We have now determined with great exactness the latitudes and longitudes of all the more important points of the earth : we io THE STARS OF GOD.

have also, by the same means and by soundings gained a clear idea of the great ocean beds. Every civilized nation has provided charts of its own coasts so accurately made that they represent the outline of the land and the neighboring sea-bottom with almost the fidelity of a Dutch portrait or of a photograph. This has been done in connection with a system of triangulation in which the telescope and its adjuncts play a conspicuous part. The coaster and fisherman as they feel their way safely among the shoals and sunken rocks may thank for their safety, not their stars indeed, but the same instrument that has done the most at exploring the stars.

The telescope is also the condition of all extensive ocean- voyaging. The coast surveys provide for the convenience and safety of navigation along certain shores ; but if we are to have that knowledge of the wide earth that comes from immense commerce and travel, means must be furnished for passing over the trackless oceans freely and safely in every direction. In order to do this, the sailor must be able to find his exact place on the deep at any moment. And it is not enough for him to consult his dead reckoning and chronometer ; he must verify these by observing certain heavenly bodies and by consulting the

THE EARTH. n

famous Nautical Almanac, which is, in some sort, the sailor's Bible, doing for him on the natural deep what the Bible offers to do on the spiritual deeps. The foundations of the Nautical Almanac are the Greenwich Observatory, the telescope, and the theory of gravitation. These are what we come to if we dig down to the very bottom of things, and ask how that indispensible companion of every long voyage is made. Astronomy hides behind every page of this vadc mecum which has made the deep comparatively safe, and gradually covered it with inquisitive traffickers and travelers into all lands, and so been the means of a vast accession to our knowledge of the earth. What crowded maps and bulky geographies are now on the tables of our scholars and even on the desks of the common school ? A thoughtful man sees the shadow of a telescope in the background and between the lines of every one of them. That our little children know more of the world on which they live than did the sages of antiquity is due to the fact that the optic tube, pointed at the sky, has discovered more facts on the earth than it has done in the heavens.

In the case of all other stars there is no difficulty in telling all we know about them — the known facts are so few. But what we know about the earth is so prodigiously much that if we would have any space left for telling of other stars we must narrow our view to a few general features like those which come under notice in the case of the other stars — such as shape, and size, and situation, and motions.

We find that the ancients were mistaken in thinking that the earth is a rough plain indefinitely extended, resting on solid supports, in the centre of the universe, without motion itself but revolved about by all the heavens. All this is now denied and defied. We know that the earth is globular in form. We know that it has no elephant and immense tortoise to rest upon but is altogether unsupported amid the vacancies of space — literally "hung on nothing." And we know that instead of being forever at rest it is forever in motion after a most astonishing fashion ; and that, so far from being the great central heart of the creation about which all things are framed and to which all things have respect as the seat of honor and control and destiny, it is almost infinitely otherwise. We are sorry to have to charge such great mistakes on the fathers. But they are not without excuse. It is unreasonable to ask men to see as well at dawn as at noon. The shadows of the night are bound to retire gradually. We ourselves are often misled by first seemings just as the fathers were.

We are largely indebted to the telescope for all our precise and minute knowledge of the shape and size of the earth. Its general roundness is known by other means (men who have sailed or railroaded round the world need no other proof), but we have to use the telescope with its appliances in order to know that we do not live on a proper globe, but on one that is somewhat flattened on opposite sides ; and also to know what are the exact values of the longest and shortest diameter. This knowledge is best gained by measuring arcs of a meridian in various parts of the world ; and telescopes have been indispensable to such measurements. By these it has been found that our extremes of diameter differ by about twenty-six miles while our mean diameter is 7912 miles.

This spheroidal star turns around on its shortest diameter once in twenty-four hours, without the least noise or jar, carrying us with a perfectly uniform motion through space at the rate of a thousand miles an hour, and making the whole heavens seem to revolve about us daily. In addition, the earth wheels about the sun once a year — which means that while we are being carried round the earth at a thousand miles an hour we are also being carried about the sun at more than sixty times that rate. It almost makes one dizzy to think of such complicate and tremendous velocities. Perhaps we feel an instinctive prompting to grasp at something. Perhaps we seem to be losing our breath — if our imaginations are very alert. But we are safe. Mother earth clasps her children mightily to her bosom as she flies. She is careful to carry with us in our double motion the atmosphere and all our surroundings without disturbing in the least their relative positions ; and to shoot along as softly and silently and smoothly as she does swiftly. Were it not for this we should find our rushing somersaults and gyrations through space anything but comfortable. As it is, not a hint of our break-neck journeying comes directly to our senses. We have to infer it distantly but conclusively from the fact that such journeying furnishes the simplest and a perfect explanation of the daily and yearly changes observed in the sky. By its double motion our star becomes a grand observatory from which to study the other stars. Our common observatories are fixtures. Once built they stand on the same spot as long as they stand at all. If they were only easily transferable from one point of the earth to anoher — could be cheaply and smoothly spirited away from Greenwich to Cape Town or Quito or, better still, to a point some hundreds of millions of miles nearer the heavenly bodies than we now are, it would sometimes be a great convenience. Well, this is done b)' means of that underlying observatory that we call the earth. This is the great celestial lookout.

Bv its rounded form and transparent atmosphere and position among the stars it gives us a grand outlook on the populous heavens. By turning on its axis it brings successively into view all parts of the sky ; whereas without this rotation we could see only a single hemisphere, except by travelling half round the globe. By its movement about the sun it brings us nearly 200 millions of miles nearer some of the stars than we should be without this motion, and so enables us to discover important facts not otherwise obtainable. And then this travelling observatory of ours, ponderous and granitebuilt as it is, moves so smoothly and quickly from place to place that no senses nor instruments, however delicate, can detect the slightest disturbance. It is so stoutly built of endless "munitions of rocks" that we have done our best at describinofirmness and stability in a thing when we have likened it to the foundations of the earth and the everlasting hills. Admirable Uraniberg ! — ready made to hand, vast in size, sumptuous in appointments beyond any palace we ever saw, usable by everybody without charge and with equal freedom (knock at the door of any other first class observatory for a like privilege and see what you will get,) built and kept in repair without a penny of cost to any man, carrying us and all our secondary observatories with magnificent swiftness and comfort on great journeys of discovery and astonishment among the constellations — surely this is a wonderful Observatory, well deserving to be written in capitals !

II. The Moon

II.

THE MOON.

We are outward-bound. And the first star we come to is the one to which we should next give our attention.

The old Greek poet iEschylus pictures to us Agamemnon, king of men, reclining night after night on the roof of the Atridae at Mycenae, and, propped on his elbow, watching the round silver shield of Dian as it beamed upon him from above. Still earlier, Homer gives us this picture of a moon-lit scene on the battle fields of Troy, where lie with upturned faces the sleeping heroes of yesterday and to-morrow: "As when in heaven the stars around the glittering moon beam loveliest amid the breathless air, and in clear outline appear every hill, sharp peak, and woody dell — deep upon deep the sky breaks open, and each star shines forth, while joys fills the shepherd's heart." Let us give a more modern picture.

It is night. You are abroad among the shadows — as perhaps you ought not to be. What are commonly called the stars are shining ; but their light is too small to make plain an unfamiliar road. Yon stumble, you slip into a slough, you take the wrong turn, you run against some person as benighted as yourself ; in short you wish that you had taken a lantern. And, lo, what you wish is furnished you — a lantern with the lighting of which neither you nor I had anything to do.

What is that ? In your hesitating and perplexed progress your eye happens to rest on the east. A narrow streak of nebulous whiteness lies along the horizon. It slowly broadens and brightens, and soon a silver rim presents itself which, by imperceptible degrees expands into a complete circle, flushed more or less with gold. Now the objects about you begin to show clearly. The dim, stumbling, vexatious road stumbles and vexes no longer. Every moment improves the situation. By the time the moon has mounted above the trees your troubles are at an end. Now you can walk safely and conveniently all night if you will ; for the Heavenly Father has sent his own lantern to your rescue. And a brave lantern it is — its soft, kindly beams doing hundreds of times as much in the way of illumination as all the stars put together. You go on your way rejoicing.

This scene is a sample of what has been all the way back to Adam — and longer. The moon is no stranger. Men have walked in the light of it as long as they have walked at all. It has shone in every sky. Its name appears in every known language. It has looked down on every human generation and been to it for signs and seasons and days and years. Itself substantially unchanged, it has seen the rise and fall of empires and civilizations and dispensations and geologic aeons even. No doubt the moon goes back to the world's beginning. And, pray, when was that ? Who knows ? A plenty of guesses there are : some founded on geological considerations (fogs), some on astronomical considerations (another sort of fogs), and some on no considerations at all (not even fogs) but all the guesses enormously at war with one another. I guess that as soon as the earth was swinging on its way the moon was swinging in its sky — and that was millions of years ago.

What an antique ? Ye who hunt the neighborhoods through for old furniture, who ransack the by-ways of Europe for originals by the old masters : ye who spade among the graves of nations for relics of primal Greece and Egypt and Assyria and count a find rusty with 4000 years as beyond all price — what think you of that celestial antiquity, the old, old moon, that from the beginning or ever the earth was has hung its cheery lantern in the sky ! There is genuine antiquity for you, without the hunting and digging ! And, for aught we can see, the relic is as good as new. The moon carries no marks of its mighty years. It is not faded, worn, tottering, dim-eyed, the worse for wear. We see no reason for thinking it does not shine as brightly and go on its way as vigorously as it ever did : no reason for thinking it cannot go on its round of aspects and motions with unflagging strength, world without end.

A famous traveler ! Has been journeying time out of mind. Not along the lands and seas where as yet our travel is compelled to go, but along the stretches of the sky where our travel is ambitious of going. A fine post for observation has the Queen of night had as she has rolled round the world on her flashing wheel. All that makes history has passed beneath her beaming eye. If she could speak how much she would have to tell. What additions and subtractions she could make to the story of the nations ! How much of what is called history would have to blush for itself and consent to be called fiction !

What is this comely Queen of night, this exalted observer, this famous traveller, this mute but capable historian, this antique but not antiquated celestial, this delightful painter of field and flood and ruins old — of abbeys gray and colosseums grand ? It is a star just as the earth is. We sometimes speak of the moon and stars ; but we mean only a distinction as to apparent size. The moon appears larger than what are commonly called stars, merely because it is nearer to us. If we could push it away from us a certain distance it would appear to us as a shining point on the sky. This moon-star has had the common fate of exalted position — unmeasured praise and also unmeasured abuse. Some have made it out a goddess, and some a devil. Some have worshipped it under the name of Diana, goddess of the silver bow ; and some under the name of Hecate, queen of hell and mother of all evils. The worshipping age is past ; but the moon has still its great admirers and great abusers. It has more sonnets inscribed to it than the sun itself. Also, the worst stories are told of it ; for slander loves a shining mark and is very apt to hit it. All sorts of evil reports have been set on foot against it as being unfriendly to plants and animals. The astrologers of the Middle Ages and later, would have it that moon-beams were poisonous, pest-breeding, especially when coming from the neighborhood of Saturn. There the moon had an evil eye. There it cursed and swore like a pirate. Then let the crops look out for droughts and mildews and blastings. Then let cattle and men look out for debilities, consumptions, convulsions, jaundice, lunacy. Wo to him who is born under the " house of the moon " ; better not to have been born at all ! The bad stories still linger. Dogs are not the only things that bark at the moon. Bad to sleep in the moonlight, is it ? Hurts certain grains and timbers, does it ? That is slander, not to say superstition. Do not believe a word of it. Smile at it as the Queen herself does. She has a shining faculty for standing abuse ; for she shines on good humoredly in a Christian way and never answers back. She knows she would not harm us on an)- account. That consciousness is enough. And she goes serenely on her way, flinging down her silver on the saucy world as freely as ever. Go thou and do likewise, O much abused reader !

What men knew about the moon till lately was little more than could be learned by the naked eye only. Common observation shows a luminous disc, about half a degree in diameter, variously shaded, apparently moving westward with all the other bright objects in the sky and at the same time creeping eastward among them so as to make a complete circuit in about twenty-seven days ; in the same period waning from a full disc to nothing and then waxing back to its old fulness ; in addition suffering occasional eclipses which after eighteen years repeat themselves in the same order and at the same intervals as before.

From this small capital put out at usury, we have at last come to a large lunar fortune. For the observed facts just stated are best accounted for by supposing that the moon is a round earthlike body, situated between the earth and the sun; shining by the reflected light of the sun, and revolving about the earth in twenty-seven days. This supposition is the simplest possible explanation of the lunar motions and phases and eclipses ; and in our time the simplest explanation of an observed fact is the only scientific explanation. Accordingly we give a scientific answer to the atheist when we tell him that God is the simplest explanation of Nature. He ought to be satisfied with it. No science has any better.

But let us go into particulars as to some of the chief points of interest in regard to the moon which have come to us by the combined aid of observation, a just theory, the mighty mathematics, and the fact that the moon is the nearest to us of all the heavenly bodies. It is to this nearness that we owe it that we know far more of the moon than we do of any other object in our sky. In a city it is by no means certain, or even likely, that one knows the most of his nearest neighbor. Perhaps that neighbor is the most unknown person in the whole great community. But, fortunately, in the country it is different. Every man knows every other : and he is apt to know best the man who lives next to him. The moon lives next to us. And the knowledge we have of it is next to that we have of the earth itself.

The shape of the moon is globular. At the full it seems like a somewhat clouded silver plate. Then it looks as if the plate itself was being eaten up, by little and little, by some invisible monster whose supply of eatables had been too scanty. We seem to see on the ragged edge the marks of his teeth. At last all is devoured ; only, however, to reappear in a new crescent and slowly wax to its former roundness. Notwithstanding this apparent variety of shapes — crescent, half circle, gibbous, full circle — the moon has really but one shape, the same the earth has. Only a round body could show th.e phases.

The light of the moon is not its own. If it were self-luminous it would, of course, always appear in full circle. But it is not seen at all when the sun cannot shine on the face that is turned toward us. When the sun is so placed that its beams can touch that face it begins to appear as a thin crescent, and then enlarges as the position of the sun becomes more favorable, until at last we have the full moon. So the glory of the moon is altogether a borrowed one. And it is a great borrower ; for it is able to give us from its store a thousand times the light we get from all the heavenly bodies put together, the sun being excepted — to say nothing of what it lavishes on the wastes of space. Happily the lender is so rich that he can afford to lend largely, to lend without interest, and even to lend with the very poorest chance of getting his principal back again.