Editorial January 7, 1905 Issue

The Heavens are Telling

From Thy will stream the world, life, and nature.

John B. Willis

Though our sense of space and time, with all the other limitations of human thought, can but sadly mar our concept of God, nevertheless we may be inspired, find escape from a baser self, as mind and heart are opened to the grandeur and sublimity of the universe about us. To turn away from the realm of sickness and sin, and let thought speed into the star-illumined corridors of the sky, is to find a richer communion, a nobler aspiration, calmness and strength, and there is much to indicate that the Master's frequent retirement, in the night season, to the mountains and desert places apart, was for that refreshment and strengthening which the spiritual interpretation of nature ever brings, and which served to relieve any sense of exhaustion attending the constant self-expenditure of his life.

In a recent article on the celestial distances, Professor Newcomb has spoken of the solar system as "merely a point! a sphere with a radius 400,000 times the distance of the sun. An idea of this distance may be gained by reflecting that light, making the circuit of the earth seven times in a second, and reaching us from the sun in eight minutes and twenty seconds, would require seven years to reach the surface of the sphere we have supposed. Now, the first result of measures of parallax is that within this enormous sphere there is, besides our sun in the center, only a single star; named Alpha Centauri."

A sphere having double this radius, that is, 800,000 times the distance of the sun, and containing eight times the volume, would enclose only about eight additional fixed stars. Estimating upon this basis, he concludes that the stars which are known to exist, and which have been tabulated in large part, occupy a region "whose boundary is two hundred million times the distance of the sun,— a distance through which light would travel in about thirty-three hundred years!" The impinge of this thought of immeasurable vastness begets a sense of awe, and of human insignificance, such as may have moved the Psalmist to say "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" Indeed one is stunned rather than uplifted by it, unless this overwhelming thought of the immensity of being is lighted up with the realization that the all-supporting, all-embracing infinite is divine Love, our Father-Mother God. The abiding faith that He who hath bound "the sweet influence of the Pleiades," and loosed "the bands of Orion," who bringeth forth "Mazzaroth in his season," and guideth "Arcturus with his sons," is our strength and our defender,—this gives an entirely new significance and value to the data of astronomy, as it does also to the data of every other domain of nature. When we can discover within the flower, beyond the sunset, and above the stars that which makes us more adequate for the sick-room, more authoritative over sin, more calm and Christ-like in every human exigency and demand,—then, indeed, have we found nature's secret, and though perhaps unphrased and unframed, our philosophy will stand every assault of doubt and distress.