[Illustration]
I have wondered a thousand times, if an infidel ever looked through a
telescope. The universe is the dream of God, and the heavens declare
His glory. There is our mighty sun, robed in the brightness of his
eternal fires, and with his planets forever wheeling around him. Yonder
is Mercury, and Venus, and there is Mars, the ruddy globe, whose poles
are white with snow, and whose other zones seem dotted with seas and
continents. Who knows but that his roseate color is only the blush of
his flowers? Who knows but that Mars may now be a paradise inhabited by
a blessed race, unsullied by sin, untouched by death? There is the giant
orb of Jupiter, the champion of the skies, belted and sashed with vapor
and clouds; and Saturn, haloed with bands of light and jeweled with
eight ruddy moons; and there is Uranus, another stupendous world,
speeding on in the prodigious circle of his tireless journey around the
sun. And yet another orbit cuts the outer rim of our system; and on its
gloomy pathway, the lonely Neptune walks the cold, dim solitudes of
space. In the immeasurable depths beyond appear millions of suns, so
distant that their light could not reach us in a thousand years. There,
spangling the curtains of the black profound, shine the constellations
that sparkle like the crown jewels of God. There are double, and triple,
and quadruple suns of different colors, commingling their gorgeous hues
and flaming like archangels on the frontier of stellar space. If we
look beyond the most distant star, the black walls are flecked with
innumerable patches of filmy light like the dewy gossamers of the
spider's loom that dot our fields at morn. What beautiful forms we trace
among those phantoms of light! circles, and elipses, and crowns, and
shields, and spiral wreaths of palest silver. And what are they? Did
I say phantoms of light? The telescope resolves them into millions of
suns, standing out from the oceans of white hot matter that contain the
germs of countless systems yet to be. And so far removed from us are
these suns, that the light which comes to us from them to-night has been
speeding on its way for more than two million years.
What is that white belt we call the milky way, which spans the heavens
and sparkles like a Sahara of diamonds? It is a river of stars: it is
a gulf stream of suns; and if each of these suns holds in his grasp a
mighty system of planets, as ours does, how many multiplied millions
of worlds like our own are now circling in that innumerable concourse?
Oh, where are the bounds of this divine conception! Where ends this
dream of God? And is there no life and intelligence in all this throng
of spheres? Are there no sails on those far away summer seas, no wings
to cleave those crystal airs, no forms divine to walk those radiant
fields? Are there no eyes to see those floods of light, no hearts to
share with ours that love which holds all these mighty orbs in place?
It cannot be, it cannot be! Surely there is a God! If there is not,
life is a dream, human experience is a phantom, and the universe is
a flaunting lie!
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[Illustration: Syrup of Figs]