"Seek Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion."--AMOS. v. 8
A country farmer wrote this text--Amos of Tekoa. He plowed the earth
and threshed the grain by a new threshing-machine just invented, as
formerly the cattle trod out the grain. He gathered the fruit of the
sycamore-tree, and scarified it with an iron comb just before it was
getting ripe, as it was necessary and customary in that way to take
from it the bitterness. He was the son of a poor shepherd, and
stuttered; but before the stammering rustic the Philistines, and
Syrians, and Phoenicians, and Moabites, and Ammonites, and Edomites,
and Israelites trembled.
Moses was a law-giver, Daniel was a prince, Isaiah a courtier, and
David a king; but Amos, the author of my text, was a peasant, and, as
might be supposed, nearly all his parallelisms are pastoral, his
prophecy full of the odor of new-mown hay, and the rattle of locusts,
and the rumble of carts with sheaves, and the roar of wild beasts
devouring the flock while the shepherd came out in their defense. He
watched the herds by day, and by night inhabited a booth made out of
bushes, so that through these branches he could see the stars all
night long, and was more familiar with them than we who have tight
roofs to our houses, and hardly ever see the stars except among the
tall brick chimneys of the great towns. But at seasons of the year
when the herds were in special danger, he would stay out in the open
field all through the darkness, his only shelter the curtain of the
night, heaven, with the stellar embroideries and silvered tassels of
lunar light.
What a life of solitude, all alone with his herds! Poor Amos! And at
twelve o'clock at night, hark to the wolf's bark, and the lion's roar,
and the bear's growl, and the owl's te-whit-te-whos, and the serpent's
hiss, as he unwittingly steps too near while moving through the
thickets! So Amos, like other herdsmen, got the habit of studying the
map of the heavens, because it was so much of the time spread out
before him. He noticed some stars advancing and others receding. He
associated their dawn and setting with certain seasons of the year. He
had a poetic nature, and he read night by night, and month by month,
and year by year, the poem of the constellations, divinely rhythmic.
But two rosettes of stars especially attracted his attention while
seated on the ground, or lying on his back under the open scroll of
the midnight heavens--the Pleiades, or Seven Stars, and Orion. The
former group this rustic prophet associated with the spring, as it
rises about the first of May. The latter he associated with the
winter, as it comes to the meridian in January. The Pleiades, or Seven
Stars, connected with all sweetness and joy; Orion, the herald of the
tempest. The ancients were the more apt to study the physiognomy and
juxtaposition of the heavenly bodies, because they thought they had a
special influence upon the earth; and perhaps they were right. If the
moon every few hours lifts and lets down the tides of the Atlantic
Ocean, and the electric storms of last year in the sun, by all
scientific admission, affected the earth, why not the stars have
proportionate effect?
And there are some things which make me think that it may not have
been all superstition which connected the movements and appearance of
the heavenly bodies with great moral events on earth. Did not a meteor
run on evangelistic errand on the first Christmas night, and designate
the rough cradle of our Lord? Did not the stars in their courses fight
against Sisera? Was it merely coincidental that before the destruction
of Jerusalem the moon was eclipsed for twelve consecutive nights? Did
it merely happen so that a new star appeared in constellation
Cassiopeia, and then disappeared just before King Charles IX. of
France, who was responsible for St. Bartholomew massacre, died? Was it
without significance that in the days of the Roman Emperor Justinian
war and famine were preceded by the dimness of the sun, which for
nearly a year gave no more light than the moon, although there were no
clouds to obscure it?
Astrology, after all, may have been something more than a brilliant
heathenism. No wonder that Amos of the text, having heard these two
anthems of the stars, put down the stout rough staff of the herdsman
and took into his brown hand and cut and knotted fingers the pen of a
prophet, and advised the recreant people of his time to return to God,
saying: "Seek Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion." This
command, which Amos gave 785 years B.C., is just as appropriate for
us, 1885 A.D.
In the first place, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made
the Pleiades and Orion must be the God of order. It was not so much a
star here and a star there that impressed the inspired herdsman, but
seven in one group, and seven in the other group. He saw that night
after night and season after season and decade after decade they had
kept step of light, each one in its own place, a sisterhood never
clashing and never contesting precedence. From the time Hesiod called
the Pleiades the "seven daughters of Atlas" and Virgil wrote in his
Æneid of "Stormy Orion" until now, they have observed the order
established for their coming and going; order written not in
manuscript that may be pigeon-holed, but with the hand of the Almighty
on the dome of the sky, so that all nations may read it. Order.
Persistent order. Sublime order. Omnipotent order.
What a sedative to you and me, to whom communities and nations
sometimes seem going pell-mell, and world ruled by some fiend at
hap-hazard, and in all directions maladministration! The God who keeps
seven worlds in right circuit for six thousand years can certainly
keep all the affairs of individuals and nations and continents in
adjustment. We had not better fret much, for the peasant's argument of
the text was right. If God can take care of the seven worlds of the
Pleiades and the four chief worlds of Orion, He can probably take care
of the one world we inhabit.
So I feel very much as my father felt one day when we were going to
the country mill to get a grist ground, and I, a boy of seven years,
sat in the back part of the wagon, and our yoke of oxen ran away with
us and along a labyrinthine road through the woods, so that I thought
every moment we would be dashed to pieces, and I made a terrible
outcry of fright, and my father turned to me with a face perfectly
calm, and said: "De Witt, what are you crying about? I guess we can
ride as fast as the oxen can run." And, my hearers, why should we be
affrighted and lose our equilibrium in the swift movement of worldly
events, especially when we are assured that it is not a yoke of
unbroken steers that are drawing us on, but that order and wise
government are in the yoke?
In your occupation, your mission, your sphere, do the best you can,
and then trust to God; and if things are all mixed and disquieting,
and your brain is hot and your heart sick, get some one to go out with
you into the starlight and point out to you the Pleiades, or, better
than that, get into some observatory, and through the telescope see
further than Amos with the naked eye could--namely, two hundred stars
in the Pleiades, and that in what is called the sword of Orion there
is a nebula computed to be two trillion two hundred thousand billions
of times larger than the sun. Oh, be at peace with the God who made
all that and controls all that--the wheel of the constellations
turning in the wheel of galaxies for thousands of years without the
breaking of a cog or the slipping of a band or the snap of an axle.
For your placidity and comfort through the Lord Jesus Christ I charge
you, "Seek Him that maketh the Seven Stars and Orion."
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made these two
groups of the text was the God of light. Amos saw that God was not
satisfied with making one star, or two or three stars, but He makes
seven; and having finished that group of worlds, makes another
group--group after group. To the Pleiades He adds Orion. It seems that
God likes light so well that He keeps making it. Only one being in the
universe knows the statistics of solar, lunar, stellar, meteoric
creations, and that is the--Creator Himself. And they have all been
lovingly christened, each one a name as distinct as the names of your
children. "He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by
their names." The seven Pleiades had names given to them, and they are
Alcyone, Merope, Celæno, Electra, Sterope, Taygete, and Maia.
But think of the billions and trillions of daughters of starry light
that God calls by name as they sweep by Him with beaming brow and
lustrous robe! So fond is God of light--natural light, moral light,
spiritual light. Again and again is light harnessed for
symbolization--Christ, the bright and morning star; evangelization,
the daybreak; the redemption of nations, Sun of Righteousness rising
with healing in His wings. Oh, men and women, with so many sorrows and
sins and perplexities, if you want light of comfort, light of pardon,
light of goodness, in earnest, pray through Christ, "Seek Him that
maketh the Seven Stars and Orion."
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made these two
archipelagoes of stars must be an unchanging God. There had been no
change in the stellar appearance in this herdsman's life-time, and his
father, a shepherd, reported to him that there had been no change in
his life-time. And these two clusters hang over the celestial arbor
now just as they were the first night that they shone on the Edenic
bowers, the same as when the Egyptians built the Pyramids from the top
of which to watch them, the same as when the Chaldeans calculated the
eclipses, the same as when Elihu, according to the Book of Job, went
out to study the aurora borealis, the same under Ptolemaic system and
Copernican system, the same from Calisthenes to Pythagoras, and from
Pythagoras to Herschel. Surely, a changeless God must have fashioned
the Pleiades and Orion! Oh, what an anodyne amid the ups and downs of
life, and the flux and reflux of the tides of prosperity, to know that
we have a changeless God, the same yesterday, to-day, and forever.
Xerxes garlanded and knighted the steersman of his boat in the
morning, and hanged him in the evening of the same day. Fifty thousand
people stood around the columns of the national capitol, shouting
themselves hoarse at the presidential inaugural, and in four months so
great were the antipathies that a ruffian's pistol in Washington depot
expressed the sentiment of a great multitude. The world sits in its
chariot and drives tandem, and the horse ahead is Huzza, and the horse
behind is Anathema. Lord Cobham, in King James' time, was applauded,
and had thirty-five thousand dollars a year, but was afterward
execrated, and lived on scraps stolen from the royal kitchen.
Alexander the Great after death remained unburied for thirty days,
because no one would do the honor of shoveling him under. The Duke of
Wellington refused to have his iron fence mended, because it had been
broken by an infuriated populace in some hour of political
excitement, and he left it in ruins that men might learn what a fickle
thing is human favor. "But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting
to everlasting to them that fear Him, and His righteousness unto the
children's children of such as keep His covenant, and to those who
remember His commandments to do them." This moment "seek Him that
maketh the Seven Stars and Orion."
Again, Amos saw, as we must see, that the God who made these two
beacons of the Oriental night sky must be a God of love and kindly
warning. The Pleiades rising in mid-sky said to all the herdsmen and
shepherds and husbandmen: "Come out and enjoy the mild weather, and
cultivate your gardens and fields." Orion, coming in winter, warned
them to prepare for tempest. All navigation was regulated by these two
constellations. The one said to shipmaster and crew: "Hoist sail for
the sea, and gather merchandise from other lands." But Orion was the
storm-signal, and said: "Reef sail, make things snug, or put into
harbor, for the hurricanes are getting their wings out." As the
Pleiades were the sweet evangels of the spring, Orion was the warning
prophet of the winter.
Oh, now I get the best view of God I ever had! There are two kinds of
sermons I never want to preach--the one that presents God so kind, so
indulgent, so lenient, so imbecile that men may do what they will
against Him, and fracture His every law, and put the cry of their
impertinence and rebellion under His throne, and while they are
spitting in His face and stabbing at His heart, He takes them up in
His arms and kisses their infuriated brow and cheek, saying, "Of such
is the kingdom of heaven." The other kind of sermon I never want to
preach is the one that represents God as all fire and torture and
thundercloud, and with red-hot pitch-fork tossing the human race into
paroxysms of infinite agony. The sermon that I am now preaching
believes in a God of loving, kindly warning, the God of spring and
winter, the God of the Pleiades and Orion.
You must remember that the winter is just as important as the spring.
Let one winter pass without frost to kill vegetation and ice to bind
the rivers and snow to enrich our fields, and then you will have to
enlarge your hospitals and your cemeteries. "A green Christmas makes a
fat grave-yard," was the old proverb. Storms to purify the air.
Thermometer at ten degrees above zero to tone up the system. December
and January just as important as May and June. I tell you we need the
storms of life as much as we do the sunshine. There are more men
ruined by prosperity than by adversity. If we had our own way in life,
before this we would have been impersonations of selfishness and
worldliness and disgusting sin, and puffed up until we would have been
like Julius Cæsar, who was made by sycophants to believe that he was
divine, and the freckles on his face were as the stars of the
firmament.
One of the swiftest transatlantic voyages made last summer by the
"Etruria" was because she had a stormy wind abaft, chasing her from
New York to Liverpool. But to those going in the opposite direction
the storm was a buffeting and a hinderance. It is a bad thing to have
a storm ahead, pushing us back; but if we be God's children and
aiming toward heaven, the storms of life will only chase us the sooner
into the harbor. I am so glad to believe that the monsoons, and
typhoons, and mistrals, and siroccos of the land and sea are not
unchained maniacs let loose upon the earth, but are under divine
supervision! I am so glad that the God of the Seven Stars is also the
God of Orion! It was out of Dante's suffering came the sublime "Divina
Commedia," and out of John Milton's blindness came "Paradise Lost,"
and out of miserable infidel attack came the "Bridgewater Treatise" in
favor of Christianity, and out of David's exile came the songs of
consolation, and out of the sufferings of Christ came the possibility
of the world's redemption, and out of your bereavement, your
persecution, your poverties, your misfortunes, may yet come an eternal
heaven.
Oh, what a mercy it is that in the text and all up and down the Bible
God induces us to look out toward other worlds! Bible astronomy in
Genesis, in Joshua, in Job, in the Psalms, in the prophets, major and
minor, in St. John's Apocalypse, practically saying, "Worlds! worlds!
worlds! Get ready for them!" We have a nice little world here that we
stick to, as though losing that we lose all. We are afraid of falling
off this little raft of a world. We are afraid that some meteoric
iconoclast will some night smash it, and we want everything to revolve
around it, and are disappointed when we find that it revolves around
the sun instead of the sun revolving around it. What a fuss we make
about this little bit of a world, its existence only a short time
between two spasms, the paroxysm by which it was hurled from chaos
into order, and the paroxysm of its demolition.
And I am glad that so many texts call us to look off to other worlds,
many of them larger and grander and more resplendent. "Look there,"
says Job, "at Mazaroth and Arcturus and his sons!" "Look there," says
St. John, "at the moon under Christ's feet!" "Look there," says
Joshua, "at the sun standing still above Gibeon!" "Look there," says
Moses, "at the sparkling firmament!" "Look there," says Amos, the
herdsman, "at the Seven Stars and Orion!" Don't let us be so sad about
those who shove off from this world under Christly pilotage. Don't let
us be so agitated about our own going off this little barge or sloop
or canal-boat of a world to get on some "Great Eastern" of the
heavens. Don't let us persist in wanting to stay in this barn, this
shed, this outhouse of a world, when all the King's palaces already
occupied by many of our best friends are swinging wide open their
gates to let us in.
When I read, "In my Father's house are many mansions," I do not know
but that each world is a room, and as many rooms as there are worlds,
stellar stairs, stellar galleries, stellar hallways, stellar windows,
stellar domes. How our departed friends must pity us shut up in these
cramped apartments, tired if we walk fifteen miles, when they some
morning, by one stroke of wing, can make circuit of the whole stellar
system and be back in time for matins! Perhaps yonder twinkling
constellation is the residence of the martyrs; that group of twelve
luminaries is the celestial home of the Apostles. Perhaps that steep
of light is the dwelling-place of angels cherubic, seraphic,
archangelic. A mansion with as many rooms as worlds, and all their
windows illuminated for festivity.
Oh, how this widens and lifts and stimulates our expectation! How
little it makes the present, and how stupendous it makes the future!
How it consoles us about our pious dead, that instead of being boxed
up and under the ground have the range of as many rooms as there are
worlds, and welcome everywhere, for it is the Father's house, in which
there are many mansions! Oh, Lord God of the Seven Stars and Orion,
how can I endure the transport, the ecstasy, of such a vision! I must
obey my text and seek Him. I will seek Him. I seek Him now, for I call
to mind that it is not the material universe that is most valuable,
but the spiritual, and that each of us has a soul worth more than all
the worlds which the inspired herdsman saw from his booth on the hills
of Tekoa.
I had studied it before, but the Cathedral of Cologne, Germany, never
impressed me as it did this summer. It is admittedly the grandest
Gothic structure in the world, its foundation laid in 1248, only two
or three years ago completed. More than six hundred years in building.
All Europe taxed for its construction. Its chapel of the Magi with
precious stones enough to purchase a kingdom. Its chapel of St. Agnes
with masterpieces of painting. Its spire springing five hundred and
eleven feet into the heavens. Its stained glass the chorus of all rich
colors. Statues encircling the pillars and encircling all. Statues
above statues, until sculpture can do no more, but faints and falls
back against carved stalls and down on pavements over which the kings
and queens of the earth have walked to confession. Nave and aisles and
transept and portals combining the splendors of sunrise. Interlaced,
interfoliated, intercolumned grandeur. As I stood outside, looking at
the double range of flying buttresses and the forest of pinnacles,
higher and higher and higher, until I almost reeled from dizziness, I
exclaimed; "Great doxology in stone! Frozen prayer of many nations!"
But while standing there I saw a poor man enter and put down his pack
and kneel beside his burden on the hard floor of that cathedral. And
tears of deep emotion came into my eyes, as I said to myself: "There
is a soul worth more than all the material surroundings. That man will
live after the last pinnacle has fallen, and not one stone of all that
cathedral glory shall remain uncrumbled. He is now a Lazarus in rags
and poverty and weariness, but immortal, and a son of the Lord God
Almighty; and the prayer he now offers, though amid many
superstitions, I believe God will hear; and among the Apostles whose
sculptured forms stand in the surrounding niches he will at last be
lifted, and into the presence of that Christ whose sufferings are
represented by the crucifix before which he bows; and be raised in due
time out of all his poverties into the glorious home built for him and
built for us by 'Him who maketh the Seven Stars and Orion.'"