tures are not only vindicated, but far more than vindicated, by the progress of astronomical discovery. It not only proves the language of the Bible to be correct; it assures us that it is divine. The same Hand which formed the stars to guide the simple peasant to his dwelling, at the close of day, and to lead the mighty intellects of Newton and of Herschel among the mysteries of the universe, formed those expressions which, to the peasant's eye, describe the apparent reality, and, to the astronomer's reason, demonstrate the reality of the appearance of the heavens, and are thus, alike to peasant and philosopher, the oracles of God. Nor is this the only instance of such Bible oracles. Thousands of years before philosophers knew anything of the formation of dew, Moses described it exactly, and noticed. how it differed from the rain which drops down, while the dew evaporates. "My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew."-Deuteronomy xxxii. 2. Solomon described the cycloidal course of the wind, and recorded it in Ecclesiastes long before Admiral Fitzroy's discovery; as he also anticipated the doctrine of aqueous circulation in his pregnant proverb: "Unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again."— Ecclesiastes i. 7. Job declared the law of pneumatics when he declared that "God maketh weight for the winds." Long before Madler, the celebrated Russian astronomer, published his remarkable opinion: "I regard the Pleiades as the central group to the whole astral system, and the fixed stars, even to its outer limits, marked by the Milky Way; and I regard Alcyone as that star of all others, composing the group which is favored by most of the probabilities as being the true central sun of the universe," Moses tells us they were known as "the hinge, or pivot," of the heavens; and God asks, "Canst thou bind the secret influences of the Pleiades?" Though Peter was no geologist, and probably incapable of calculating the ratio of the central heat, he tells us that the heavens and the earth are "reserved unto fire," literally, "stored with fire." Equally in advance of modern medical science, thousands of years before our modern discoveries, the Author of the Bible declared that "the life is in the blood," and spoke of the slow combustion of starvation exactly in the language of the most recent physiology, "they shall be burnt with hunger, and devoured with burning heat."-Deuteronomy xxxii. 24. Here we have scientific truth not discovered for centuries by our men of science, but revealed by prophets-scientific discovery, in advance of science-predictions of the future progress of the human intellect, no less than revelations of the existing motions of the stars. He who wrote these oracles knew that the creatures to whom he gave them would one day unfold their hidden meaning (else he had not so written them), and in the light of scientific discovery, see them to be as truly divine predictions of the advance of science, as the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, read among the ruins of Thebes or Babylon, are seen to be predictions of the ruin of empires. Man's discoveries fade into insignificance in the presence of such unfolding mysteries; and we are led to our Bibles, with the prayer, "Open mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law." 4. The ancient charter of the Church was written in the language of one of the most recent astronomical discoveries, thirty-six hundred years before Herschel and Rosse enabled us to understand its full significance: "He brought him forth abroad, and said unto him, Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and he said unto him, So shall thy seed be."* *Genesis, chap. xv. 5. The scenery was well calculated to impress Abraham's mind with a sense of the ability of Christ to fulfill a very glorious promise, by a very improbable event; but the illustration was as well calculated as the promise to test the character of that faith which takes God's Word as sufficient evidence of things not seen; for, if the promise was a trying test of faith, so was the illustration. Before this, God had promised that his seed should be as the dust of the earth; and afterward he declared it should be as the sand of the seashore; the well-known symbol of a multitude beyond all power of calculation. To couple the stars of heaven with the sand upon the seashore in any such connection as to imply that the stars too were innumerable, or that their number came within any degree of comparison with the ocean sands, must have seemed to Abraham in the highest degree mysterious, even as it has appeared to scoffers, in modern times, utterly ridiculous; for, though the first glance at the sky conveys the impression that the stars are really innumerable, the investigations of our imperfect astronomy seem to assure us that this is by no means the case. And, as the patriarch sat, night after night, at his tent door, and, in obedience to the command of Christ, counted the stars, and made such a catalogue of them as his Chaldean preceptors had used, he would very speedily come to the conclusion, that so far as he could see, they were by no means innumerable; for the catalogue of Hipparchus reckons only one thousand and twenty-two as visible to one observer, and the whole number visible in both hemispheres by the naked eye does not exceed eight thousand.* And even if we suppose, that these old patriarchs had better eyes, as we know they had a clearer sky, than modern western observers, and that Abraham saw the moons of Jupiter, and stars as small, still the number would not seem in the * Cosmos I. 140. least degree comparable with the number of the sands upon the seashore-whereof a million are contained in a cubic inch,* a number greater than the population of the globe in a square foot,† while the sum total of the human race, from Adam to this hour, would not approach to the aggregate of the sands of a single mile. Though the stars of a size too small to be visible to our eyes, are much more numerous than the larger stars, yet even up to the range of view possessed by ordinary telescopes, they are by no means innumerable. In fact, they are counted and registered, and the number of the stars of the ninth magnitude, which are four times as distant as the most distant visible to our eyes -so distant that their light is five hundred and eighty-six years in traveling toward us-is declared to be exactly thirty-seven thousand seven hundred and thirty-nine. Abraham's sense and Abraham's faith must have had many a conflict on this promise, as the faith and the sense of many of his children, especially the scientific portion of them, have since, when reading such portions as this; and those other Scriptures which represent it as an achievement of Omniscience, that "he telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names." It is indeed remarkable how God delights to test the faith of his people, and to stumble the pride of fools, by presenting this mysterious truth, of the innumerable multitude of the stars, in every announcement of the wonderful works of Him who is perfect in wisdom. Infant astronomy stretched out her hands to catch the stars, and count them. Many a proud Infidel wondered that Moses could be so silly as to suppose he could not count the stars, and the believer often wondered Ehrenberg computes that there are forty-one millions of the shells of animalculæ in a cubic inch of Bilier Slate. † Annual of Scientific Discovery, 1860, p. 341. Psalm cxlvii. 4. what these words could mean. But faith rests in the persuasion of two great truths: "God is very wise," and "I am very ignorant." The increase of knowledge, by widening the boundaries of our ignorance, seemed for a time to render the difficulty even greater. The increased power of Herschel's telescope, and his discovery of the constitution of the Milky Way, mark an era in the progress of astronomy, and enlarge our views of the extent of the universe, to an extent inconceivable by those who have not studied the science. Where we see only a faint whitish cloud stretching across the sky, Herschel's telescope disclosed a vast bed of stars. At one time he counted five hundred and eighty-eight stars in the field of his telescope. In a quarter of an hour, one hundred and sixteen thousand passed before his eye. In another portion, he found three hundred and thirty-one thousand stars in a single cluster.* He found the whole structure of that vast luminous cloud which spans the sky, "to consist entirely of stars, scattered by millions, like glittering dust, on the background of the general heavens." Yet still it was not supposed to be at all impossible to estimate their numbers. Even this distinguished astronomer, a few years ago, computed it at eight or ten millions. Schroeter allowed twenty degrees of it to pass before him, and withdrew from the majestic spactacle, exclaiming, "What Omnipotence!" He calculated, however, that the number of the stars visible through one of the best telescopes in Europe, in 1840, was twelve millions; a number equaled by a single generation of Abraham's descendants, far below the power of computation, and utterly insignificant, as compared with the sands of the sea. Had our powers of observation stopped here, the great promise must still have seemed as mysterious to the astron * Dick's Sidereal Heavens, 59; Herschel's Outlines, |