ence. So perfect his government, that the processes of slow change take place within limits, and the continual variations produce permanence in paths ever varying around him. By slowly-exerted influence, he changes the eccentricity of our earth's orbit; and causes the terrestrial equinoxes to circuit the ecliptic in their grand procession of 25,868 solar years. By this, continents become oceans, and seas dry-land; one hemisphere and then another supplies fruitful fields; activity follows rest, and rest activity; so, through many ages, this globe has been, and will continue to be, a fit abode of life and beauty.

In one sense the sun's sphere of influence includes all space, but for practical purposes we now regard it as limited and definite. His power is 315,000 times greater than the earth's. It might be supposed that a very vast increase of velocity is needed to change our periodic revolution; but if the earth's speed were raised from its actual rate, 18'2 or 19 miles the second, to about 25.7 miles the second, we should be carried thenceforth further and further away from light and life. Still rotating, day and night still succeeding, the orderly sequence of the seasons would be displaced by continual diminution of solar light and heat; and a cold more intense than that of the bitterest arctic winter would bind all things in everlasting frost. So true is it, the lights in heaven are for signs and seasons, for seed-time and harvest, for summer and winter.

The sun rules all the vapour of our atmosphere, lifting it up, and then casting it down as rain or snow. The mechanical power of every river in the world is drawn from the sun; the energy of the winds, the growth of trees and vegetables, the support of animal life, are all from him. The blood in our veins-that oil of the lamp of life, the work of our muscles, the oxidation which supports the heart's action—without which it would be utterly consumed by its own action in eight days, prove that we are children of the sun. In tracing out all these powers to their source, we come to one single power-that from which every vital energy proceeds, the sun. He is the natural agent, and as the knowledge of nature is brought to bear upon Scripture, it becomes as easy for men

to see the Providence of God in the creation and ordering of the world, as in startling and miraculous occurrences.

For many æons the sun and our earth were a fluid haze of light;" and then again, for other æons, our earth, like the sun, was a globe instinct with fiery heat in which no life could live after the manner of life now known. The potential germs of life might have been present in the midst of the fire, but only after periods infinite to our conception could life, such as we know it, or in the remotest degree like it, begin to exist on the earth: though it is probable, from the existing fact that seeds and plants, in order to germinate, must be placed in darkness, this being the case even with those plants which cannot flower and fruit until they receive the solar beams and power, that the living principle began to germinate ere solar beams shone with great light on the earth. The sun was hotter formerly than now, but the zodiacal light and corona may have had particles not luminous which hindered the shining forth of great light. In fact, it may be that when the sun was giving forth most heat it was simultaneously raising the greatest amount of obstruction to the propagation of radiations from its surface.

This throws light on the Divine Narrative. Grass, herb, tree, are representative words for all vegetation; and grass comprises that low order, called cryptogams, or flowerless plants. The earliest may have been like those fungi which are found in mines, quarries, and gloomy or dark places of the earth. Herb and tree stand for that growth of flowering plants, including modern cereals, fruit and forest trees, which now adorn the earth; but probably did not exist until required for the nourishment of animal life. We may reasonably conclude that, lord of earthly life as is the sun, creative energy waited not for his manifestation on the fourth day; but that in the water and on the land, even before the sun's face was cleared from the battle and smoke of early cosmical struggles, life became rooted in the ground and floated in the waters; and when, with clear face, the monarch surveyed the earth, many other forms of life sprang up to be gladdened with

his smile.

The Sun's Path Through Space.

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Sun's Path through Space.

217

As knowledge and piety extend the horizon of our view, the world enlarges to our contemplation; we travel beyond the sphere of sun, moon, earth, planets, and enter new firmaments to behold other suns and stars of greater and lesser splendour. The vast system, of which we are members, is hasting on with meteors, comets, satellites, asteroids, comets, sun, from the southern rich region of stars-the neighbourhood of Canis Major, Columba, and Lepus, to the northern rich regionwhere the chiefest splendour is gathered in Cygnus. We are speeding along a relatively barren path, from a rich past to a glorious future, at a rate of one hundred and fifty-four millions one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles the year; we are circling a centre in the direction of Alcyone, a star of the Pleiades, of which Job (xxxvii. 31) said long ago, "Canst thou bind the sweet influence of Pleiades?" Round some central sun, or central void without any preponderate mass, or in a great vortex-ring, we move as parts in a scheme of movement too wondrous and complicate to be as yet interpreted by astronomers, and we complete the course in about eighteen million two hundred thousand years.

As the earth and other planets are carried on, their orbits continually advance; the earth, as beheld from the sun, is but a dust-mote in his beams; and the actual path, year by year, is through fresh space. Viewing the sun, as among other suns, and the planetary orbits, as seen from the fixed stars, those orbits are little more than a point, and the sun is invisible. What unknown possibilities lie in that measureless extension of space where worlds are sprinkled as dust of gold, for the display of intellectual and moral life! Our sun and his fellow suns are connected with groups of minor suns, with clusters of star-dust, with masses of star-mist, with whorls and convolutions of nebulous matter, sometimes combined in vast spherical gatherings of worlds. There are orbs lying in such close order that we think great brilliancy is in those heavens; but, after stricter examination, they are found wide apart as the inconceivable distance between our sun and his nearest fellow. Further off still, are stars whose rays take thousands, perhaps millions of years to reach the earth. The arrangement is of striking order, and the possi

bility of it having sprung up by chance is so ridiculously small that Quetelet calculates it is as nothing. There is a multiplicity of worlds in infinite space, and a countless succession of worlds in infinite time, with point or base of gravity regulated by the weight and motion of all. Great and glorious is the Garden of God. The suns are planted in flowering beds of many splendid colours. The planets interweave in sparkling germination, various foliage, blooming fecundity of borders. Dark suns, weird places, cavernous chaotic regions, shadow forth the desolation of eternal wintry fields. There are ridges and clusters, rows and shelvings, with spirals and streams, in celestial depths where are disclosed the signs of as yet unthought of laws. "I shall maintain it all my life, whoever says in his heart there is no God, and makes use of a different language, is either a liar or a madman."1

Scripture holds closely to mundane affairs, yet the very ground on which religion and morality are based, is that we move in a wider circle than the physical; that there are spiritual beings, good and evil, that enter our firmament and concern themselves with the destiny of our race; and that we, after a rational service in duty and trial, shall enter a vast congregation of pure spirits, who are further within the circle of Divine Power, and nearer to the manifestation of Divine Glory. Meanwhile, God guides us by His hand, and in His heart has sympathy. Life's trials cast down, but not destroy; blinding lightning may rend the firmament, yet awake no fear; and sickness, touching our body with premonition of the grave, brings conviction that we shall live again. Like the suns and stars, kindled into splendour from previous worlds, our restored spirits, with frames refashioned out of former elements and purified, will evermore live on, and find a starry pathway to the Eternal Throne.

Thoughtful men studying the Sun's Path Through Space, Rule, Physical Constitution, Age, and Origin, receive a deep impression that the Divine account, the simplest in the world, is not vague nor indefinite; but startling, grand, abrupt. There is an appearance corresponding to our own limited aspect of

Rousseau, "Emilius," vol. ii., p. 230.

nature, in words and times agreeing with our ignorance and mortality; but possessing an inner spirit, revealing powers of the world to come.

Marvellously strange is human perversity!

The pomp

of heaven is made a plea for clothing the earth with poor garments, and the Father's boundless wealth a reason that we should expect nothing. Forgetting that if a narrative, like that of Scripture, bristling with apparent contradictions, startling and bold in a sturdy contempt of our confidence in human will and wisdom, is found to agree with accurate science, the Book must be of God; an attempt is made to turn even God's greatness against us. We are asked "Of what consequence can men, their pleasures or their pains, be to Him in whose sight all the worlds our eye can see are less than a speck in infinite space?" Thus those who charge the Bible with narrowness, pervert the splendour of God into a plea that He is too great to love mankind. The Being whom they profess to hallow is made less wise, less good, less wonderful, by the assertion that He cannot and will not visit us. Why should our reason be less firm in structure, or analogy concerning this be entitled to less confidence, than when we consider smaller things? If the incalculable multiplication of worlds, and the necessities of a rule that is infinite, hinder not the fashioning of a moth's wing, so that it possess a very firmament of beauty, why should not the All-good and Holy devise a plan for rendering us good and holy, in a manner as far exceeding human thought and merit as the elaborate manychambered houses for tiny and invisible life transcend our comprehension ?

The philosopher delights to show that a grain of sand on the shore of a sea, and a thought in the mind of a child, are bound by a law which cannot be broken, with a past that is infinite and a future that is eternal. The Christian rejoices to know that God has a plan for every man -that the provision for a soul's salvation is infinite, is connected with worlds and times, transactions and interests, surpassing knowledge. To God, in a human sense, is no such thing as absolute size. There is relative greatness and small