IF we look out upon the starry heavens by which we are surrounded, we find them diversified in every possible way. Our own mighty Stellar System takes upon itself the form of a flat disk, which may be compared to a mighty ring breaking into two distinct divisions. severed from each other, the interior with starsless densely populous than upon the exterior. But take the telescope and go beyond this; and here you find, coming out from the depths of space, universes of every possible shape and fashion; some of them assuming a globular form, and, when we apply the highest possible penetrating power of the telescope, breaking into ten thousand brilliant stars, all crushed and condensed into one luminous, bright, and magnificent centre.
But look yet farther. Away yonder, in the distance, you behold a faint, hazy, nebulous ring of light, the interior almost entirely dark, but the exterior ring-shaped, and exhibiting to the eye, under the most powerful telescope, the fact that it may be resolved entirely into stars, producing a universe somewhat analogous to the one we inhabit. Go yet deeper into space, and there you will behold another universe-voluminous scrolls of light, glittering with beauty, flashing with splendour, and sweeping a curve of most extraordinary form and of most tremendous outlines.
Thus we may pass from planet to planet, from sun to sun, from system to system. We may reach beyond the limits of this mighty stellar cluster with which we are allied. We may find other island universes sweeping through space. The great unfinished problem still remains-Whence came this universe? Have all these stars which glitter in the heavens beenshining from all eternity? Has our globe been rolling around the sun for countless ages? Whence, whence this magnificent architecture, whose architraves① rise in splendour before us in every direction? Is it all the work of chance? I answer, No. It is not the work of chance.
Who shall reveal to us the true cosmogony② of the universeby which we are surrounded? Is it the work of an Omnipotent Architect? If so, who is this August Being? Go with me tonight, in imagination, and stand with old Paul, the great apostle, upon Mars Hill,③ and there look around you as he did. Here rises that magnificent building, the Parthenon, sacred to Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. There towers her colossal statue, rising in its majesty above the city of which she was the guardian-the first object to catch the rays of the rising, and the last to be kissed by the rays of the setting, sun. There are the temples of all the gods; and there are the shrines of every divinity.
And yet I tell you these gods and these divinities, though created under the inspiring fire of poetio fancy and Greek imagination, never reared this stupendous structure by which④we are surrounded. The Olympic Jovenever built these
heavens. The wisdom of Miner va never organized these magnificent systems. I say with St. Paul,⑤-"The God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands."No; here is the temple of our Divinity. Around us and above us rise Sun and System, Cluster and Universe. And I doubt not that in every region of this vast Empire of God, hymns of praise and anthems of glory are rising and reverberating from Sun to Sun and from System to System-heard by Omnipotence alone across immensity and through eternity!
- O. M. MITCHELL
NOTES
① Architrave (arketrave ), entablature; or that part of the entablature which rests upon the column.
② Cosmogony, the theory or science of the origin of the universe.
③ Mars Hill, Parthenon, Minerva.-See the lesson, Paul at Athens , -Minerva is the Latin name for the Pallas Athene of the Greeks. She was the goddess of wisdom.
④ Olympic Jove.-Zeus of the Greeks, (called by the Romans Jupiter and Jove, the chief of their deities, who were supposed to have their abode on Olympus, a lofty mountain in Thessaly.
⑤ With St. Paul.-See Acts , xvii 24.