What pleasures you have in astronomy, what a constant delight! You
are reading the poems of the old Greeks written in the skies. They
had thoughts about manhood so broad, so heroic, so full of glorious
sympathies, that there were no books on earth fit to record them in,
no marbles enduring enough to celebrate the remarkable and interesting
deeds. So they took the page of the clear heavens, and put one hero
there, and some suffering one near by, and the hero marching on to the
deliverance of the suffering. The poetry, the pathos, the great deeds,
the special sacrifices, all that they could think of, was written in
the skies, and they read it nightly and taught it to their children
in the open air. They read it as they sailed on the round sea. They
kept in their minds the glory and heroism of the race, as it was there
portrayed before them.
But the thoughts of the Greeks were mean and poor and small, compared
with the thoughts that come to the astronomer of to-day. Then the stars
were only little points in the heavens, and now they are greater worlds
than we can think. We use them as the machinery of the gymnasium upon
which to stretch our minds and invigorate our thought, not only in
regard to material distance and greatness and glory, and years without
count, but after a little they will become significant of the infinite
power and godhead of our father who made all these things. Paul puts it
just right, that these things that are seen tell of the eternal power
and Godhead, so that people that see these things, and do not believe
in him, are even without excuse. Then comes the teachings of the Elder
Brother and the infinite Savior teaching something more than his power
and Godhead, even of his Fatherhood and loving care for his children.
Do you know the pleasure of reading these heavens, of all the bright
eyes signify, perchance, to you, in their nightly gaze upon you?
Whenever I look into the heavens above there are friendly faces,
there are bright eyes, there are, I may almost say, individuals that
I well know, that I can not only call their names, but tell the very
substances of which they are made, and rejoice that they look down upon
me with a friendly eye. Under the oak at Hebron I hear God’s voice
saying to me, as it did to Abraham, “Lift up thine eyes now unto the
heavens.” When God wants to make a man great enough to found a nation,
to have a special influence on the earth, he takes him out under
the open heavens. By the infinite stars Abraham got his faith in an
infinite God enlarged enough to trust him in all things.
I think any one who has not known the heavens might complain like
Carlyle in his old age, “Why didn’t somebody teach me when I was young
the names of the stars and the groupings of the constellations, which I
do not half know now, and thereby have lost pleasure for a lifetime?”
You can easily teach these things to those about you, to younger
brothers and sisters, to children committed to your care as teachers.
They will receive such teaching with delight. First teach them the
North Star and the Pointers as always directing the gaze toward it.
Tell them some stories about the Greek mythology of Theseus. Then tell
them a little about finding some of the constellations. Teach them to
know where to look for them at various seasons of the year. Then come
to the planets. The planet that happens to be plainest in your sky
at present is Venus. Tell them how far east it will come among the
stars. You can get, in any ordinary almanac, her greatest elongation,
the date, the time, and the star to which it goes. Tell one of these
children that this star in the sky will journey so far toward the
east, and then begin to go back among the stars toward the west. What
a thing it will be for you to have a reputation for having the gift of
prophecy, and what a thing it will be for you and your reputation when
it comes true. Then tell them it will go west and come so close to the
sun that by and by you can scarcely see it for the glory and brightness
of the setting sun. Meanwhile, perhaps, Mercury will come in sight, and
on some favorable night, on rare occasions, you can tell them, “There,
you see that star; perhaps you will never see it again in your lives.”
Thus you will give them acquaintance with a few stars and get them
in the habit of looking up, a blessed thing for individuals in this
world to do. They will interest father and mother about it, and that
will interest all the rest of them, and it will be an exceeding great
delight. Tell them of the few stars in the east just before sunrise, of
Jupiter in the east at present. Tell them of the great changes that are
going forward in that planet at present. You saw an account of that in
the newspapers. But tell them that Jupiter has been so hot and covered
with clouds so long that probably we have never seen its surface at
all until a few months since, and now that a great floating island of
scoria has come up to the surface, and it has been seen there now for
nearly two years, and when it came near the sun men were anxious to
know if the spot would be seen when it came up on the other side of the
sun. They looked for it eagerly, and when they discovered that spot
again, it had floated a long way in longitude.
These stars seem to be almost alive, and the thought that great
activities are going on in them will exceedingly interest those with
whom you have to do.
Then, how easily you can teach your circles the idea of distance.
Just draw them in your school rooms where you “schoolma’ams”—the most
honorable name in the world except that of mother—are permitted to
teach. Draw them, and by this means you will be able to teach these
little ones a few fundamental facts, and enlarge yourselves as you
strive to grasp these distances. Bring the idea to them how long it
would take a locomotive to go from the earth to the sun, three hundred
and twenty years, running all the time; how long it would take to go
elsewhere. Just stretch these little ones, for minds never give way,
however much they may stretch or enlarge, stretch them up to understand
these things that God has put before us.
I will represent the size of the sun by this table, and then represent
Mercury and Venus with the head of a pin; represent the earth by a
small-sized pea, very small, the smallest that grows at the end of
the pod; represent Mars with another, and Jupiter with an orange. In
an astronomy which I first taught, and the first one I ever studied,
too, and it was studied and taught at the same time, there used to be
an illustration that I have often used with great profit. Go out on
your croquet ground, put down a two-bushel basket, for instance, to
represent the sun, then draw at suitable distances the orbits of the
different bodies. If you have some little children about the school
house, put the liveliest little fellow you have to represent Mercury;
then the liveliest girl to represent Venus; you know who will represent
the earth; put some little fiery fighter to represent Mars, and explain
it; then you can get some least sized brothers to represent the
asteroids; some big old grandfather that will go slowly to represent
Jupiter, etc. Try to start them. Let Mercury go his round swiftly as
possible; let Venus go with queenly dignity, and the earth more slowly.
You will get into confusion at first, and you will have a good laugh,
but you will give to those young minds some illustration of how the
earth revolves around the sun.
Don’t try to teach too much. Begin slowly with a single idea. You know
how these lectures were represented with an apple swinging around the
sun, sometimes with an elastic string to represent how near the moon
came down to it. There are a thousand ways of making this interesting,
plain and profitable. As you begin to study these, you find your own
mind develops and unfolds in this direction.
I just looked into a book of poetry before coming up here, and almost
to my surprise on a single page I found more than a dozen allusions to
the stars. Astronomy is making itself felt in literature, is coming to
be one of the largest means of expression. We are always lacking means
of expressing our thoughts; for our words you philologists know have
been mostly taken from material things, and then raised up one degree
to represent mental ideas. For instance, we say “hard” of a table,
then complain that it is a “hard” thing to bear, bringing it up into
the region of mind; and we give words one more uplift for spiritual
significance. So that our language is all the time one, two or three
degrees below the full significance of that which is in our spiritual
perception. Now, astronomy with its vastness, with its might and glory,
is coming more and more into literature, so that you want an idea of
it, and want to know what is to be understood by the words used. And
especially when you come to that highest thought, when the Infinitely
Wise condescends to speak in the language of men, and men’s words
tremble and break down and can not bear his great thought, then you
want to say, “High as the heavens are above the earth, so high are his
thoughts and ways above ours.”
How much shall we grasp of his thoughts? As much as we grasp of his
symbols. He has filled the Bible all full of his symbols, with the
Divine Word full of the things of heaven, that we may know of the
greatness and glory and power expressed in some of his great thoughts
for the children of men. And we want to rise, grasping them, more and
more of them, until “a primrose by the river’s brim, a yellow primrose,
is to” us, and something more, and the meanest flower that blows brings
thoughts that lie too deep for tears. What shall the heavens mean when
we are used to utter God’s thought?
By reason of this I want you to spread the knowledge of the heavens
above you just as freely as you possibly can. In Pennsylvania, in a
quiet inland town that was supposed to be almost dead, some one with a
little enthusiasm proposed to form a star club. It was a club for the
study of the stars, and no man was to be admitted thereto except on
certain conditions. He could be put on the course of study, he could
have his preparatory course, he could gradually come along up, but
the excellence of the real membership could not be obtained until he
passed this test, until he could go out under the open heavens and call
a hundred stars by name. How many here are eligible? A little pains
would make it, a little pains along in the early evenings of a month,
and then along in the later evenings of a month or two; a few minutes
only would give you the ability of calling a hundred stars by name. It
makes you feel a little like God, for “He calls all the stars by their
names,” in the greatness of his power. And it is good for me to know
some of the names that have trembled into the air from divine power and
out of divine wisdom; it is good to call over the works of God.
Now, with a little enthusiasm here and there and elsewhere, you can
get individuals to know the names of the stars very easily. I see here
before me what I do not hesitate to advertise, simply because I have
not been requested to do it, the outgrowth of one of our ideas in the
“Recreations in Astronomy.” You will remember that there are some dark
plates with bright spots, with directions to cut them out, stick them
in a box, and put them before a candle. It is a little crude, but that
thought has been taken up by Prof. Bailey, and a lantern constructed
that is the most perfect invention in this department ever made. [Shows
the lantern.]
This round disk is a representation of the northern heavens. It is an
exact representation of all the stars in the northern sky. It gives
their names, makes them revolve around the heavens, sets them to any
hour or minute of the night of any month, in the exact position that
they are at that very minute or month in the sky. Here on these other
sides are the other portions of the heavens, north and south. It is
beyond question the greatest invention in this line that has ever been
made. It has the approval of such astronomers as Proctor, Asaph Hall,
the men of distinction in the United States, and of such names as
carry weight and authority anywhere. This is a Chautauqua invention.
(Applause.) It has done more for the study of the heavens and the
understanding of uranography than any other invention that has been
made.[D]