A CHAPTER VI. DIFFICULTIES FROM ASTRONOMY. YOUNG MAN states to the writer his belief as follows. "I believe in a God who has a general superintendence over the affairs of the world. I believe in the immortality of the human soul. I believe that what a man does here affects generally his condition after death. Anything farther than this I doubt." Urged to tell why he doubted, the reply was that, substantially, of thousands. "God seems too great to concern himself minutely about our human affairs. It is too much to believe that he who has the care of the whole universe will condescend to notice all the thoughts of a being so insignificant to him as a single and separate man: too much to believe that he will hear him pray, and do anything because he prays, that he would not have done just as soon if the man had kept silent: too much to believe that this infinite God had such a care for this world a mere dot among the starry worlds, a mere grain of sand in a corner of his universe-as to give his Son to die for those dwelling upon it, whole nations of whom are but as the invisible dust in the balance." And when this argument is pressed at night, and out under the vast canopy of the winter heavens, with unnumbered worlds in view, and when it is remembered that new telescopes and larger glasses are multiplying these worlds, each as worthy, so far as we can see, to be visited by a Saviour, each as worthy of the divine care and providence as our world, the impression, to some minds, grows stronger, that we must not be too definite in our belief about the minute care and providence of God. "Is not a man's creed best when it is briefest-when he ventures only on a mere outline belief as to God, the soul, and the future life?" So say some. Others feel it. And they hold to Christianity but loosely, because of the starry worlds, and the planetary spaces, and the vastness of the universe. It is believed that these doubts are without foundation; that the vastness of the universe confirms faith rather than suggests doubts, when carefully considered; that, since God is nowhere general in ordering the stars, but everywhere special in the realms of astronomy, the inference is in favour not of a general and outline creed, but of a special and distinct and Christian belief. David's song, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" was not the minor strain of doubt, but the song of holy wonder and thankful praise. Others might doubt, but he must believe and adore and pray. Look at the minuteness of the arrangements in the starry sky. The first impression is vastness. World upon world, sun upon sun, system upon system, crowd each other to the very verge of space. But where is the verge of space? Through the best telescopes, counting a little patch of worlds in the distant star dust where they are sown with only average thickness on the sky, and then multiplying the whole horizon by that star patch, astronomers count billions of stars. And when larger tubes shall be pointed against the sky, it is believed that the number now known will be but a mere fraction of those then to be seen. Figures get to be meaningless as we try to number the stars. The universe is immensity. Think, too, of the spaces through which these worlds are distributed. Our world spins its annual round of two hundred million miles, and never gets within thirty million miles of a neighbour star. Our sun has for its nearest neighbour sun a star forty-six million miles away. And if this is nearness in the skies, what is distance? Looking only on this vastness, we are abashed and confounded; and we are almost ready to say that God's care can be nothing beyond general over the worlds, and especially over man, the minute insect here, in a mere outpost of the universe. But then this temporary feeling yields in a single moment to our firmer and calmer reason. For surely all this immensity tells of an infinite God. It is exactly what might be expected of him. It scatters atheism, driving it beyond the stars. There must be a God of immensity, when the universe, the work of his hands, is so immense. These Now mark the fact that this God of immensity is great in the minuteness of his arrangements. planets are racing through the sky at the rate of thousands of miles each moment. But see how carefully God keeps time on this race course. Jupiter never gets in at his goal at any given point a moment too late or a moment too soon. One mistake of a second here would wrench the system past all computation. The most unwieldy of the stars comes exactly to time. Turning from the evening sky the astronomer said, "God is a mathematician." And as the motions are exact, and timed to the millionth of a second, so the masses are arranged and guarded with the minutest care. God stands with scales more exact than those of the goldsmith, and weighs out to each planet its grains of sand, never one too many to Jupiter or one too few to Uranus. A handful of dust in the wrong place would upset the machinery of the heavens. God is minute as well as vast in his universe. If his lines and angles stretch across the universe, the measurement is exact. Nothing is simply and only general. Everything is carefully poised and specially considered. God has its vastness, because he has the minuteness of the universe in his hand. What, then, is the religious inference from these heavens? Is it that God is simply a general God, who has made only the cast-iron frame of the machinery, and has left the exact fitting of each cog of every wheel pretty much to itself; that he is to be believed in as having only a general care for mankind, who in turn are to have only a general faith in his existence, a general idea of religious duties, which duties are only the general |