which come to us every now and then from far remote systems, for a
comet, I suppose, is only seen for a month, or a week, and then
sometimes does not reappear for hundreds of years. Where have they gone
all that while? Well, they have gone somewhere, and they are serving the
purpose of the God who made them, I dare say; but, for my own part, I
would not like to be a comet in God's system. I would like to have my
fixed place, and keep on shining for the Lord there. I have lived in
London for a good many years, and I have seen many comets come and go
during that time. Oh, the great lights I have seen rush by! They have
gone off into some unknown sphere, as comets usually do. I have
generally noticed that, when men are going to do so much more than
everybody else, and they are so amazingly pompous over it, their history
is usually pretty accurately described by that simple simile of going up
like a rocket and coming down like a stick.
* * * * *
I do not know whether you can, in imagination, lean over the battlements
of this little solar system, and see what there is beyond it. Do not
narrow your minds, gentlemen, to a few hundred millions of miles! If you
look out for a long way indeed, you will begin to see a star. I should
only be uttering meaningless words if I told you its distance from us;
yet there are others, of those that we are able to see, that are almost
immeasurably farther away. They have taken a deal of trouble to send us
a ray of light such a vast distance, to inform us that they are getting
on very well, and that, though they are at such a distance from us, they
still enjoy themselves as best they can in our absence.
These stars, as the common people look at them, seem to be scattered
about in the heavens, as we say, "anyhow." I always admire that charming
variety; and I am thankful to God that he has not set the stars in
straight lines, like rows of street-lamps. Only think, brethren, how it
would be if we looked up at night, and saw the stars all arranged in
rows, like pins on a paper! Bless the Lord, it is not so! He just took a
handful of bright worlds, and scattered them about the sky, and they
dropped into most beautiful positions, so that people say, "There is the
Great Bear;" and, "That is Charles's Wain," and every countryman knows
the Reaping-hook. Have you not seen it, brethren? Others say, "That is
the Virgin, and that is the Ram, and that is the Bull," and so on.
I think that naming of the various constellations is very like a good
deal of mystical preaching that there is nowadays. The preachers say,
"That is so-and-so, and that is so-and-so." Well, perhaps it is so; but
I do not see it. You may imagine anything you like in the constellations
of the heavens. I have pictured a fortress in the fire, and watched it
being built up, and seen little soldiers come and pull it all down. You
can see anything in the fire, and in the sky, and in the Bible, if you
like to look for it in that way; you do not see it in reality, it is
only a freak of your imagination. There are no bulls and bears in the
heavens. There may be a virgin, but she is not to be worshiped as the
Romanists teach. I hope you all know the pole-star; you ought also to
know the pointers; they point to the pole-star, and that is just what we
ought to do, to direct the poor slaves of sin and Satan to the true Star
of liberty, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Then there are the Pleiades; almost anybody can tell you where they are.
They are a cluster of apparently little stars, but they are intensely
bright. They teach me that, if I am a very little man, I must try to be
very bright; if I cannot be like Aldebaran, or some of the brightest
gems of the sky, I must be as bright as I can in my own particular
sphere, and be as useful there as if I were a star of the first
magnitude. Then, on the other side of the globe, they look up to the
Southern Cross. I dare say one of our brethren from Australia will give
you a private lecture upon that constellation. It is very beautiful to
think of the Cross being the guide of the mariner; it is the best guide
any one can have, either this side of the tropics or the other.
* * * * *
Besides the stars, there are vast luminous bodies which are called
NEBULÆ. In some parts of the heavens there are enormous masses of
light-matter; they were supposed by some to be the material out of which
worlds were made. These were the lumps of mortar, out of which,
according to the old atheistic theory, worlds grew by some singular
process of evolution; but when Herschel turned his telescope upon them,
he very soon put the nose of that theory out of joint, for he discovered
that these nebulæ were simply enormous masses of stars, such myriads
upon myriads of miles away that, to our sight, they looked just like a
little dust of light.
* * * * *
There are many wonderful things to be learned about the stars, to which
I hope you will give your earnest attention as you have the opportunity.
Among the rest is this fact, that some stars have ceased to be visible
to us. Tycho Brahé said that on one occasion he found a number of
villagers looking up at the sky; and on asking them why they were gazing
at the heavens, they told him that a new star had suddenly appeared. It
shone brightly for a few months, and then vanished. Many times a starry
world has seemed to turn red, as if it were on fire; it has apparently
burned, and blazed away, and then disappeared. Kepler, writing
concerning such a phenomenon, says: "What it may portend is hard to
determine; and thus much only is certain, that it comes to tell mankind
either nothing at all, or high and weighty news, quite beyond human
sense and understanding." In allusion to the opinions of some, who
explained the novel object by the Epicurean doctrine of a fortuitous
combination of atoms, he remarks, with characteristic oddity, yet good
sense, "I will tell these disputants--my opponents--not my opinion, but
my wife's. Yesterday, when weary with writing, and my mind quite dusty
with considering these atoms, I was called to supper, and a salad that I
had asked for was set before me. 'It seems, then,' said I aloud, 'that
if pewter dishes, leaves of lettuce, grains of salt, drops of water,
vinegar, and oil, and slices of egg, had been flying about in the air
from all eternity, it might at last happen, by chance, that there would
come a salad.' 'Yes,' says my wife, 'but not one so nice or well
dressed as this which I have made for you.'"
So I should think; and if the fortuitous combination of atoms could not
make a salad, it is not very likely that they could make a world. I once
asked a man who said that the world was a fortuitous concourse of atoms,
"Have you ever chanced to have no money, and to be away where you knew
nobody who would give you a dinner?" He replied, "Yes, I have." "Well,
then," said I, "did it ever happen to you that a fortuitous concourse of
atoms made a leg of mutton for you, with some nice boiled turnips, and
caper sauce, for your dinner?" "No," he said, "it has not." "Well," I
answered, "a leg of mutton, at any rate, even with turnips and caper
sauce included, is an easier thing to make than one of these worlds,
like Jupiter or Venus."
We are told, in the Word of God, that one star differeth from another
star in glory; yet one that is small may give more light to us than a
larger star which is farther away. Some stars are what is called
variable, they appear larger at one time than another. Algol, in the
head of Medusa, is of this kind. We are told that "the star, at the
brightest, appears of the second magnitude, and remains so for about two
days, fourteen hours. Its light then diminishes, and so rapidly that in
three and a half hours it is reduced to the fourth magnitude. It wears
this aspect rather more than fifteen minutes, then increases, and in
three and a half hours more resumes its former appearance." I am afraid
that many of us are variable stars; if we do sometimes wax dim, it will
be well if we regain our brightness as quickly as Algol does. Then there
are thousands of double stars. I hope that you will each get a wife who
will always shine with you, and never eclipse you, for a double star may
be very bright at one time, and sometimes be eclipsed altogether. There
are also triple stars, or systems, and quadruple systems, and there are,
in some cases, hundreds or thousands all spinning round one another, and
around their central luminaries. Wonderful combinations of glory and
beauty may be seen in the stellar sky; and some of these stars are red,
some blue, some yellow; all the colors of the rainbow are represented in
them. It would be very wonderful to live in one of them, and to look
across the sky, and see all the glories of the heavens that God has
made. On the whole, however, for the present, I am quite content to
abide upon this little planet, especially as I am not able to change it
for another home, until God so wills it.
SUNDAY-SCHOOL AS AN INSTITUTION, What Shall We Do With The.--By George
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End of Project Gutenberg's The Art of Illustration, by Charles Haddon Spurgeon